The Primeval Era

<On Witnessing: Fragments from the Covenant Archives>

There is a silence that settles over those who have watched what the world was never meant to show them. It’s the silence of a vessel poured too full, still deciding whether to crack.

Pity the one who witnesses such things alone. Pity more the one who witnesses them beside someone they’re still learning how to love.

- From the Fourth Archive of the Covenant of the First Stone, author unknown

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Serala couldn’t...quite remember how to breathe.

She floated a distance from Damian, held up by wings that had woven verdant threads through their white-gold and still hadn’t stopped surprising her. Beneath her impossibly expanded frame, a heart trained since childhood to the measured discipline of a Holy Daughter was beating with none of that discipline at all.

She was watching a man speak to an Ancestor!

Speak to one, as easily as he might have spoken to anyone across a corridor of the Covenant. The verdant-blue figure of Emperor Zuku Vakochev filled the heavens above the Cradle, and Damian hung beneath it exchanging words across the bridge between living and dead as if that bridge had been built for his convenience.

She’d been raised on the stories. Shamans who prepared for such rituals across days of fasting and inscription and chanting until their voices cracked, and even the oldest Sangoma of the Covenant had wept for hours afterward from the strain of holding herself intact while an Amadlozi brushed briefly against her spirit.

Damian had done this with a handful of phrases in the Old Tongue.

Every instinct layered into her since childhood insisted she should fall to her knees the way the tribesmen below had. Instead she floated, and watched, and couldn’t look away.

He looked...otherworldly.

That was the word her thoughts kept circling. He hung there with certainty, verdant flames licking across skin they didn’t consume, wings of verdant-blue fire half-spread behind him and flaring wider whenever his emotions surged. Twice the size he’d been this morning, something the Lands of Stone hadn’t produced in generations, and he was speaking to an Ancestor as if it were a conversation he’d simply needed the right body to attend.

The Emperor’s booming words reached her only as echo, most of it meant for Damian alone, but enough fragments about cruelty and duty and burning Lands needing rain pressed through the clouds for her to understand the shape of what Damian was being asked to carry.

Then she heard him howl.

It ripped out of him with the fury of everything she’d ever sensed beneath his composure, and everything she hadn’t. When it ended, his voice fell into the Old Tongue and made a promise.

I will erase them all. I will burn their world. Father, I swear by the Ancestors, they will not live!

Her heart beat faster! Her wings pulsed once without her permission, throwing golden-green light across the clouds around her.

He was going to scorch the demons! He was going to burn their world until the River ran across ash where their kingdom had stood!

Her heart kicked harder.

He looked so grand!

The thought arrived fully formed and refused to be shown out. She’d called him things before, protector and ally and Tokoloshe and friend in the private dark where she didn’t have to defend the word, but standing beneath his father’s aurora with wings of verdant flame spread behind him, he was something her vocabulary didn’t yet reach.

Grand was the closest she had. It wasn’t close enough, but she let it stand!

The aurora began to fade.

The threads composing Emperor Zuku Vakochev loosened, patterns unweaving into ribbons, ribbons dissolving into points of light that lifted upward and were absorbed back into wherever the Amadlozi walked. A last pulse of his presence reached Damian alone, and then the aurora was gone.

The dark clouds shuddered and began to recede. Across dozens of miles the darkness thinned, softer light bleeding through, and the paradise below rediscovered its colors by degrees as the Acacia and Baobab and blue-stemmed grass reclaimed their place in the visible world.

Damian remained in the sky.

He hung where he’d stood before his father, verdant flames still dancing across his skin while the fading clouds parted around him as if they recognized him as something they weren’t permitted to touch. A single figure of verdant-blue fire standing in the last of the dark while the light returned around him.

Then he turned.

His wing-shaped pupils found hers across the distance, gentler than they’d been during the howl.

When he spoke, it was in the Old Tongue, pitched so only her evolved hearing could catch it.

"Lungela, Nkosazana. Umzimba wami wobuntu nawe, sizohamba siye eCovenant yaseTshe Lokuqala emahoreni alandelayo. Umzimba wami wesilo uzosala lapha, ukuze ukhulume nezilwane ezizayo."

Be ready, Holy Daughter. My human body and you, we travel to the Covenant of the First Stone within the next hour. My beast body remains here, to speak with the beasts coming to us.

...!

Her thoughts buzzed. She cycled Mana into her existence.

It was trained reflex, the response taught that Mana brought clarity when flesh refused to. White-gold radiance flowed through her frame and threaded itself with the verdant brightness her evolution had added.

She nodded, as she found her lips opening naturally.

"Ngilungile."

I am ready.

Damian inclined his head once, then descended toward Uncle Adam and Grandmother Essun still kneeling below. Serala watched him go, and then her gaze drifted past him, past the tribe walls, to the raised mountain behind them where his other body rested.

The beast form.

She’d seen it before in every size the Noble Simba Physique permitted, and she’d grown accustomed, as much as anyone could, to the sight of a massive golden lion lounging on a mountain that hadn’t existed before Damian decided it should.

This wasn’t that lion.

Verdant-blue flames covered the beast form now, the same fires from Damian’s human body reaching into this one. The golden fur beneath had been deepened and enriched, burning as if woven from molten sunlight rather than strands of hair, and the mane that had always flowed like fire actually was fire now, verdant-blue flame curling around a head the size of a hut. Nine tails swept in slow arcs behind it, each one longer than before, each tip trailing its own small flame.

Even across the distance, she could see the eyes. They burned with the same wing-shaped verdant-blue as Damian’s human pupils, set into a face built for predation before majesty. It didn’t merely radiate the bestial aura it had carried before but something older!

Her concentration broke.

A voice rang out from the earth below.

"Exelissomai!"

BOOM!

Her head snapped down.

Damian stood before Uncle Adam and Grandmother Essun, having descended all the way to the grass, his transformed body towering over them. The old warrior knelt, the grandmother knelt beside him, and Damian stood between them with more than twice their mass, hands resting one on the head of Uncle Adam’s graying head and one on the head of Grandmother Essun’s.

Verdant flames were erupting from nothing around the two kneeling figures, engulfing them the way the same flames had engulfed Serala earlier that day.

Uncle Adam’s mouth opened in a soundless gasp. Grandmother Essun’s eyes went impossibly wide. Their forms began to change beneath Damian’s hands, fire devouring them with the hunger of flames let loose upon new kindling!