The village of Okpara died at sunset.
Uwana knew this because he'd watched the sky bleed from gold to crimson to something darker—a bruised purple that looked like the color of his mother's face when they'd held her down. The flames around him didn't care about the sky. They rose in eager columns, licking at the corpses with a hunger that made him think of dogs fighting over scraps.
Two hundred and thirty-seven people.
He'd counted while they screamed.
The number mattered. Not because he cared—caring had died somewhere between the third man who raped his mother and the moment his father's throat opened like a second mouth—but because precision was the only thing keeping him from flying apart. Two hundred and thirty-seven. The entire village. Every man, woman, and child who'd celebrated while his family burned.
Well. Almost every child.
The younger ones had run. He'd let them. They'd grow up with nightmares and the knowledge that mercy was a coin flip in the hands of a god they'd called cursed. That seemed fair.
Uwana sat cross-legged at the center of it all, naked except for the patterns crawling across his skin. The fire had marked him—carved into his flesh with artist's precision until his body became a map of every moment he wanted to remember. His mother's screams, etched in flowing script across his ribs. His father's last breath, a spiral of char at the base of his throat. The faces of the seven men, branded into his forearms like a roster of the damned.
The flames had obeyed when he'd asked them to.
That was new.
Everything was new, actually. The way he could feel the air moving, thick with ash and the copper-sweet stink of burned meat. The way his voice had changed when he'd spoken the word—not a word in any language he knew, but something older, something that bypassed his mouth and came directly from the hollow place where his heart used to be.
Burn.
And they had. From the inside out. Blood boiling in their veins, lungs igniting with each desperate inhale, bones becoming furnaces that cooked them in their own skin. He'd made sure they felt every second.
The gods hadn't stopped him.
Of course they hadn't. The gods never stopped anything.
A sound cut through the crackling—footsteps, crunching over charred bone and melted earth. Heavy. Deliberate. Not running away like the children, but walking toward him.
Uwana didn't look up. Didn't need to. He could taste the newcomer's essence on his tongue—dark fire and old metal, the particular flavor of someone who'd been soaked in violence long enough that it had become part of their blood.
"You're late," Uwana said. His voice came out flat, scraped raw from smoke and screaming.
The footsteps stopped. A pause, thick enough that Uwana almost turned to look. Almost.
"I was trapped." The stranger's voice was young—maybe early twenties—but it carried the exhaustion of someone three times that age. "Fifteen years in a rift where time forgot how to move forward. I came as soon as I could—"
The words cut off sharp, like a blade meeting bone.
Uwana finally raised his head.
The man standing at the edge of the killing field was tall, broad-shouldered, with skin the color of burnished bronze and scars that caught the firelight like veins of silver. His eyes were the first thing that proved he wasn't mortal—black sclera surrounding irises of molten gold, wide with something between horror and recognition. He wore combat leathers that looked like they'd been stitched from shadows, and at his hip hung two weapons that shouldn't exist: blades forged from crystallized midnight, edges sharp enough to cut the space between moments.
Mo'huni. One of the warrior clans from the stories his mother used to tell.
Used to.
"Gods," the stranger whispered, staring at the bodies. At Uwana. "What did you do?"
Uwana gestured lazily at the smoldering corpses, at the stakes where they'd displayed his father's mutilated body, at the pyre where his mother's bones were still crackling. "I answered a prayer."
The Mo'huni warrior's hand drifted to his weapon—not drawing, not yet, but ready. Professional reflex. "Whose prayer?"
"Mine." Uwana stood, and the flames rose with him like subjects greeting their king. Ash fell from his shoulders in a grey snow. "They said my family brought bad luck. That we needed to be purified. So they took my mother—seven of them—while the others watched and smiled. They made my father watch too, until the priest decided his eyes had seen enough sin and carved them out."
His voice never rose. Never cracked. He recited it like a recipe.
"Then they burned her. While she was still alive. Still begging. Not begging them—begging the gods. Screaming for Ala to save her, for Amadioha to strike them down, for any deity who'd listen to please, please just make it stop."
Uwana took a step forward. The flames parted like a curtain.
"The gods didn't answer. So when I came home and found them celebrating—celebrating, like it was a festival—I decided to become the god who does."
