In the celestial courts, where the air is made of starlight and the floor is the top of the clouds, silence is never just silence. It is a tension, a pulled bowstring waiting to snap.
For three hundred years, the throne of the Sky had been occupied by a shadow. Amadioha, the King of the Bolt, the Judge of the Heavens, had become a recluse. The thunder that used to shake the foundations of the world had dwindled to a distant, half hearted mumble. The storms he sent were thin, watery things that lacked the teeth of his former glory.
In the lower courts, the whispers of the lesser deities and the ancestral spirits had turned into a cacophony of dissent.
"He is hollow," hissed a river goddess, her voice like the rushing of a waterfall. "The Great King has let his fire go out. He sits in his palace of mist and lets the mortals forget the taste of fear."
"It is the loss of the Earth," whispered a forest deity, swaying like a willow in the wind. "He has let a love lost quiet his valor. He is no longer a King,he is a widower who has forgotten how to reign."
They spoke of his grace as a thing of the past. They mocked his mercy, calling it weakness. They claimed the people of Umu-Oka and the surrounding clans no longer offered the deep, trembling worship of the old days. They only spoke of him in ghost stories, as a fading memory of a time when the sky had teeth.
Inside the inner sanctum of the High Palace, Amadioha heard it all.
The whispers didn't just reach his ears,they scraped against his skin like shards of broken glass. His mind was a battlefield of thunderous torment, a mirror of the turmoil that brewed in the center of his being.
He stood at the edge of his kingdom, looking down through the floor of clouds at the spinning, green and red marble of the earth. His reflection in the celestial mist was not the face of a monster, but the face of a god brought to his knees by the one force even a bolt of lightning cannot destroy, love.
"They do not understand," he roared, and the sound sent a shockwave through the halls of the gods, silencing the gossiping deities.
His eyes, usually the color of a storm tossed sea, flared into a brilliant, blackened red. His heart a core of pure, compressed energy,throbbed with a pain that felt like a boiling pot of hot palm oil being poured beneath his veins.
"I cannot forget," he growled, the words vibrating through the fabric of the universe.
He thought of her. Ala.
The Goddess of the Earth. She who had been the grounding force to his volatile energy. She had been the only one who could touch his lightning without being burned. But centuries ago, when the earth was parched and the soil was turning to gray dust, when life itself was on the verge of blinking out, Ala had made the ultimate sacrifice.
She had given up her form. She had dissolved her divine body, pouring her essence into the veins of the world to keep it breathing. She was everywhere now,in the roots of the Iroko, in the flow of the streams, in the red dust of Umu-Oka but,she was no longer there. She had no face to look into, no voice to answer his thunder.
The pain of her absence was a simmering heat that never cooled. For three hundred years, he had been a king without a queen, a sky without a horizon to meet.
"They say I have lost my grace?" he whispered, his voice cracking like a dry riverbed. "They say the mortals have forgotten the King?"
He looked down, his gaze piercing through the layers of the atmosphere until it landed on the village of Umu-Oka. He saw the humans scurrying about their small lives. He saw their petty fears and their fading rituals. He saw the way they looked at the sky,no longer with the awe of a subject, but with the casual indifference of those who think the lion has lost its teeth.
A cold, divine fury began to rise, mixing with the grief to create something new and dangerous.
"Fine," he growled, and the sound was the first true thunder the world had heard in centuries. The stars themselves seemed to flinch. "I will give them a show, if that is what they so desire. I will remind them that the sky does not just watch,it consumes."
He didn't want a sacrifice of goats. He didn't want the blood of bulls. He wanted something that could hold the weight of his grief. He wanted a vessel. A reflection.
He reached out his hand, his long, translucent fingers hovering over the map of the world. He searched for a soul that was empty enough to be filled by his storm. He searched for a house that had been silent for as long as he had.
His gaze landed on the hut of Nnanna and Ugomma. He felt the ten years of barrenness, the hollow ache of the woman's womb, and the fierce, protective love of the man. It was a perfect mirror of his own void.
"There," he whispered.
In that moment, the choice was made. He didn't choose Adadiogo because she was a "lucky" child. He chose her to be his penance and his pride. He would pour a drop of his own essence into her,a spark of the lightning that had died when Ala vanished.
He watched as the High Priest, his mortal instrument, began the journey to the village. He watched the moment the girl was born, her first cry acting as a beacon for his power.
But as he looked at the tiny, fragile life he had claimed, a strange feeling flickered in his divine heart. It wasn't the cold possessiveness of a god,it was a ghost of the warmth he had felt with Ala.
"You will be my reflection," he promised the infant from his throne of clouds. "You will be the voice I lost. And through you, the earth will remember why it fears the sky."
The torment in his mind did not end, but it found a focus. He would wait. He would watch her grow. He would mark her, test her, and isolate her until she realized that the mortals of the earth were not her kind.
He was the King of the Bolt, and he was lonely.
As the first lightning strike hit the village threshold, Amadioha didn't just claim a bride. He began the slow, agonizing process of trying to find his lost queen in the soul of a mortal girl.
The turmoil in the heavens subsided into a low, predatory hum. The other gods fell silent, their mocking whispers replaced by a cold realization:
The King was no longer silent. He was hungry.