Nikki’s POV

I could feel the warm rays of the sun betting absorbed into my skin, a welcome sensation from the cold of the past few days. I could feel the grass tickling my thighs, wetting them with the warm dew drops that have not yet fallen or dropped away. I could feel the warm earth, oh how it soaked into me! The best sensation I have ever felt.

But no gods whatsoever.

“I am tired of sitting here looking like a Buddhist” Shango complained.

I lay back down from the lotus position, positively tired. I heard Mike sigh, like from far away.

“2 hours have passed” Neil said in a small empathetic voice. He sat a few meters away from us to guard our bodies if we do ascend into the astral plane and meet these gods and let them tell us what we need to know.

“Let’s try this again…” Mike suggested. Shango and I groaned.

This was supposed to be the most spiritual place in all of Wagadu. All Vodun who died while performing vodun were buried here. It is said that if you unearthed every grave, you would see glowing eye sockets and their moving hands, performing the deed that most probably killed them. The grass here was unlike any other as it was blue instead of green and the land was so vast that it looked like it stretched on forever but since the land was not extremely flat, it gave that illusion. I buried my face into the blue sand it smelled sweet but the smell would not be enough to lift my spirits. Where are these bloody gods?

“Let’s try the spirit realm again” Shango suggested, loathe to sit again for an hour feeling the energy in the universe.

“We roamed there for hours” I said, the grass muffling my speech.

“How about we try this, in the spirit realm!” Shango excitedly said.

“The spirit realm is a neutral place” Mike sounded exhausted “’powers’ don’t work there”

“So what do we do! We are running out of time!!”

“Relax Shango, we’ll figure this out”

Or we won’t and our powers will be stripped away and we’ll have to live as Benafas.

“Remember when Nikita danced?” Neil said, breaking the sorrowful silence “And Mawu took over her?”

“I was angry and turns out she was angry too. Who knows if she’s happy right now?”

“Let’s watch Titanic again” Mike suggested. I narrowed my eyes at him.

“I wasn’t speaking to her, she took over my body! I only felt her pain and anger,” I thought harder “and saw a memory, of when she was dancing when she was human. She just really loves dancing, nothing big”.

“No something doesn’t make sense” Mike got up and began pacing. His pacing always made my head dizzy. I closed my eyes again and lay backdown “they used to be all over us! Ifa can attack me in the toilet for study lessons!”

“Shango and I used to talk a lot” Shango smiled as he reminisced, it sounded like a sad smile “I last communicated with him a few weeks ago. What if something has happened to them?”

“I saw Mawu this morning” I slowly opened my eyes to see looks of mutual surprise from everyone “I see her often, in the mirror”

“How do you summon her?” Shango asked.

“I don’t,” I said with a shake of my head “I’m just there and she appears, looks at me and then disappears”

I saw Mike’s gears turning, trying to understand the dynamics of this whole thing.

“Neil, have you heard of any god of the water?” Mike asked, clearly on to something.

“Yes, there are several…”

“Are they part of the Godhead?” Neil shoke his head.

“What’s a Godhead?” I asked.

“Think of Olympus. The gods of Olympus, but in Africa. Those days, you didn’t need much to be a god. Pharaohs were even called gods on earth those times. The Creator, set Asaase Yaa in charge of everything on Earth and then went away. Then she created gods, they are the Godhead. I hear some of the Godhead had children and gave others powers, they were called gods as well, 4 tier gods but they are not in the Godhead and they can die.”

I mauled it over in my head. The creator is a 1 tier god, most powerful and scarce to find. 2 tier is Asaase Yaa, powerful too, god of the entire earth. Then there were her children, 3 tier gods, the Godhead, powerful enough but are not supposed to be scarce. They are supposed to manage humans. What happened to them? Why do they even need initiates? Like Mike said. Something doesn’t make sense.

“Is there water around here?” Mike asked. What’s with his obsession for water?

“Yeah” Neil said.

He led us to a little stream. It was peaceful, stagnant and so clear. I saw little fish swimming inside it and the vegetation about it was the only thing around that was green.

“Step into it” Mike ordered.

“I know you’re not talking to me” I retorted. I’m not stepping into some strange pool. What if there were snakes or flesh-eating fish or scorpions or worse, frogs.

“Nikki come on! We have no time!”

“Yes, water is reflective but phone screens are too!”

“Nikki, it’s not about the reflectiveness. Mawu is goddess of the moon and what controls the tides?”

“Oh” I said simply “But the frogs!” I wailed.

