The sky had turned a darker shade of purple than the violets I’d picked for my bouquet. Essence had said those were her favorite color in our chats. I checked the time on my phone. She should’ve arrived well over half an hour ago. Most restaurants would have closed by now, and the next showing of the movie I’d picked would not be until tomorrow.
Where was she?
I sent her another message. No response. The waning moon was almost halfway up in the sky. Still no response. I could make out a few stars overhead despite the streetlights’ glow, and the passing cars were dwindling in frequency. Still no response.
That wasn’t like Essence. She’d always been good about getting back to me within seconds on the app. The dread was shaking me up. I had to call her.
Still no response. Not even a ring.
Maybe she was stuck in traffic. Rush hour had long passed, but I was desperate.
I called her again. Nothing.
Was something wrong with her? Was her phone dead? Why hadn’t she kept it charged?
I shouldn’t preoccupy myself with worry. Better to think of all the positives instead. We had so many great conversations. About her studies in English literature, about her cute little dachshund, about her equally adorable niece. How she liked strawberry cheesecake and gospel music, how her last ex had hurt her so badly, and how she thought I was the most sensitive man she’d ever met. In turn, I could tell her everything about myself, and no matter what was bugging me, she knew how I should deal with it and how to cheer me up.
Of course, if her photos on the app were anything to go by, she was as beautiful on the outside as the inside. I should dig them up.
Footsteps clipped on the sidewalk. My stomach fluttered with delight. That had to have been Essence. But why had she not called or texted me first?
It was not Essence. Too tall, too big and stocky, too clad in black, and much, much too white to be her. Whiter than me, even. The tattoos on his hand stood out like black clouds in front of the moon. As he regarded me with eyes as gray and sharp as the steel blade in his grip, he grinned with a show of bejeweled teeth.
“Waiting patiently for your Nubian queen, eh, Dylan?” the man said with a thick Russian accent.
Rhomu and Djula, two lovers from warring families in a prehistoric fantasy world
In another world, in another age…
Rhomu poked his head out from under his lean-to shelter’s roof of leaves and branches. The rest of the camp remained asleep as far as he could see, the campfire having shrunk into a pile of dim embers. It was the pale glow of Grandfather Moon beaming through the treetop canopy, gleaming on the mist and the damp undergrowth, that helped Rhomu see through the darkness. For that, he was thankful.
He crawled out of the shelter with a hunter’s practiced silence, carrying his bone-pointed spear for protection. After a second scan of the camp around him, he glided on his toes out into the jungle beyond. A gentle warmth embraced Rhomu as he followed a familiar game trail. It was not the humid heat of the night, but something far stronger.
A loud crunch split through the nocturnal singing of crickets and frogs. Rhomu tensed to a halt with cold sweat on his brow. Branches cracked beneath heavy pounding on the moist earth. It was coming his way.
Rhomu hurried to hide between the high buttress roots of a kapok tree, hugging his spear while his heart drummed. Across the trail ahead lumbered a massive bull hornface on its four stout legs. The creature’s scaled hide shone like wet pebbles from the moonlight, and a glinting pair of horns longer than Rhomu’s spear curved out of its brow over two stubbier horns on its snout. A missing chunk of the rigid frill that shielded its neck attested to a survived confrontation with a mighty deathjaw, and the broken shaft of a hunter’s spear jutted out of its hip.
The hornface stopped to snip at some fan palm saplings with its hooked beak. While it browsed, Rhomu crept past it on all fours, careful not to snap a single twig on the jungle floor. Hornfaces may have eaten plants rather than flesh, but they could be as aggressive and dangerous as any deathjaw, not to mention vindictive.
Once he had sneaked out of the beast’s earshot, Rhomu rose back to his feet and jogged down the trail. The flutter in his stomach returned to lift him up with every step. All remaining thought of danger subsided under his eager anticipation. When the trickling of a low waterfall reached Rhomu’s ears, he accelerated into a joyful skip.
It was to his pleasant surprise to find Djula already there on the stream’s bank. The curves of her dark-skinned figure glistened like fine obsidian beneath Grandfather Moon’s gaze, and the coils of her black hair sparkled. Between cheeks dotted with traditional scarification, her full lips spread into a smile of white teeth brighter than either Grandfather Moon or Grandmother Sun. Rhomu’s heart erupted into a ceremony of jubilant percussion.
