CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE – WHEN DEATHS GATHER.

Here is how a story begins: once upon a time, there lived a girl, no, maybe there lived a land, and in that land lived a girl.  A story needs a land just like it needs a girl. Every story may need the land as much as it needs the girl, because what use is the girl when she has no place to belong? Uloma was a girl; there was no land. There was no awareness because there was no land. Uloma was a girl without awareness because she did not have a land to which she belonged. There was no Uloma because there was no land, and there was no story yet for the Uloma. Inside the nothingness where her consciousness was cocooned, the little body that would one day house the dormant consciousness that would, in turn, one day be Uloma kicked, a protest against her living space’s attempt at eviction. Oge winced; it was her fourth contraction of the day. 

~ 

Larger than life, Death occupied the room, making it appear smaller than it actually was. She was staring at her daughters as if she hoped that one of them would be ‘stupid enough to talk back.’ 

“I want to see sensible behaviors as you go out there, you are not just the children of Chaos, you are mine too, and I will not suffer your refusal to get along, now go.” 

The room was alive with feeble mutterings, daughters as strong-headed as their mother, but smart enough to keep their anger in check, grumbled their defiance. But Death would not hear it. 

“Ehn? Did you say something?” 

She asked her eldest daughter, who was not making any effort to move. She was looking at her mother as if not talking back was taking her whole being. 

Silence met Death’s question, defiant silence. 

“Let's go, please.” 

One of her sisters whispered, pulling her along. Uloma was the last of the lines of sisters to leave the room. She did not make it to the door.  

The heart palpitation started again. Darkness came for her. She was shrouded by complete blackness, like a night without the promise of sunlight, long after the Moon had given up His shift. The darkness wore a silence telling of complete emptiness, yet Uloma knew she was not alone; another heart beat alongside hers. ‘Who are you?’ She wanted to ask, but there were no words in this blackness, only void, so why did she and the beating heart exist here? She wanted to know. 

“Ulom.” 

Death called, and the darkness was gone. She was in the small room again, her sisters surrounded her, and she was in her mother’s arms. She loved it here, in the earthy smell of herbs and nature. She remembers she loved it in her mother’s arms, but when had she ever been hugged by her mother like this? It was as if her body remembered something her brain had forgotten. 

“She stopped time again.” 

Her sister was whispering. 

“What will we do?" 

Uloma heard Odim ask. As she pulled herself out of her mother’s firm embrace, she felt drowsy and confused. She collapsed on a chair, her head resting on her mother’s thigh. 

“Hope that nobody else but us felt it? What else?” 

Aku answered Odim. 

“That is stupid, we are Death. Time exists less for us than it does for them; still, she started the clock for us and then slowed it down, as if she were numbering our days. I can’t be the only one to have felt like that, please.” 

Uloma's head on her mother’s thigh strummed; she felt too tired to raise them to her sisters, but she felt the fear in the room and was living it. Her sisters were supposed to be fearless, and she had started time again. Uloma wished the grogginess away. Why did she feel so tired? 

“Like she was numbering our days. That is what that had felt like, I could not put words to it.” 

Aku repeated what Eke had said. Uloma felt her sisters’ eyes on her. 

“Mother, what can we do?” 

Odim asked. The room spun even faster. Fearless Odim sounded more than worried; she sounded frightened. 

“If we felt it, they all did, I feel disconcerted, imagine how they are feeling. It is one thing to hear about stopping time, but to experience it firsthand, they will be taking this a little more seriously for a fact.” 

Odim repeated. Uloma shut her eyes even tighter; her heart was running wild in her chest. 

 “Mother, what will they do to her?” 

She asked again, to murmurs of concurrence from her sisters. Death pulled Uloma a little closer to her huge bosom. Uloma held her breath as her sisters discussed her as if she were not in the room. She was afraid that if she as much as breathed, they would be able to tell she was awake. 

“Mother, we are not giving her up.” 

Eke suddenly announced. Uloma’s head snapped up to look at her sisters; they were holding hands, forming their sister cycle around her. Uloma felt her raging heartbeat slow down. Her sisters looked like they had decidedly moved past their initial shock and fear. 

“We will fight.” 

Aniye agreed; her always-ready-for-war chin, defiant. 

“For once, I agree with Ani, we will fight if we have to.” 

Aku repeated, she was watching Ulo. 

“And we can take them.” 

Aku said with gusto, her dress vibrating as if it, too, were gearing up and ready. 

“Nobody is going to war or battle; those people out there are not the enemy. The enemies are what we need to prepare for. I have prepared in anticipation of all of these.” 

Death told her daughters, her hand gently running through Uloma’s hair. 

“Mother, you anticipated this, the biggest thing to have happened in all of our lifetime?” 

