Chapter Forty-Eight #2
“But now she is gone, I will not hide behind mists and superstitions. I will rule out in the world where I will be their superstition, their greatest fear, made real. They will fear me.”
Her last words came out like ice. I could see the world exactly as she said. More abalsoms, stronger, hungrier. A world of death and carnage all at her whim. She was the last god left.
“Will you join, my child?” she asked. The silence around us was louder than the storm Effie had summoned. “I won’t ask again.”
I gripped her iron-like claws, struggling to break free. “Never.”
Effie tightened her hand around my neck. She glowered at me, her glowing red eyes lasering into me, igniting a tiny spark that began to spin and spin and grow.
“Then have it your way.” She began to squeeze the breath out of me. It was like she was pinching a straw. I felt my vocal cords and my windpipe crushing and all air being cut off. I pried at her rock-hard fingers, but she only squeezed harder and harder, preparing to twist my head off.
Effie began to transform. Her shoulders curved into a haunch and her arms drew in.
Her eyes enlarged, becoming luminous disks, more bright red than amber.
Her mouth elongated, as if she were yawning, extending lower to unbelievable proportions.
Her joints popped and crackled, disengaging and rearranging.
She was terrifying and beautiful all at once, both Effie and adze.
In her natural self, with the cuffs and the amulet, her strength intensified. Her long hands pulled, attempting to separate my head from my neck. I closed my eyes, focusing on the spinning ball of heat within me as it rippled, and grew, and heated.
Please, Nana Ama. I didn’t know if my grandmother could hear me. I wasn’t sure if she was with me, or if she was just dead and buried at the base of the tree under which we gathered. But I begged just the same. Show me what to do.
But a strange voice, thick with the heavy accent of my nsamanfo, my ancestors, whispered, the voice from my last dream. Anansi.
To kill adze, you must be adze.
I hadn’t understood it then. But I did now.
My body took on a mind of its own. I gave myself to it.
To the spinning orb glowing and growing in me, stretching itself to every limb, filling me with heat that grew and grew.
I thought we’d made it to sunrise, but the Light, the heat, wasn’t coming from around me, but within.
It was like looking into the sun, something Effie’s insect eyes couldn’t take.
She let out a shriek of shocked pain, her claws releasing me. I began to fall back down to earth.
My body collapsed in on itself, the world spinning around me. I was not in control but only knew what I needed to do, what I needed to be.
For the first time, I was drinking the Light.
Truly. I was becoming the obogya, the firefly with its golden orb, the part of me I had yearned for but was always too scared to accept.
I stopped my downward spiral. I reversed, shooting up faster and faster, a rocket, launching myself into the very heart of Effie.
Effie audibly sucked in air. Her body bent inward from my impact as I took up residence within her, absorbing her essence from the inside out.
She was too powerful with so much rage she’d siphoned from the countless lives she’d taken by force, so alone, so utterly broken—the storm of emotions and unbridled power she could barely control nearly expelled me from her.
But I held on, refusing to give up because only an adze could kill an adze in this form.
When I had absorbed all I could, taking her core within me, I shot out, going through her back, and leaving a small hole.
Exhausted and nearly passed out, my body started to fall.
I almost passed the cliff’s edge, heading down to the sea, but with the last of my energy, I managed to launch myself at the cliff, hoping I wouldn’t miss.
I hit the ground in a hard roll along the grass and over the protruding rocks, until I came to a stop. As my body began to reshape, returning back to my human form, my friends gathered around me—Sekou, Lyle, and Naira.
“Are you okay?” Naira asked frantically.
I barely got out, “I think so—”
Someone below shouted to look into the sky, and we all did.
Effie was still suspended in the air where I’d left her.
She still wore the cuffs and amulet that glowed turquoise blue, but she no longer commanded the storm.
The island shuddered itself to a complete stop, like the earthquake that started this whole thing.
She remained completely still. She gazed down at her chest and studied the palm-sized hole that I had left in the middle of her chest. The hole I’d made expanded, eating away at her.
She looked like the golden edges of a piece of paper as it smoldered with fire, the edges blackening, curling, flaking off, then floating away.
Her mouth opened as if to speak, but no sound came out. She studied the growing hole, now up to the base of her neck and down to her abdomen.
Then she looked at me, the red within her irises changing to gold.
She looked relieved. She looked like she didn’t hurt anymore.
She’d lost everything. Her daughter. Her granddaughter.
All for fleeting rage and a desire for revenge on people and a world that would never truly understand her or her kind.
She looked up to the sky, her right arm stretching up to it as the burn crawled up her skin. It was a different kind of hollowing.
