Motes of darkness congealed, clinging to Ayanda’s astral form as she traversed the membranous mist at the edge of material reality. A cinnabar effulgence arose from footprints that faded into numinous oblivion. Their fleeting warmth bolstered her fragmenting spirit as she pushed through the tide of psychic trauma that threatened to consume her. Mind and soul alike nearly drowned in galactic wickedness when the footsteps returned. Dazzling outlines repeat themselves frenetically when through the haze Ayanda is spirit-touched by a pulse. Its beat throbs to life within her sꜥḥ. A tangle of ethereal vines erupted from her spectral form and tore through the corruptive barrier. Unhindered, she entered a realm she’d only seen flashes of during moments of deepest meditation. An enormous baobab reached towards the heavens and dominated a savanna of prismatic plains, dappled with vitreous lakes. Wide branches sprawled across the fantastic vista. Their feather-laden branches swayed softly above teeming grasslands where chrysanthemum mandalas hummed melodies that conjured nth-dimensional toys. Fractal sprites batted them playfully, laughter like running water. Wavy sheets of aubergine filled a twilight sky, acting as a backdrop for ten suns and moons. The celestial bodies acted as scintillating nodes along a cosmic nexus. Totems stretched across the plenum of space, granting boons to champions across all planes of existence. Surrounding the savanna, Ayanda witnessed dozens of déblé that dwarfed Kilimanjaro in scale and majesty. Their appearance crossed all the cultures she knew and many she’d never seen; the citrine Nemes of long-lost Pharaohs, wide-brimmed eburnean Fulanis and lofty jacinthe Isicholos dazzled the eye. The primordial glory they exuded was nearly as magnificent as the auroras that enveloped them. Variegated bands of aether erupt with each strike of their ancient staves against the Earth. Their percussion created the pulse that pulled Ayanda through the fog. It was a rhythm she’d danced to since birth. An impenetrable darkness loomed far to the North, where a déblé’s massive figure was impaled by a sapphire beam from the cosmos that slashed through bands of quintessence. Its final note was a tormented cry, held until nihility. Ayanda recoiled in horror, recalling the vile nature of the beam her mind had momentarily connected to. At that moment, the pygmy appeared before her. No longer obscured by the fog of psychic anguish, she became aware of its peculiar appearance as it noisily beckoned her closer. The psychopomp’s frame was shrouded in a stramineous cloak of crimson. Sewn to each tattered strand were cowrie shells that clattered with its exaggerated motions while Ayanda drew closer. Its craned neck was adorned in dzilla of burnished brass, with countless rings disappearing into the depths of its raffia mantle. What Ayanda found most intriguing though, was the pygmy’s avian visage. Perched atop its coiled halse was a bleached corvid’s skull. Faintly glowing cosmograms adorned its surface, depicting its allegiance to the Orishas. Deep cracks ran along its beak and interrupted an intricate vèvè of infinitely subdividing triangles. It regarded her for a moment, head moving in sharp, stereotyped saccades, before speaking through its closed beak. “DOOM!” the pygmy cawed at Ayanda, its voice somewhere between a growl and a hiss. “I… What?” She began, unsure of what exactly the spirit meant, when a series of omens flooded her thoughtscape. The curve of a Chthonian gas giant hung still against the brilliant backdrop of its parent star. Megaannums trickled past it like the crystalline Ikralz showers that enrich its exposed molten core, fulminating in aphotic azoth. Swarms of omnivorous Tzijhuan sail through the nimbus sea of Tunara-6. They metastasize through the allophane exterior of the Murzid; within a svident the city is lost. Slurries of translucent protoplasma exude from vents along the K’isti chain, ready to consume verminous stellar worms when an oscillating glome is shunted through the yoke of entropy. A skiv skitters across a gulch of bubbling selenium when silica pyroclasts erupt through Ganaxavori’s mantle and choke the planet. “The gluttonous Void has awoken. It has consumed. It shall consume. The stars wither in its presence.” The Initiation pummeled her sꜥḥ. Comprehension came at a heavy price as the pygmy imparted its wisdom. Time lost all meaning as causality collapsed upon