“Our powers are going to be stripped away and you are going to let frogs stop you?”

I hated Mike’s logic but he was right, this wasn’t just for me, it’s for my family and friends. The gods seemed to need us, else why will they go through such lengths to find us? I needed to do this, to find what the gods needed, tell the council so they don’t cut our mind from our souls and then save the world from whatever is coming but we do not know about.

Easy peesy.

I thought of removing my clothes and decided against it.

“There are too many males in my life” I mumbled.

“What?” Mike asked.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Nothing”

I rolled up the cuff of my jeans and stepped into the water. It was surprisingly warm and the fish swam away from my advancing feet.

Yes, I thought, let the snakes and frogs go away too, I am a scary human.

Focus! Mike hissed.

I raised up my middle finger at him and kept on walking. When I reached the middle of the pool, I looked down. It was so clear I could see my toes; I wiggled them. I could also see my reflection on the surface of the water. My eyes were wide and my lips were a thin line, obviously I was scared.

“Mawu,” I said out loud, looking at my face as I said so “They’re going to separate us. The council. We need your guidance. Tell us for once what we need to do for you and let us tell them so that we are not cut off”

Only silence and disappointment answered my call. After a few minutes of waiting for my reflection to say something, I gave up. I looked up at Mike.

“It’s not working”

“Try harder”

As I was about to flip him off and leave the water anyway, I felt something clutch my leg. My heart stopped, a snake, oh god a snake! I was too scared to look down but it felt less than a snake after a while.

It felt like a hand.

“What’s wrong?” Neil asked after he saw my face of terror.

“Nikita!” Mike cried, seeing something else.

That was the last thing I heard before the hand pulled me under.

I was in water for about 2 minutes and kept my eyes religiously closed. I was sinking down and no one had to tell me that I was no longer in the clear warm pool. This one was freezing cold and I felt my bones shattering in my body, like bees trapped in a balloon soon to pop. My heart was ramming in its rib cage, mostly in fear and apprehension, was there no other way to talk to me than dragging me into the bloody water?!

I fell out of water and dropped unto the ground. I coughed and spattered, grateful for the air I was breathing. I seemed to have fallen a lot more than a few feet but I wasn’t hurt although the surface seemed to be marble. I looked up and saw the body of water on the ceiling. An ocean above instead of below.

Then I felt the cold. I rubbed my arms to generate some heat from friction but there was a breeze from the ocean above, as it sloshed and waved, making my arm rubbing futile. I stood up dripping wet and looked around. It seemed lit from windows from the outside and fires burned in every corner of the room. Everything was marble white, except the ceiling of course. I seemed to be on a high platform with tall stairs leading downward, the only part of the room that was closer to the ocean. If I had fallen a few feet to the left…

“Hello” I cried. Hoping that someone would hear me, preferably Mawu, so that I could yell at her. They just had to make everything complicated, like they didn’t know that there is a word called ‘easy’.

When only my terrified echo came back to me, I decided to explore this place, maybe figure out what Mawu has brought me into. As I descended, I realized it looked like a conference room, a really medieval looking conference room if they had mountains of marble. There was a big round table right in the center of the room and on it was a giant map of Africa with 8 chairs around the edge. On the walls were paintings, murals of sorts of scenes I could not recognize. Most showed spectacular shows of great power. Giants rising from the seas, wielders of thunder and lightning, people on fire but not consumed. Shango would’ve loved to see this as his patron god was one of thunder and lightning. I ran my hands over the map and realized it was part of the table. I felt a light breeze on my shoulder and looked back and almost shit my pants.

It was a god, skin dark as night and frown lines etched over his face and I scowl so deep I could drown in them. Most of his face was covered in locs that fell from the bun he had tied up over his head. I backed away but the marble table was in the way and his deep brown eyes stared into my soul. His tattoos glowed a strange red spiraling and lines that showed images. I looked back to see how I could get as far from him and noticed there were others in the room, all around the table.