Makena of Azania aiming her arrow in the deserts of Ahrabiyya.
An acrid haze floated over the camp. Makena passed through it with her stomach knotting with nausea. Dark torrents of smoke billowing from the burning tents watered her eyes. Spatters of bloodshed, reeking to the heavens of a coppery odor, stained the sand red.
There lay all over the ruined camp the bodies of men and women, young and old, their once tawny skin having faded into an ashen pallor. Even infants lay in their mothers’ arms with faces still contorted in voiceless, unmoving cries. Javelins transfixing many of the dead testified to an atrocity at the hands of men. Plucking out one of the javelins, Makena recognized its leaf-bladed tip as being of Habeshan make.
She curled her lips into a snarl even as remorse pierced her heart. The Habesha were not her people, but as another people of eastern Afrika, they shared the same black skin and coiled hair as her own Azanians despite their narrower noses and thinner lips. By attacking these hapless Ahrab nomads with such brutality, the Habesha had made Makena regret her own distant kinship with them.
A wide road of human tracks, mixed with those of camels and sheep, led out of the camp southward through the desert. Upon reading the centermost line of tracks the way a scholar could read a scroll, Makena discerned that the walkers had laid it with a slow, shuffling gait. Some of the tracks’ dimensions matched the feet of women and children as well as men. Such were the telltale signs of captives of all ages and genders being herded in a line like cattle for slaughter. If Makena’s suspicions were correct, their fate would be no better.
She unslung her bow with a determined grip. Makena had traveled to the sandy Ahrabiyyan peninsula in search of an ancient treasure, the treasure of old Ubar, and she had hoped the people in this camp would guide her to that fabled ruin. Much as fate had banished all hope of that, so had it banished any thought of treasure from her mind. Who were left of these people needed justice. They needed their freedom back. Only Makena could give them that out in these barren wastes.
Eumenes and Sadeh seek shelter from a sandstorm in a desert cave.
Sadeh staggered in defiance of the wailing gale even as the sand slashed red streaks across her deep brown limbs. Through the billowing orange haze that engulfed the world, she could tease out with shielded eyes the silhouette of a rocky outcrop up ahead. In its side yawned a darker shadow, the mouth of a cave. If there was any place in this forsaken desert she could find shelter from the storm, it would be in there.
She did not know whether to thank the gods for such a small blessing. Had they been looking out for her and her army, they would not have let those goatskin-caped Temehu raiders lure them into an ambush and crush them. As far as Sadeh knew, she was one of only two survivors of the Khumetian force sent to punish those marauders. The other was her dear Eumenes, and she could hear him collapse into the sandy ground behind her, overwhelmed by his exhaustion and the wind.
Sadeh turned to trudge back, still fighting against the storm, and hauled up the man’s bulky body with her arms. Eumenes was not a Khumetian or even a native of the larger continent, but rather a Sherdenu whose light olive complexion and wavy brown hair betrayed his origin from across the northern sea. His armor of thick banded leather and the horned bronze helmet on his head added to the big burly man’s weight. Despite the strength she spent dragging him through the sand-choked wind, Sadeh could never give up on him. Brave and strong Eumenes was all she had left between here and their garrison’s fort to the east.
After what seemed like a lengthy passage of time, they reached the cave at last. Sadeh laid Eumenes on the floor and leaned against the rocky wall with heavy panting, taking a swig from her waterskin to wash her parched throat. She ran her fingers through the braids of her black hair to get the grains of sand out.
The waterhole glimmered like gold beneath the setting sun. Eadric admired it with a lick of his lips while he guided his steed down to the bank. After a sweltering day spent riding across the savanna the Saracens called Bilad as-Sudan, or the Land of the Black People, even a pond as small as this one was a welcome blessing. While his horse lapped away at the waterhole’s surface, Eadric cupped his hands together and scooped up as much water as he could. He took a swig of the cool, if earthy-tasting, fluid and splashed the rest onto his sunburned face with a satisfied moan.
Thus rehydrated, Eadric unsheathed his iron sword, planted its tip into the muddy bank, and knelt with one hand on its hilt. He murmured his thanks to Woden, the Allfather, and all the other gods for his good fortune. Unlike most of their countryfolk back in distant Saxony, Eadric and the people of his village were never willing to surrender their old faith in favor of the new Frankish god Christ, no matter how the Franks might have threatened him. Alas, they had made good on their threats, and only by fleeing to the ends of the known world had Eadric evaded the same fate that had befallen everyone he knew and loved.