Effie reached up toward the sky above her.
“What is she doing?” Naira asked.
“She’s trying to use the keys to open the gate to the Oosoro,” I answered.
I knew it because in taking her heart, I learned what had always been in it. Her father. Going home. That had been the root of everything, as convoluted as it had become for her. She had wanted to be seen by him. She had wanted to go home.
Her body blackened in that final pose, reaching for the sky, looking to her father, who wasn’t there, or maybe he was.
Nyame was supposed to be everywhere. Even on this foreign land, though it was beyond his African realm.
The father who would not interfere in the ways of the human world nor aid those who did.
The burned-out, charred husk of Effie’s remains floated back down. Slowly, it dropped, settling softly onto the grass, petrified in its ash state in the same position Effie had died. Still reaching up to the sky.
The ground once again began to shake.
“Now what?” Sekou groaned, looking around frantically.
Lyle held out a steadying hand. “Wait.”
Where Effie’s lightning had ripped the tree in two, it had struck where I’d privately buried my grandmother. Beneath the Gathering Tree, at the foot of Nyame’s stool.
The cuffs and the amulet began gleaming on the ground as black ash from Ama’s grave drifted into the air, between where the tree was split, joining the bowing two halves back into one, as it had been.
The ashes lifted into the air. Swirling like a tornado.
On the other side of us, Effie’s charred remains began to do the same, swirling up from the ground, into the sky.
Their two ashes intertwined, revolving upward into a deep funnel that suddenly appeared in the heavy clouds above.
There was something on the other side of those heavy clouds. A looming presence, big and meaningful. Something familiar and yet not, which had never been there before but was now.
The jewelry shone so bright, their light shot skyward, piercing through the black mass of the clouds like a spotlight, as if all the fireflies coalesced together to create a lit guide for the ashes’ path into those impenetrable clouds.
They went straight up in that funnel, the brilliant light guiding them the entire way to whatever—whomever—waited for them on the other side.
It stayed like that until every last piece of them had made its way up.
And then the light followed them, growing shorter and shorter as if it, too, were joining them wherever they had gone. A long, jagged stretch of lightning cut through the sky, and a sonic boom of thunder exploded—the sound was so deafening it forced us all to cover our ears.
Then the billowing clouds began to collapse in on themselves until they dissipated and there was nothing left but a cloudless night and a million stars shining bright and a big-ass moon to accompany them.
The cuffs and the amulet lay there in the dirt as if they hadn’t just opened the gates to the Skies and lit the way home for Ama and Effie, returning them to Nyame the Sky God’s imperial kingdom, the beginning of our story.
I picked up the cuffs and clasped them on my wrists.
Naira helped drape the gleaming amulet around my neck.
I expected them to feel heavy, as weighted as the responsibility of being their keeper, but the jewelry was surprisingly light, like air.
I held Nana Ama’s cuffs up, watching the gold catch the moonlight from different angles, their brilliant blue centers radiating like the stars above and the blinking fireflies floating around me.
The cuffs and amulet vibrated, warming against my skin, and I recognized it as power.
But what would I do with all of this power?
First, I had an island full of people to tend to. I was sure the locals were confused and beside themselves. I had to make sure I still had a home and parts of the island hadn’t crumbled into pieces into the Atlantic during all this family drama.
And I’d call Hailey, because after all that’d happened, I thought about her all the time and of how free I felt when I was with her and how chill she could be with me.
I thought we could work it out. I thought …
together we could do some things, explore the world, and see what other beings were out there, because it couldn’t just be me.
And, one day, I’d go to Africa, visit the lands of the Akans.
I’d go to the Kakum Rainforest, in Ghana, from my vision—the one that was the gateway between the Oosoro and this world.
I’d check out the ancestral grounds where the twin adze goddesses once roamed free, to see if maybe there were more of my kind.
Maybe Sekou and Naira would go with, or maybe they would go wherever they wanted. Didn’t matter, because in the end, we’d all end up back home where we belonged.
I’d have a word or two with my great-grandfather about some of his choices.
I now held the keys into Nyame’s kingdom, the power of my ancestors.
One day I’d tell him that he was a day late and a dollar short for a lot of things, the first being his daughters.
But that was an entirely different story and could wait until another time.
Wherever my travels took me, I would always return home to the Golden Isle to be with my people.
I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, or what challenges I would face as the Kin’s leader, but I had Sekou and Naira, and most of all, I would always have the Light of my grandmother, Nana Ama, and my ancestors to guide me, because I was Addae Ewiem, the morning sun of the sky.