Eke sounded confused. 

“I could not have foreseen the events of today, evidently.” 

Her mother told her. 

“But this does not surprise you, does it, mother? You must have seen this from the start, you are moving like, you have been waiting for Uloma to shake the universe.” 

Eke said, and Uloma imagined her narrowing her eyes. The only creature in all the universes that is not equal to Death but will talk back to her. 

“Stop it, this is no time for a divided front, we cannot win out there if we cannot agree in here. We protect Uloma, okay? Mother’s secrets notwithstanding, whatever mother has done, has been no fault of Ulo’s.” 

Odim looked at Enwu as if she and the others had always suspected that Enwu was not telling them something. Something she had kept from them. Uloma knew the feeling. 

“Girls, you can blame me.” 

‘And I suspect you do,’ was missing from that statement. Ulo could feel it; she could also sense that her mother was right. They all looked suspiciously at her. 

“Or you can listen. Uloma has done nothing, and neither have I. Ulom’s existence, on the other hand, should not be possible. I did not make it happen, but I anticipated some sort of blowback from the universe. She has particles in her that do not exist in any part of the universe accessible to us.” 

“Mother, you are talking about dark particles.” 

Ani whispered audibly. There was a palpable gasp in the room. Can a room gasp? Uloma wondered. 

“I wish I were not.” 

Their mother answered. 

"Uloma has stayed dormant until now. Mother is something activating her? All of us come from the known universe; we exist in unison with every atom and particle in the known universe, so we multiply and cannot exist in isolation. I assume even in the darker part of the universe, particles do not exist in isolation, do they?” 

Ani asked her mother, and Enwu shook her head in response. 

“No. Uloma must be encountering the consciousness of her twin. And before you say anything, yes, I know you were implying that those things currently attacking life forms are like Uloma from the darker side of the universe.” 

A pause that dug its feet into Uloma cut through the room, but Mother continued. 

“Yes, but they are not what is activating her powers; her twin is. I don’t know why now. Why this is happening at this point. I never saw the prophecy, because no one took it seriously.” 

Uloma felt her heartbeat stop. Ani had been implying that the scary woman was like her, that they were made from the same things. But a twin? She would have pulled herself up if the room had not been spinning even faster; the other heartbeat in the void was that of her twin? 

“Mother, no one took the prophecy to heart, or even seriously in connection to Ulo, because you never mentioned that there is another Uloma out there. Two as one was the most important bit missing from the prophecy.” 

Eke raised her voice as she spoke; her mother’s eyebrows shot up, quenching her. 

“If my rudimentary physics is correct, one dark particle split into two souls; that other Uloma is not really Uloma, even if she will retain a lot of her attributes. Mother, what else are you not telling us?” 

Odim sounded like she would have yelled at their mother, but she was not as defiant as Eke was to their mother. 

“She is human.” 

Death answered without even a thought, and like that, Uloma felt her head and heart stop; she was no longer thinking, she could not. 

“Mother! That is impossible.” 

Uloma’s sisters were certainly no longer holding hands. The room continued to spin for Uloma; she felt the shock her sisters were working hard not to explode from coursing through her body. A twin: a human twin, kept a secret for millennials. Her numb mind screamed, but her head would not let thoughts keep. 

“I know, why do you think I guided that secret? These beings coming out now must have somehow learned of both girls.” 

Uloma heard the stubbornness in her mother’s voice. How could she even now be acting right? Did she not see how terrible her secrets were? Why was Mother so awful at being wrong? Bile was trying to escape from Ulo, but she could not even raise her head off her mother’s thigh; she felt frozen. 

“I believe they have come because they, too, want their shot in the light.” 

Mother was still talking. 

“But they will unbalance everything here.” 

Eke shouted. 

“Still, if our sister exists here, they must feel that they should, too. If mother is telling us everything, Ulom is unbalancing the universe as we know it, is she not?” 

Aku said. 

“She is.” 

Asi answered, speaking up for the first time, she sounded as dazed as Uloma felt. The room fell silent. 

“So, we fight. We will not give her up.” 

Ani sounded like she had given the whole situation as much thought as she would care to and had made her own decision. The silence following her announcement only lasted a few seconds before Odim seconded her. 

“We will not give you up, baby sister. You are here now, our gift.” 

Odim smiled at Ulo as Ulo raised her eyes to her sisters. They at least were processing whatever this was, Ulo thought, because nothing her mother had told them was sitting well inside her head or stomach. 

“We will fight! Our sister, darker even than Death and all the heavenlies and Darknesses.” 

Eke beamed at Ulo. 

“Watch it.” 