itself. Through the void Ayanda followed an extension of the cosmological horror, enemy beyond enemies. Her mind-form pulls the vision into focus. Cocooned in a warped corona of spacetime, the galactic lance ravaged existence with its passing. The lustrous quantum interlinks of the Bahá-cizr surged, rupturing as konul:sankul harmonics desynced with disastrous effect. "The Betrayer has returned. It has branded. It shall brand.” In the aftermath of atmospheric entry, the beam’s corrupt nature was disseminated across the planet, with large concentrations blanketing Europe and Asia. The repercussions of this were beyond her ken. Like a moth to the flame, Nuberu marched towards the lance’s wound while a monstrous horde of nightmares stirred deep beneath the ruins of the Sahara, dormant for decades. They shambled across the Glasslands, consuming all in their path with little resistance. Her perception shifted to just beyond Venus as a flotilla flashed into existence. Through the membranous hide of an enormous cetacean Ayanda witnessed a Flood that dwarfed the invasion that changed her planet forever. “The key is broken.” Despite her astral form, Ayanda instinctually recognized her return to Marange. Geomantic awareness spread through its comforting honeycomb of well-lit tunnels and vibrant chambers. This place, her home, had been created through years of patience and diligence; swelling as rapidly as the ranks of her extended family. But now, the well-lit tunnels were plunged in darkness and the vibrant chambers were dominated by kenopsic silence. [i]Something dreadful had happened.[/i] Ayanda’s sꜥḥ was yanked across the aether to the searing pain of her dearest child, Najwa. The young Lioness crashed through a heavy basalt fortification along the training colosseum’s perimeter. A heavy plume of dust rises from the crater. With a wave of telekinetic might, the smoke is cast away. A howl of pure rage erupted from Mshale’s corrupted form that scoured his surroundings. In its final throes atop the basalt wreckage was a massive, leathery wing that oozed with each spasm. Perception twisted beyond her mastery and into the realm of cosmic awareness. She tried to close her eyes to shield herself and found she had none. The Pygmy’s ultimate revelations threatened to consume her when she recalled Faizah’s first lesson: Breathe, child. A calm spread through Ayanda’s consciousness. The universe stretched out before her as she passed through fields of galaxies before ultimately transcending the multiverse. Beyond the comfort of Time and Space she saw a Crown, adrift in a sea of protonic decay. Its dread domain surrounded the lustrous jewel of all Creation. Billowing masses pulsed from one vague shape to another within the encroaching oblivion when waves propagated through the Crown, folding its structure into a tight curl as parallel axes unfolded through the gamut of spatial dimensions until manifesting as an eye, horrendous to behold, that peered directly at Ayanda. Her sꜥḥ reeled and she retreated, through billions of light-years, along a tether of familiarity towards her body. [b]13-8-2039 Mzinda wa Mitengo Lake Malawi, Free Territories[/b] She felt the prison of corporeality once more. Sensation trickled in through a dissociative fog; the first being the healing percussion of an odondo. The warm rhythm filled the ritual chamber as Nkosiyabo’s chants came to her next. His voice had gone hoarse days ago but he dared not end the ceremony lest harm befall Ayanda while her spirit roamed astral wilds beyond his ability to comprehend. A week had passed since he’d last rested, during that horrid night of terrors. Exhaustion surpassed the shaman’s willpower. The odondo fell with a muffled clatter atop the pile of enchanted pelts that littered the cramped hut’s floor. Cool moonlight poured through the thatched roof and danced along the emerald accents of Nkosiyabo’s nganga mask as it shifted during his collapse. Several kola nuts rattled against the opon ifá he’d been using to divine Ayanda’s location as the altar bearing her body rocked gently in the commotion. Ayanda’s whispered thanks came to Nkosiyabo as he was pulled into a dreamless void. The following morning he awoke with a start. The lanky shaman scrambled to his feet and took Ayanda’s hand in his. Nkosiyabo broke into a croaking laugh when a geologic pulse spread through his body. He looked to the divination board near the altar’s edge and understood what he must do.