Everything she needed for the ritual of guidance.
She set each object on the low circular table in the room’s center, hands moving with the calmness of long practice even as her heartbeat refused to settle. Tonight, she would guide Leonotis and the others through a dungeon they were never meant to enter—through stone corridors that had devoured better warriors than them.
Chinakah had been held there too long.
Too long.
“Just a little more,” she murmured to herself, steadying her breath as she tied her braids back with a strip of white cloth. “I will free you tonight. I swear it.”
A faint metallic chime echoed through the chamber.
Jabara stiffened.
The door slid open without her bidding.
Diviner Zuberi entered smoothly, robes immaculate, face composed in a gentle, unreadable smile. His long fingers interlaced behind his back.
“My lady Seer,” he said, bowing just deeply enough to be respectful without sincerity. “I bring news.”
Jabara did not turn from her ritual—only adjusted the cedar, letting its aromatic smoke curl upward.
“Then speak.”
Zuberi stepped closer, his soft sandals whispering across the floor.
“The King has departed.”
Jabara went still.
“Already?” She snapped her gaze toward him. “He wasn’t scheduled to leave until afternoon.”
“The schedule changed,” Zuberi said with an apologetic shrug. “He left a hour ago. With a large escort.”
“And the council agreed with his departure?” Jabara asked, though she already knew.
Zuberi confirmed it anyway.
“Yes, it is to save the kingdom after all.”
Jabara’s anger simmered beneath her skin, heating her pulse.
“He intends to seize more Dryads for his experiments,” she whispered. It wasn’t a question.
Zuberi nodded. “He seeks to strengthen the ‘sustainable production’ of Dryad essence. He believes the forest is dryads are key to revitalization, and thus—”
“We are Seers of the Orisha, Zuberi. Our place is to rule as a pillar with the king,” Jabara cut in sharply, her voice low and fierce. “Not lapdogs for Rega. And the Orishas of the forests will not tolerate their sacred children being tortured.”
Her hand curled into a fist.
“If Rega continues this path—if he continues stripping the Dryads from the Dark Forest—the forest will answer. The Orishas will answer.”
She met Zuberi’s eyes.
“We cannot let him do this.”
Zuberi blinked once.
Then twice.
His expression softened into something that might have been pity.
“My lady,” he said gently, “I’m afraid I cannot permit you to interfere.”
Jabara’s heartbeat faltered.
“…What did you say?”
Zuberi stepped forward. His shadow stretched strangely long behind him, as though the lanternlight were bending away from him rather than illuminating him.
His smile remained polite, even serene.
“I said,” he repeated calmly, “I cannot permit you to stop the King.”
Jabara’s fingers inched toward the cedar bowl. “Zuberi… what are you?”
“Not what you think.” His voice deepened, a strange resonance threading through it. “And not beholden to the Orisha you serve.”
Something inside Jabara snapped taut.
She raised her hand—and the illusion shattered.
Zuberi’s outline wavered like heat over flame.
His aura twisted.
His form… rippled.
Jabara’s breath caught as the truth emerged beneath the false face.
He was not a Seer.
He never had been.
“You’re not tied to the Orisha,” she whispered, horrified. “You’re not Diviner Zuberi at all.”
Zuberi smiled wider.
“No,” he agreed. “But the lie was useful.”
His voice shifted again—deeper, colder, ancient.
“I serve only Iku.”
The Orisha of endings.
The god of death.
Jabara’s skin prickled with gooseflesh.
She stepped back, hand already weaving a protective sigil in the air.
“And you wear the face of a Seer to sabotage the Orisha,” she hissed. “To poison their will.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“To correct it,” Zuberi replied calmly. “To free this realm from their outdated designs. King Rega is the perfect tool. Ruthless. Ambitious. Predictable.”
His eyes gleamed.
“And now, you are in the way.”
The air darkened.
Zuberi’s palm rose and a surge of à?? spiraled outward like black smoke made alive.
But that wasn’t what made Jabara’s blood freeze.
It was the scent.
The shape.
The rhythm of the spell.
It was Amara’s.
Her breath stuttered. “That… that is Amara’s signature.”
Zuberi tilted his head thoughtfully.
“Of course it is.”
Her heart dropped into her stomach.
“No,” she whispered. “No. That’s impossible.”
Zuberi’s eyes flared with sickly gold light.
“There was no Amara.”
The world stilled.
Jabara stopped breathing.
Amara… the summoner from Obatala's Reach… A follower of Iku? A traitor? A puppet?
Jabara shook her head violently.
“Amara has been talked of for years. I've heard of her. I was asked to train her. Guide her. She is no servant of death.”