He could still hear, and feel, the hot roaring flames engulfing his village, as well as the screams of men, women, and children fleeing the Frankish ambush. One woman’s scream in particular rang louder than the rest. It might have been Eadric’s dear sister Hilda, whom the Franks ravished before butchering her. He would never forgive himself for not being able to cut down the Christ-worshipers and save her in time.
No, wait, that was not a scream from his memories. It was a real woman’s scream, in the here and now, piercing out from somewhere nearby!
Yandi stood poised with her bone-tipped spear and watched the river’s surface for movement. The lukewarm current licked her thighs while the perspiration on her black skin fended off the steamy heat. Weighing down on her hip beneath a thong of twisted plant fibers was a butchering knife fashioned from a deathjaw’s serrated tooth.
A long shadow drifted through the water in front of her. Drawing her spear overhead to build momentum, Yandi struck with lightning swiftness and pierced her prey in the head. She drew out a violet legfin larger than her forearm, more than enough to feed her family for the night. Watching the fish flail its leg-like fins about, she smacked her lips as she anticipated savoring its tangy flavor.
A flurry of frantic splashing shattered the calm, flinging droplets of water onto Yandi’s side. Her sister Benje, younger than her by five rainy seasons, was attacking the river’s surface while yelling with frustration. The tiny silhouettes of Benje’s intended targets all darted away from her with every desperate jab.
Looking up to see what Yandi had caught, Benje pouted. “Why does the river favor you so, Yandi?”
Yandi gave her sister a playful chuckle. “Because I don’t attack it the way you do. Remember what our mother taught us. Stay still until the fish comes to you.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing, and yet the fish don’t come to me at all. What have I done wrong?”
“Nothing, Benje. You only need patience. I was that way once, remember?”
Yandi closed her eyes and prayed thanks to the river for offering her its bounty, imploring it to bless her sister as well. It was only a few heartbeats later that Benje yelped with triumph.
Benje had skewered a young watersnapper. The squirming creature was scarcely larger than Yandi’s legfin, nowhere near as massive as its kind could grow upon reaching adulthood. It was still plump for its young age. Both sisters had eaten watersnapper meat before and knew it to taste as good as any fish. Together, the two sisters would bring back to camp more than enough river meat for their family.
Yandi waded to her sister and laid a hand on her shoulder, stretching her lips into a proud beam. “It seems the river favors you too, Benje.”
Her heart jolted within her chest when a flat black form, as long as a man stood tall, surfaced with an eruption of foam behind her sister. A pair of green eyes with slitted pupils glared from its far end with what could have been either hunger or parental rage. As it zoomed toward Benje, drawing a steep wake behind it, the great watersnapper twisted its head aside and parted sharp-toothed jaws, ready to chomp down on her with crushing force.
Yandi yanked her sibling out of the way. The watersnapper’s jaws clamped a narrow breadth away from them, their closure blowing out a gust of wind that almost shoved them off their feet. Together the two sisters jogged toward the riverbank as fast as the water would allow them. Swimming faster than either woman could run, the great watersnapper caught up to their rears in little time.
The giant reptile opened its jaws behind Benje for a second attack. Yandi hurried to punch it in the eye with the butt of her spear. The watersnapper threw its immense head back with a guttural bellow, letting the sisters rush all the way to the water’s edge. As they sprinted over the riverbank’s damp and sticky mud, the aggravated beast stormed out of the water after them on its sprawling legs.
It swung its head like an oversized club of bone and scaled flesh at Benje. She ducked with a stumble and slipped face-first onto the mud, losing hold of her spear. Scrambling to recover it, she rolled back onto her feet and brandished the weapon at the incoming beast. The baby watersnapper Benje had caught earlier flung off the spear’s tip and landed one pace in front of its huge parent.
Whether or not it recognized the young as its own, the elder creature scooped up the little carcass with its teeth and swallowed it as if it were an ordinary fish. In the meantime, both women had run to a safe distance farther up the riverbank. They watched with relief as the great watersnapper lurched and swam back into the river without giving further pursuit.
A panting Yandi patted her sister on the back. “That was swift thinking there, Benje.”
