Above the expedition endless lightning strobed off the peak. All of them complained of headaches, and a sense of meaning, as if they had a word on the tips of their tongues but couldn’t quite remember it.…

And then the attack came. Out of the dark. Out of the lightning.

Most of the accounts agreed the attackers had been human.

Baru wrote, We must confront the possibility that these eyewitness accounts are not hallucinations, and that natural law on the supercontinent somehow differs from our own.

This was a good dream. This was the dream she would hold to when she couldn’t see any reason to go on. To visit the mountain where the lightning never stops, and to name it for Hu.

Baru laughed into her hands, stirred by joy and fear.

There were powers in the world still beyond the grasp of Cairdine Farrier or the designs of Falcrest. So as Baru wrote about causal closure (let by my choice become exactly synonymous with by Imperial decree), as she signed the letter with the name Agonist, she sang to herself:

Tain Hu

kuye lam

you are beyond them

like the lightning in the east.

A Story About Ash 1

A STORY ABOUT ASH 1

FEDERATION YEAR 910:
25 YEARS EARLIER

TAU-INDI Bosoka came into this world alone.

Now, you might protest, who is not born alone? Stop a moment and think, o listener! Do you have the answer? Correct! Twins!

Now, the House Bosoka had no tradition of twin births. There was no twin to accompany Tau-indi’s mother Tahr when she popped out of her lamother Taundi through the mine foreman’s slippery hands and fell into a wash bucket, nor a twin for grandlam Taundi who came out of Toro Toro downside-up and burbling, so small they wrapped them up in a leaf.

But Tau-indi Bosoka was different.

The first difference was that Tau had been elected, before their conception, to become a Federal Prince, raised to help rule the Mbo.

The second difference was Tau-indi’s stillborn twin.

What do you call a wound that everyone has, but no one notices? What do you call the loneliness of not-having-a-twin, a loneliness most of us will never acknowledge? Imagine that wound. Imagine that you are haunted by the ghosts of people who should have loved you. But you did something wrong, and they abandoned you, or never arrived at all.

Imagine that this loneliness strikes you on the morning of your thirteenth birthday, in your home upon Prince Hill, above Lake Jaro which is the center of the world’s crossroads, Lonjaro Mbo. Imagine that you cry out in grief and paint your brow with white lamp ash from temple to temple, which is, in Lonjaro, a way of mourning.

Then you run across the hill to see Abdumasi Abd.