The smoke filled Ka-Hails nostrils with its thick greasy stench, he woke coughing and spluttering the world seemed to be coated in a thick greasy smoke The sun was a red circle on the horizon, shining darkly on the savannah through the haze of the smoke. The grasslands ahead of Ka-Hail smouldered and smoked stretching out from his eyes in a blackened plain. Brush fires were not uncommon in the grasslands, sometimes the sky would call down lightning and ignite huge swaths of the grassland. It was the way of nature he knew, a cleansing that would cause the next season's grass to grow healthier. The smoke clogged his nostrils he shouldered the heavy burden of the antelope pulling it onto his back. He took from the pouch around his neck the large crystal of salt it held and chipped off a small amount with his fingernail. He could feel the emanating power from the mineral as he held it, the stone containing a thrumming potential he ached to use. The power called to him impelled him to move and act as felt the magic the stone housed. The same thrumming energy could be felt in the shaving in his hand as he replaced the larger stone in the pouch. It was this power he drew on as he began to move, his body felt alive as its energy surged into him. He drew on it slowly, like a man savouring fine drink he tasted the energy of the shard sparingly. Even using a fraction of the power contained in the small shaving he felt it shrink in his hand, growing brittle and thin. Granules of fine white ash slipped from in between his fingers. The smoke was thick but the power of the salt made his breath come smoothly even as he inhaled the smoke. It burned his lungs with its acrid taste, it filled his mouth and nostrils with its thick sickly sweet scent as he pushed his way through it towards his village. The pain faded to the back of his mind as he endured it, the power of the salt hardening his body as he focused on his breathing. The evidence of the blaze that burned his lungs was all around him as he moved forward. Animals fled the oncoming fire and as he drew closer he could see patches of burning grass in the distance. As he walked he saw beleaguered rabbits and antelopes walk by him, their chests heaving as they tried to move barely able to stand. For animals to be as exhausted as this it must have meant they had run a great distance. The blaze must have blanketed the lands for miles around for the animals to have to come so far to escape it. He pitied them as he could see the patches of fire in the distance growing in size as he approached them. This would spell death for hundreds if not thousands of animals from the smallest mice to the biggest lions. He wondered if it were fair to have pity for all these deaths while he carried the antelope on his back. It was something he often wondered, he knew death was the way of the plains but he lamented it all the same. This antelope for instance, what made its life less than his he thought, why must it live for him to survive? The answer was simple, or so he had been told since he had first thought to ask these questions. Nature was harsh and many said that the nature of the world was for the strong to live and the weak survive. Even at a young age he hadn't understood this, he was weaker than his father, did that mean that it was right for him to die, or wrong for his father to protect him? He had asked this question too, and like many of his stranger questions his Appas had been the one to answer. She had told him of the true Balance, of the balance Taslak had entrusted them with keeping. She had told him of the beasts that fed on the weak, the great hyenas that stalked and killed. These she said were not less than any other creature and it was their nature that governed them to hunt in the way that they did. His Appas had said that they were different though, that people were like no other beast that walked the plains. People were of Taslaks creation and by his breath they had been given the ability to go against their nature. It was their job to keep the balance, to protect the weak, to keep the strong in check. When he had been revealed as blessed she had sat him down and as he had joked and laughed she had held him with a look. The glimmering light behind her eyes had turned dark and there was sadness there he had seldom seen. The old woman looked at her grandson and Ka-Hail did not know what she had seen. What she had said though guided him now in his every action.

“You are now named, a name that has been made for you and one that no other has ever borne. Greatness will be expected of you, honour will be expected of you, power will be expected of you. These are meaningless, balance is what I demand of you, do not forget your place.”

The plains around Ka-Hail were burned to little more than cinders as he pushed through the thinning smoke towards his home. The fire must have burned out here a day ago as the ground was warm to the touch still but cool enough for his bare feet to walk on. The smell of smoke still filled the air but the heavy oily scent was gone now as he only caught scents of the char. He could see his village on the horizon now far off still but in the flatness of the plain you could see for miles ahead. With his vision sharpened by the power thrumming in him he could see smoke curling from cookfires. He could even smell on the wind with his keen senses the scent of cooking meat and he hastened his steps. Ka-Hail knew that his wife would be preparing a feast when she heard of his return and he looked forward to it greatly. Her cooking was perhaps the best in the whole village, or at least that's what he had quickly learned to say to avoid her dirty looks and cold night on the floor of the hut they shared. No, it was true that Howana was not known for her cooking but for a fiery attitude that rivalled the great mount in ferocity. It had been this that had drawn him to her, she had not bowed and scraped when his blessings had been revealed. The men of the village lauded him as the coming of a great power, the boys feared him. The woman had sent their daughters out to court him and Howana’s had been little different. Howana though, she had not seen anything special about the skinny boy that zipped around the village like a desert shrew. She had come up and told him in no uncertain terms how she felt,

“My mother has told me to make you fall in love with me.”