Death warned her. Ulo understood why. She was already frightened to be at the center of all this, but if the other beings of power thought her a threat... it did not even bear to imagine. 

“They will not lay a magic, spell, tentacle, or even finger on you, on our watch.” 

Aku’s eyes never left Ulo. You will be fine, we will make sure of it. Aku’s eyes were promising. But Ulo wished she could believe her. She wished her head would stop spinning, she wished she did not want to curl up and go to sleep, and pretend that everything happening was just a dream. 

“For now, the best you can all do for her is follow my instructions. You all question and challenge my every command as if I have never lived your individual lives four times over. I am your mother; you have to learn to trust me.” 

Mother said she sounded stern enough to keep their protests tightly lodged in their heads and stomachs instead. 

“What would you like us to do, Mother?” 

Aku asked her. Her dress was still breathing, heavily in fact. It had been riled up and did not seem to want to back down. 

“The Elders will be on the lookout for any form of magic, spell, or power resembling our family’s, but we cannot under any circumstances let the Heavenlies get their hand on Uloma. They will not be kind; she is a threat to everything that makes them relevant.” 

Death’s voice was led to Uloma’s quavering stomach; she swallowed. 

“That means we need to get her out of here.” 

Odim suggested. 

“Yes.” 

Their mother replied. 

“But how, without our powers? If you have not noticed, we are in the other world; it is not like you can just come in here and leave at will.” 

Mother shot her first daughter a warning look before she turned to her other daughters. 

“Oh, but you can. We are Cosmics, and breaking rules is embedded in our core. Mine more than yours because I am ancient, but even for you, there are ways. I, like a lot of the cosmics who have existed forever, can bend the rules of this place, but of course, I cannot use my powers; they will detect mine faster than they will detect yours.” 

“And there is the matter of you getting involved in a universe-defining matter.” 

Aku reminded the room. 

“I cannot contribute directly to this, and neither can you, really.” 

Death agreed, looking around at her daughters, the serious look she always reserved for them, etched on her face. 

“But we have a loophole, a Death in training. Asi is our key, a secret weapon. Our strength, our power, our pillar, the one I have been cultivating for this very moment. She, I have put into rigorous training these last decades because I feared a day like this.” 

Uloma looked over at Asi, expecting the usual glint, but Asi had her eyes on the mud floor, her face folded as if she were uneasy. Uloma felt the lead in her stomach lurch. Not only was she the reason the universe was turning upside down, but she was also putting a lot of the responsibility on Asi. 

“Are you ready, my child?” 

Mother motioned for Asi to come to her, without even lifting her head. Asi drifted towards Death, her mother pulled her chin up. Asi’s eyes took a second longer than her face to look up. Her eyes held what Uloma felt: resignation. 

“We have spent all that time talking and preparing Mother. I am.” 

Her voice did not even shake. 

“But she is just our baby sister, mother. I fear we are asking too much of her and Ulo.” 

Odim protested, coming to stand beside Asi. She took Asi’s hand. The pleading look Asi gave her broke Uloma. She had felt like she was breaking before; this was different. She was about to put her sister in danger for her own sake, what she would not give to be dreaming all this. 

“The universe balances itself, the known universe at least. Asi was an equation that would never have been solved, because she was the death of things unheard. We had no job for her; that was why she was left in training, long after you all graduated. But now, the unheard-of are trooping into our corner of the universe. My Asi is coming to her mission, to her purpose, to her true powers.” 

The pride in Death’s voice was enough to light Asi up. She pulled away from Odim and stood taller, as tall as Asi can stand, Uloma’s mind thought. A second thought occurred to her: she was still poking fun at her sister even at this moment, maybe she had some of their father in her as well. 

“But what use will she be against those things out there? Death cannot kill; we are more equipped to collect souls.” 

Aku reminded them. 

“Thank you for the vote of confidence.” 

Asiya muttered, Aku shot her a sharp look that said that Asi was lucky Enwu was in the room. 

“True, Asi even started herself to become weak and fade whenever those beings poured into a realm, she can sense them, something only she is capable of. She will train and become stronger; she does not have much of an option. Neither of them has.” 

Death made the last statement with her eyes on Asi. 

“I think I can manage some spineless killers.” 

Asi muttered again. 

“If they were so spineless, we would not all be huddled here in panic.” 

Aku shot at her. 

“They are nothing like we have ever experienced. So do me a favor and take this a little more seriously.” 

Odim joined in. She looked grave. Odim, Asi will always listen to. A grave Odim quieted Asi’s defiance a little. Uloma wondered where the Asi who had looked forlorn a moment ago had gone, probably buried under hearing that she was not fighting for Ulo, that these beings were also her purpose. Uloma answered herself, and almost rolled her eyes. In that second, she felt almost like herself, but it did not last. 