To the red gods’ left was a woman, whose skin was a bit lighter but still darker than most I’ve seen. She had a kind face framed with long loose tightly coiled hair adored with flowers and was smiling at me a face that looked so happy to see me; her tattoos were pink. There was another with a neutral face framed by big twists that he let loose and they fell shapely over his shoulders, his skin the darkest of chocolates, his tattoos glowed green. The one to his right was bored, picking his nails and had skin that looked like clay, his purple tattoos were centered around his mouth, hands and legs and his braids that he kept loose flowed over his chest. The next was smiling a terrible smile that looked dangerous, like he was dangerous. His skin looked almost brick red making his yellow tattoos look like veins that even run over his bald head. The next had a similar expression to his comrade but with skin that looked like midnight blue, braids tied tightly away from his face and orange tattoos adorned his body. I recognized Ifa, he nodded at me, his face looking grave as though wearied by the knowledge of this world, his dark skin made the marble look brown and his tattoos were centered over his head. Contrasting their various dark skin was brightly colored kente clothes and gold chains and jewels. The pink god’s breasts were bare but her nipples were obscured by many jewels and her very long hair.

I looked around for Mawu, but she was nowhere to be seen.

They were all so tall, it was like looking into the sky to catch a glimpse at them.

Ifa pointed to an empty seat between him and the red god. I noticed something else.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Ifa’s mannerisms were like Mike’s and the orange god, like Shango. I wondered what it meant. Do the gods look for people with special qualities to be their initiates, or was it by chance?

Despite the beating of my frantic heart, I walked over to the giant marble chair and stood in front of it. They took their seat in flourish while I had to climb up mine.

When I was able to sit down, I found they were all looking at me. This made me so anxious my head began to pound and my heart begun to beat. My chest felt so tight I thought it would explode.

“Nikita Asante” Ifa begun, in a soulless voice “We used to be a mighty people,” I looked over in surprise as some parts of the map got bigger, it zoned in the middle of West Africa, roughly where the Old Ghana Empire was situated. Then there were moving lines that I saw to be people, realizing with a gasp that the map was going to demonstrate what Ifa was saying “and the Godhead ruled, fostering peace and harmony in all of the land. We were made from Asaase Yaa, she divided her spirit into thousands of fragments and made us.” The map showed a picture of a bigger woman holding a shining crystal ball that split into many pieces and then they all turned into people each radiating light of different colors “Each fragment of her spirit had special abilities that set them apart from the rest, we were unique and powerful and beautiful. When Asaase Yaa saw that everything was good, she lay her head and went to sleep. She will rise when the Earth is in danger it cannot save itself from”

“And then came The Silencer,” the pink goddess continued, her voice light like a thousand chiming bells. The map showed a figure which did not radiate anything but was black “when he touches any of the Godhead, they die. No one knows where he’s from or how he got here” the dark figure walked to a shining figure and when it touched them, they disappeared. I shivered at the thought of this dark god.

“We waged war against him,” the purple god continued, his voice so clear once would have to try to not understand him “he was hurt badly but he won. Several of us died that day. The rest of us who survived, he locked us up in here,” he held us arms up, showing me that he meant the room “forever”

“Where is here exactly?” I asked.

“The in-between” Ifa answered “Wedged between the cracks of the physical and the spiritual world. You might prefer the term Limbo” the map showed the people in the room kneeling and wailing, probably for Asaase Yaa, but no one came for them.

“But the Godhead always survives” the orange god declared, this face maddening and his voice booming like thunder “We realized we were not completely cut off from earth. We appointed armor bearers to do our bidding. The initiates, to our surprise, could not lose their power from being touched and so they won the war, and the silencer, destroyed” The map showed a person beheading the dark figure “But alas, we were still stuck here, no way for us to flee this maddening prison”

“We tried to wake The Mother,” the green god continued with a silent monotone “but she never arose. We knew we were left on our lonesome. We tried to help Earth with the initiates, but they stopped believing in us, making us realize in the end that we needed their belief to have a hold on Earth. Our hold on Earth is so weak and so fragile that now it takes an immense amount of energy to just manifest ourselves”

“After you,” the red god said, his emotions washing over me “we will lose touch on the Earth forever and remain in our prison forever. This is unfortunately not an epic, it’s a rescue mission. Save us from this prison, we beg you”

“How?” My mind was bursting with too much information, I did not know how much of this I could take.

“Get all of our initiates together, in a sky where the sun and the moon are present, trees on the left, the ocean on the right. Read the sacred passage from the Book of the Dead resting on an uncut iron ore. With thunder and lightning and passion and love, the Godhead will be restored”

As I was trying to memorize and make sense of everything I was being told, I was grabbed by Ifa, who cradled me like I weighed nothing.

“Which sacred passage?” I said, clutching his kente attire with the terrible feeling that the conversation was about to end with too little information than I felt comfortable with.

“Michael Asante will know”

And with that, he threw me so high, I fell into the ocean on the ceiling.