The warrior stared at him. His gold eyes tracked the scars mapping Uwana's body, the way the flames moved around him like trained animals, the absolute absence of remorse in his expression.
"You're the one," he said finally. Not a question. "The child born of no seed. The prophecy—"
"Fuck your prophecy." The words came out sharp as broken glass. "I'm not a weapon. I'm not salvation. I don't care about your wars or your realms or whatever destiny you think I'm supposed to fulfill." He spread his arms, displaying his ruined body like an offering. "I'm the consequence of every unanswered prayer. The receipted bill for every god who turned away. And I'm going to find every single deity who let this happen and make them choke on their own divinity."
Silence, broken only by the soft collapse of a burning support beam somewhere behind them.
Then the warrior did something Uwana didn't expect.
He knelt.
One knee on the ash-covered ground, head bowed, weapons untouched.
"My name is Zuberi," he said quietly. "Seventh prince of the Mo'hun Empire, First Blade of the Temporal Guard. I was sent to retrieve you. To bring you home, train you, forge you into the weapon that would end the war with the Ten'gari." He looked up, meeting Uwana's void-black eyes. "But I think you're past that now."
"Then why are you still here?"
Zuberi's smile was all broken edges. "Because I failed my mission once. Spent fifteen years frozen in a moment while the world moved on without me. Fifteen years screaming in silence, unable to save anyone." His hand pressed flat against the scorched earth. "I won't fail again. You want to kill gods? I know where they hide. You want to burn the heavens? I know the way."
Uwana studied him—this prince who knelt in the ashes of genocide, who smelled of impossible time and dark fire, whose eyes held the particular exhaustion of someone who'd aged a lifetime between heartbeats.
"Can you fight?"
"Better than anyone you've ever met."
"Will you try to stop me when I do things you don't agree with?"
Zuberi's smile widened, sharp as his blades. "Probably. And you'll do them anyway. But I'll be there to watch your back when you do."
Honest. Uwana could work with honest.
He extended a hand—scarred, still radiating heat from the flames that had marked him.
Zuberi took it without hesitation. His palm blistered immediately, skin searing at the contact. He didn't let go.
"Then let's go," Uwana said. "I want to find the gods who didn't answer. Starting with the ones who rule this realm."
"They're not in this realm." Zuberi stood, still gripping Uwana's hand despite the burns. "The true gods—the ones with power—they live in the Outer Realm. The reflection of this world where magic runs thick as blood." He gestured toward the horizon, where the sky was beginning to split. "There's a place between worlds. A fortress-academy called the Citadel of Oku, where the children of gods and men learn to share skin. That's where we start."
Uwana looked at the sky—at the wound in reality spreading like a bruise, bleeding purple light across the darkening heavens. The Threshold, opening. Calling him to a world he'd never seen but somehow remembered, like a dream half-forgotten upon waking.
Behind him, the village of Okpara collapsed into itself, timber and bone and stone becoming indistinguishable in the flames.
Ahead, the Threshold gaped wide.
"Will there be gods there?" Uwana asked.
"Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Students channeling divine power, masters who've given themselves over to possession." Zuberi's grip tightened, steadying. "It's the greatest concentration of deities outside the Outer Realm itself."
"Good."
Uwana stepped toward the portal, trailing fire like a coronation cape. The flames fell away as he approached the Threshold's edge, as if even they knew they couldn't follow where he was going.
He paused at the boundary between worlds, looked back one last time at the ruins of his childhood.
"I loved them," he said. Not to Zuberi. To the ashes. To the memory of two people who'd raised a cursed child anyway. "I want you to know that. I loved them, and you took them, and I will never, ever forgive that."
The ashes didn't answer.
The gods didn't answer.
But somewhere in the space between silence and sound, Uwana thought he heard his mother's voice—not screaming this time, but whispering the way she used to when he was small and frightened of the dark.
Go, my son. Make them remember what it means to be afraid.
He smiled—a terrible expression that had nothing to do with joy—and stepped through.
The Threshold swallowed them both.
In the ruins of Okpara, the last flame guttered and died.
The village had burned for exactly three hours and seventeen minutes.
By morning, there would be nothing left but questions and a smell that wouldn't wash away for generations.