“I did not say I wasn’t, I was just saying.” 

Asi said in a more demure voice. 

“Your sisters are right. But I believe in you, you have risen to the challenge so far, of all your sisters, you were the only one who knew to train for this day, because you may be called on to protect your realm and all the other realms.” 

“Now, for the rest of you, we cannot waste any more time. Gather the friends she came to this realm with; they will not be looking out for their powers. We will use that to our advantage. We cannot summon them; we are at this very moment very closely watched, and we must act accordingly. No rash actions. Communicate your thoughts when you need to coordinate. But you must not get involved; you cannot afford to make things worse. Right now, we are all facing something beyond our control. It is a new feeling for everyone, and tensions are high, so if we give them a reason to come after Ulom seriously, they will.” 

Death paused as if she needed this to sink into her defiant daughters. 

“Now go. Get them ready as soon as you can.” 

She shooed her daughters away. The room was alive with activities again. Deaths moved about, pulling their weapons about them. For people who had just been warned against a war or battle, they looked very war-ready and battle-ready. 

“You and you are with me.” 

Death pointed at Aku and Odim, stopping them, just as they were about to hurry through the door, one behind the other. 

“Go to the Assembly for the Gathering. I will be with you shortly. We must act as if nothing has changed, like Ulom would still be attending her summons.”  

The room hastily emptied, but Uloma remained frozen where she was seated, her head lying on Death’s cushiony thigh. Death waited a heartbeat before she gently pulled Uloma’s head from her leg. She tugged Uloma to her feet and gently pulled her all the way to face her. Uloma’s eyes lazily watched her mother; she seemed to occupy the whole room. As if the room were a backdrop and she were the focus. Her deep, dark eyes studied her daughter in her real form. Her eyes did not just have depth; they were the very bottomless pits that unsuspecting beings could fall into, forever. Her attire, covering her, did not shine; it was a dull shade of white that should have no reason reminding you of earth and blood, but it did. 

“You must have so many questions.” 

Uh, yes, Uloma thought, quite a few of them really: 'what was going on?' Was one question, off the top of her head. She had a twin. A human twin! A twin? There were so many questions swimming around in her head... also, the dark side of the universe? The creepy, evil, eyeless woman was like her? Her mouth could not choose any of the questions to ask, so she just stared at her mother. 

“It is a lot to take in, I know.” 

Death said, raising herself to her full height, as if the room was not straining enough to accommodate her. 

“My dear, so much you should know. Oh, how I wish I had the time to explain, but you must go now. Your friends are waiting.” 

She cocked her head as she spoke, as if listening for something only she could hear. Her fluid movement was hypnotising, even as everything told you she was something that you should react to with urgency. 

“Close your eyes.” 

Death instructed her daughter; she was using a softer tone of voice than she had used earlier with her other daughters, as if she thought Uloma could not take much else. Ha, Uloma felt like saying, but she did not, because she was truly exhausted and, for once, more than mentally. She closed her eyes and felt her mother’s giant, feathery pat on her head, but it was gone in a second.  

She was hearing birds now, and the rustle of the breeze moving through leaves. She opened her eyes to find herself in the green forest again, but the people from before were no longer there; in their place were her friends, her sister, and Eligwe. They did not even look up as she approached, as if they had not heard her appear, or as if they could not hear her moving towards them.

The leaves and trees were rustling now more from what her friends were doing than from the breeze. All around her, things that were not stuck solid to the ground or on something that was stuck solid to the ground flew and were whipped about in every direction. Dews and droplets pelted Uloma, threatening to soak her. She struggled towards her friends, wondering warily why she never seemed to reach them, no matter how fast her bare feet pounded the brown earth. 

The sound of the birds should have dominated the forest, but her friends’ silent chants gripped the atmosphere, silver lightning mingled with white dazzling light, and darkness zigzagged around where they stood, yet their eyes never left a point at the center of their small circle. Uloma finally reached them as the ground began to shake, but her friends still did not look up at her. They looked as if whatever they were doing was not only straining their powers but was also physically strenuous. Droplets of water from the shiny green leaves of the forest started to fall all around them in a slow, lazy drizzle, just as Asiya was suddenly by Uloma's side, dragging her into the heart of all their powers. Before Uloma could protest at being pulled to the centre of the chaos, she was back in her palace.  

They had not said a word to her through all that; they had not even looked directly at her. Whatever else she should have been feeling, she felt even worse, to be ignored like that by her friends, Eligwe and Asi, of course, but Abali and Ekama as well? 

She fell to the floor of her bedroom. Her last thought as she lost consciousness was that her friends were not with her; had they made it out? She wondered as she drifted into a drained, exhausted sleep.