Benje brushed mud off her breasts with a disappointed frown. “A shame I had to give up my catch.”
“Don’t worry about that. The river will always offer more.”
“If only I could catch them as well as you can.”
“That’s only because I am older and have more experience than you, sister. You’ll catch up in time. It will get dark soon, so we should return to camp.”
Benje nodded. “And we wouldn’t want to be around if that watersnapper is still hungry.”
Yandi led her sister parallel to the river’s upstream course. Their path straddled the shaded juncture between the riverbank and the towering rainforest that walled its far edge. She kept her gaze swaying between the river and the forest undergrowth, never forgetting the myriad threats lurking in both.
Even the sky overhead could present danger should a great skinwing swoop down to pluck either of them up in its beak. Those soaring giants ruled the sky as much as the great watersnappers ruled the waterways and the deathjaws the deep jungle.
As she trailed behind her elder sister, Benje still held her head low with a gaze aimed at her spear’s empty tip. Yandi gave her a soft tap on the shoulder while cradling her necklace of fangs, claws, and eggshell beads in her hand. It was their late father who had strung each sister’s necklace after she had earned her facial scarifications of womanhood. Their necklaces were therefore the last tangible things the sisters had connecting them to his memory. Yandi would not lose Benje the way they had lost both their parents several rainy seasons ago. This she had sworn by Grandmother Sun and Grandfather Moon.
A subtle tremor shook the earth beneath their feet with a rumble. Far beyond the jungle along the river’s opposite bank, a gray stream of smoke meandered up from the summit of the eastern horizon’s tallest mountain. A chill slithered up Yandi’s spine. Never in her life had she seen that ancient dome of black rock leak smoke like that, but she recalled the elders’ stories well enough to recognize what it meant. It was something even the fiercest deathjaw or the most colossal longneck feared, something more powerful than any beast or man.
After generations of slumber, old Fire Mountain was stirring once more.
In prehistoric Africa, the huntress Ekan’e and her saber-toothed friend Orru attack a marauding party of Lovecraftian Deep Ones!
East Africa, 100,000 years ago
Ekan’e grimaced as she crunched a brittle strip of dried ostrich between her teeth. The meat’s flavor had all but faded, yet it had been all she and her blade-fanged companion Orru had had to eat for the past couple of days. It was the middle of the dry season, and both game and forage had been hard to come by on the savanna. Oh, how her stomach growled like a famished lion for the juicy tenderness of fresh meat or sweet berries! Ekan’e’s mouth turned to water even imagining such luxurious treats.
Slipping out the remainder of the dried meat from the small pouch she had hanging beside her short gazelle-hide sarong, she tossed it over her campfire to Orru. After it fell between his front paws, the cat lapped it up with his tongue and swallowed it whole. His whimpering moan afterward suggested that he too had grown tired of the stale leftovers and craved fresh, bloody meat.
Ekan’e gave him an empathetic smile and stroked the fur on his head with her fingers, receiving a satisfied purr in return. “We shall eat better before sunrise, my little Orru, I promise.”
She looked out to the ocean which sprawled eastward from below the cliff atop which she and her bladefang friend sat, the crests of its little waves glimmering pale yellow beneath a full moon and innumerable stars. Ekan’e and Orru had come to this coastline precisely to take advantage of its wealth in food, which they would harvest with her spear and his claws and fangs after going down to the nearest beach. It would be the first time Ekan’e had fished from the sea, but she had fished from streams before and figured it could not be that different.
Close to the bottom of the cliff, something sliced up through the water’s surface, shimmering wet. It was a thin and membranous ridge like the dorsal fin of a fish, and four more of them rose from behind it, forming a triangle that cut in a diagonal path toward the shoreline. Beneath her dark skin, Ekan’e blanched, the air around her turning cold. Those fins might not have been pointed like the fins of the ocean predators known as sharks, but they reminded her of even more terrifying denizens of the deep. Those were the ones that people had always spoken of in hushed tones in the campfire stories.
A valiant adventuress confronts a fin-backed pelycosaurian predator within sight of some ancient cliff dwellings.
