It was the eye color of all the Blessed, those marked by the Unworshipped Sisters: Al-Lat, Al-‘Uzza, Manat. Ancient goddesses whose broken temples now paved roads of industry. Their myths had been scrubbed clean. Their faces all but lost. Only one commandment had slipped unnoticed through time, held close by the lineage once blessed by the goddesses.

In your hands lies the gate of godhood—let none pass.

As a child, when her mother had told her of their duty to uphold this commandment, Kahina had not believed it. She had laughed, thinking it was nothing more than her mother’s fanciful imagination. But on her thirteenth birthday, her mother brought her to an abandoned courtyard in the desert long since left to the goats and vagrants. At the center of the courtyard lay the remains of what looked to be a well, but it held no water. Instead, it overflowed with dusty palm fronds and sand.

“Give it your blood,” demanded her mother.

Kahina had refused. This fancy had gone too far. But her mother was determined. She yanked Kahina’s arm to her, drawing a sharp stone across the inside of her elbow. Kahina remembered screaming from the hot sear of pain until her blood hit the old stones.

The world trembled. Blue light—like the sky twisted into a single rope—shot from the stones, then split into glowing strands that caged in the old courtyard.

“Look into the well,” said her mother.

She no longer sounded like herself. Kahina, overcome, peered over the stone lip. Gone was the sand and the dusty palm fronds, replaced instead with a story that poured through her. Her eyes fluttered shut. Her mouth filled with the weight of a hundred languages, her tongue loosened, her teeth ached in her skull. For a second—no longer than a blink—a different consciousness stretched within her, a consciousness that whispered for roots to uncurl and birds to take wing, a consciousness sharp enough to slice intention out of chaos, carve reason from randomness, set stars spinning through the worlds.

Kahina fell to her knees.

As she fell, she felt her perspective jolt skywards so that the world beneath her seemed like something she might cup in her palms. She saw a mere sliver of that uncanny consciousness burning bright and shattering across a young world. She saw power denting the land, saw clusters of people raise their hands to their eyes, as if new colors had exploded into their vision. She saw these slivers of power folded into the earth, each spot blooming with vines of light, so the world looked scrawled over in a poetic language only angels could pronounce. The earth bloomed above that network of light. Plants sprouted. Animals grazed. Communities—small at first, then, ever growing—began to create. A man waved his hand above the grass, and the blades slowly twisted into a flute. A woman draped in beads pressed her fingers to a child’s temples, and the people around her cowered in wonder. Later, Kahina would learn that the Western world called this Forging, both of matter and mind, but the art had more than one name.