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She held her hands on her hips as she looked on at the boy in front of her who stared back at her stupidly. Ka-Hails family had warned him of suitors but had told him that they would try to be sly and trick him into marrying them. The girl in front of him was a year older and a head taller than him as most girls were at that age and she was beautiful or at least he thought so. Ka-Hail was struck first by her words, then by her beauty, and lastly by her hand. The slap was hard making him stagger although not hurting him as the salt was surging within him. He looked up at her in surprise and confusion as she smiled down at him and shook the hand that had hit him.

“Close your mouth boy and stop staring at me, just because the rest of the village loves you doesn't mean that you won't have to earn mine.”

With that she had turned and walked away, leaving Ka-Hail to rub his cheek and watch on, a grin slowly forming on his face. All thoughts of other women had left him after that meeting and he had courted Hawana intensely. He had brought her gifts, animals he had hunted, many things, all of them she had turned her nose up at, she could not be bought she said. A man, according to Hawana did not show who he was with the things he had but by what he did. Hearing this Ka-Hail had sat and told her that if it was service she wanted then he was at hers. He had tried to do everything for her, taking the water buckets from her when she walked from the well, and carrying the large vessels full of tubers from the fields. This too she pushed away from,

“I am not some weak fragile thing you must do everything for, help those who are not able to do this themselves.”

Even as she said this he could see the hint of a smile on her face, a knowing smile perhaps, beginning to know that he would do whatever she asked of him. Ka-Hail had gone first to those who he knew needed help. Old Ba-Sook who had lost a leg to a Lion, and Mawasa who had just had a baby whose father had died from a blood rotting disease. Ka-Hail searched out those who needed help needed them, and as he worked and helped them he thought of two things, Hawana and the balance.

Finally, as months of this passed Hawana had finally let Ka-Hail court her, letting him take her out onto the plains to watch the sun set of over the mountains. As time passed and he grew larger and stronger he would put her on his back and run deep out into the savannah and show her things only he knew of. The places his powers allowed him to reach, up into the great trees, to the great salt flats. She would laugh as he ran as fast as the cheetah and the wind blew back into her face. She could not see his smile but she could feel it when she would bend down to kiss his cheek as he ran. His love for her had been there from their first meeting, but hers blossomed like the most beautiful flower he had ever seen. Their courtship advanced as time passed but it was not until the last season that they had finally been married. Hawana had wanted to go slowly and as long as she was there Ka-Hail couldn't have cared less how fast they went. But now they were together and more than that they had a baby on the way, Ka-Hail would have never believed that he could love anything as much as he loved Hawana. The child though, a new piece of her he would get to meet and raise, in this baby he had found something he could love even more. It was for this reason he had gone out into the plains, both to hunt for the feast celebrating the baby and to look for any omens his Appas could interpret. Appas though was old now and Ka-Hail knew not long for this world, it was a fact the would return to the earth but until then he would accept her guidance. She had told him to go out, that a great change was coming and that this hunt would mean much in the time to come. So he had and now as he approached his home, walking through the burned lands and seeing the burnt corpses of animals being fed on by buzzards he wondered if this was the change. Either way, lean times were coming for the village after a fire like this and he knew that the village would be depending on him. It was a burden he accepted happily, as he had helped the village for years now and had grown close with every person, coming to befriend or at least understand even the most hated members. The village grew closer, the huts and fences beginning to take shape in his enhanced sight, something was wrong.

It was the colour he noticed first, the normal dark orange of the clay walls and bright yellow thatch was gone, replaced with black. Every building was black, the thatch burned from their roofs, the fences around the fields of tubers and yams broken and burnt. He could see that some of the homes had collapsed walls, some seemingly blown apart. The antelope dropped from his shoulder and he tore the pouch from around his neck and ripped out the crystal and drew upon it deeper than he ever had. The world seemed to slow around him. Ash he hadn't even noticed drifted through the air like through honey and as Ka-Hail ran the earth cracked. He reached the village the air cracking as he stopped abruptly. Bodies. Bodies on the edge of the village, piled into a stack and burned, the origin of the fire maybe. He ignored the pile at first, racing to his home, he did not remember screaming but the force of his voice cracked the brittle clay of his home. He screamed for Hawana, for his child, he looked through the home finding nothing. Next, he ran to his family's home, he looked for his mother, his father, his Appas. He found none of them. Finally, in a daze he walked to the grotesque pyre outside the village. Sinking to his knees he dug through the bones and blackened flesh he found there. Thick tears fell onto the bones of his kinsmen, he could recognize some by the jewellery they wore, or other small traces of who they had once been. Mawasa was there, and her daughter who he had helped feed when she was just a baby. The elders were there, all of them their glittering jewellery tarnished by the flames and soot. He dug through hoping to find nothing, begging to find nothing. The sun was dipping below the horizon when he found her, she wore nothing to distinguish her from the other corpses and he knew it was her all the same. He knew it was her by the shape of her bones, that was how much he had loved her.