Ezegbe of Amozey tugged the reins of her gallimimus. The shaggy-feathered creature halted with a squawk, with the dust kicked up by its long and slender legs settling over the desert floor behind it. After slipping off its saddle, the Amozean warrior gave her mount’s elongated neck a gentle rub while treating it to a handful of dried dates and beetles, which it pecked up with relish. Once Ezegbe had tethered the gallimimus to a tamarisk sapling, she brushed sand off her green cotton top and skirt and her bun of fluffy black hair. She then surveyed the landscape to her left with a hand over her umber-skinned brow to shade her eyes from the midday sunlight.
The canyon below her cut westward through the desert like a colossal scar. Its sandstone walls burned as brilliant as burnished copper beneath the sun’s unobstructed glow, sinking as far into the earth as many mountains stood high. A narrow forest of palm and acacia trees choked the gorge’s very bottom, their leafy crowns blocking any view of whatever rivulet supplied them with water. On the numerous ledges that jutted from the cliffs’ faces, the weathered edifices of an extinct people stood crammed together as slouching beige stacks of boxy and cylindrical structures.
Ezegbe could not find any steps carved into the canyon walls that would allow passage between these old cliffside settlements. Surely these people, whoever they were, had set up wooden bridges and ladders connecting village to village which had since disintegrated into dust over the eons. Squinting at the face of a cliff beneath one cluster of ruins, the Amozean did notice pairs of little pits gouged into the rock that ran down its height to the ravine floor, which could have served as climbing holds for the ancient denizens while they went to fetch water beneath the trees. It was still hard for her to imagine any human being having the strength or stamina to make regular climbing trips up and down the canyon walls.
Assuming, of course, the beings who built these cliff dwellings were human to begin with. Priests, shamans, and philosophers all over the world spoke of races of other creatures that had evolved sapience and erected shining cities millions of years before humanity’s descent from the trees. All over the world, these earlier civilizations’ ruins lay like innumerable rotting skeletons on a past battlefield. There were even legends of old cities deep within the vast sea, their monuments long since encrusted by coral and seaweed. Even if humans were the race who had built this canyon’s villages, humankind itself had been around for a few hundred millennia, plenty of time for entire nations to rise and fall as nations always had.
Regardless of the cliff dwellings’ origin, what Ezegbe had to do was find a way into one of them. Akhenhotep, the Hekuptan priest who had hired her, claimed that the canyon hid a mask-like idol that might have retained enough magical energy for him to exploit. What he planned to do with it, he had withheld, and Ezegbe could not promise that she could even find such an artifact lying there unmolested over uncounted centuries. Still, the middle-aged Hekuptan had plenty of gold cowries to spare, and he had even paid half the price upfront.
An agitated shriek from her steed shattered Ezegbe’s musing. The gallimimus was hopping on its feet while waving its plumed forelimbs in a panic while a hungry dimetrodon charged at it. The dimetrodon may not have been nearly as large as the giganotosaurus of the southern savanna or the tyrannosaurus from the Amozean jungles even further south, but these lizard-like monsters were nonetheless the desert’s apex predators and were still big enough to prey on humans or gallimimuses. The tall semicircular fin that reared on the dimetrodon’s back did not hinder its darting speed in the least.
Luwi stalked with practiced silence through dry grass that grew high as her waist. With her spear in hand and a sheathed machete on her hip, she followed the lead of her two spotted hyenas, Kamfunti and Muzowa. The animals’ keen senses of smell would guide her toward potential game, and their bone-crushing jaws could be every bit as lethal as her iron-bladed weapons. Ever since she had raised them from cubhood, Luwi had found them to be far more dependable companions than any people she had known.
It is the first century AD, and the empire of Rome has grown into one of the largest in the history of the Mediterranean. Forged with cold sharp iron over the course of centuries, Roman authority now stretches as far afield as the floodplains of Egypt to the south, the sands of Judaea to the east, and the frigid woodlands of Gaul and Britannia to the north. Yet that is not enough for Rome. Their latest designs are on the equatorial heart of Africa, hoping to expand from there to conquer the whole continent and its innumerable riches…riches enough to support a campaign of world conquest.
There is one person who stands in the way of these ambitions. She is Nadjela, the proud and fierce Crown Princess of Batela. Together with her trusty leopard companion Ishaga, Nadjela will come face to face with both local adversaries and the wrath of the Roman Empire over the course of four adventures. Will her courage and martial ability, and the blessing of her god Nyambe the Creator, be enough to defend all of Africa and the world beyond?