“That's true she wasn't a servant of death,” Zuberi corrected softly. “At least not the one you knew. The real Amara is dead, buried in a ditch in the sands outside of the temple.”
His fingers snapped. And he morphed into Amara.
The black à?? surged outward materializing into creatures.
Twisted silhouettes burst from the shadows—limbs too long, bodies too narrow, eyes glowing like dying embers. They clawed at the pillars, scraping their nails across stone.
Jabara’s composure shattered. “You dare summon corrupted beasts of the dark in the palace?”
Amara’s smile sharpened. “I dare many things.”
The first creature reached her in three strides.
Jabara dropped low, her staff sweeping in a tight arc. The wind that answered wasn't a gust. It was a wall, dense and shaped, slamming into the creature's chest and folding it backward into the two behind it. They hit the stone hard. One didn't get up.
The second wave came from both sides at once.
She spun, one hand tracing a sigil in the air that her fingers had drawn ten thousand times before. The wind caught the shape of it and held, a curved barrier that deflected the nearest creature's claws close enough that she felt the air move against her cheek. She pivoted into the deflection, letting momentum carry her, and brought the staff down across the thing's neck with the full weight of compressed air behind it. The crack echoed off the stone walls.
She was already moving before it fell.
A creature dropped from the ceiling directly above her. She felt the displacement of air before she saw it, the sudden hollow where pressure should have been, and threw herself sideways, pulling a whip of sharpened wind behind her as she rolled. It caught the creature across its too-long arm. The limb separated cleanly. The creature shrieked and folded.
Amara sent three at once.
Jabara planted her feet.
She exhaled once, slow and deliberate, and drew the wind inward. Not outward, inward, pulling it tight around her body and then released it in every direction simultaneously.
The burst scattered all three creatures. One hit the far wall hard enough to crack the stone. Another dissolved entirely, the dark substance held it together coming apart in the sudden pressure change. The third scrambled upright and lunged again and she caught it mid-air with a spear of focused air through its center. It stopped moving.
Silence for half a second.
Jabara stood in the middle of the room. Her breathing was controlled. Her wind chime staff was level. The white-gold of her à?? had spread to the floor around her feet, the wind still circling her in slow, ready rotations.
Across the room, Amara had stopped advancing.
She was watching Jabara, realizing she may have underestimated the Highseer.
"You cannot win this," Amara said. Her voice had lost its steadiness. "Even if you defeat me, you cannot stop—"
Jabara crossed the distance before she could finish her sentence.
Her palm connected with Amara's chest and the compressed air she had been holding since the last wave detonated outward in a single concentrated burst. Amara flew through the air. She crossed the chamber and met the stone pillar at the far end with a crunch.
She slid to the floor.
Jabara walked toward her, staff raised, her à?? blazing at its edges.
"You dare defy the Orisha?" Her voice was just above a whisper. "You dare threaten this kingdom?"
She raised her staff to end it.
Jabara felt the air in the room change.
It wasn't that something disturbed the air but created an absence.
The shadow behind Amara thickened and then stepped forward.
The woman who emerged moved without sound. Robes black as a starless sky. A braid coiled over one shoulder. She crossed the room.
Jabara's eyes found her face and stayed there.
Beautiful. Wrongly so. Features too symmetrical, skin unmarked by time or weather or any feeling that had ever passed through it. Her cheekbones sat too close to the surface. Her lips held a faint, permanent curve that had never once been touched by actual amusement.
She looked like something that had studied human faces for centuries and decided to improve on them.
Her eyes were the worst part. Not glowing. Not dark. Just still, the way deep water is still when nothing lives beneath it.
She clapped. Slowly. Once. Twice.
"Sit back, sister," she said. "This is no longer your stage."
Jabara could not place her. Not from court. Not from any vision she had ever walked into. Not from any line of power she had ever read.
This woman appeared in none of it.
That was impossible.
Amara bowed from the floor, blood on her lip. "My sister."
The woman glanced down at her. The smile didn't change.
"Pathetic," she said pleasantly. She stepped over Amara like a threshold. "You couldn't even stall her."
She raised one hand.
No breath drawn. No preparation. The black à?? simply came, instant and absolute, obedient in a way à?? was never obedient. Jawless things poured from it. Poison-hollowed shapes. Shadows with too many joints dragging themselves across the ceiling.
Jabara staggered back.
"Who are you?"
The woman turned and looked at her fully for the first time. The stillness in her eyes didn't shift.
"You wouldn't know my name," she said. "Names are for things that can be forgotten."
She lifted her hand again and the à?? moved before she finished the gesture. No pause. No cost. Nothing a living wielder should be capable of.
"No à??weaver, no à??seer, no human should wield à?? like that," Jabara whispered.
The woman's smile widened by one precise degree.
"I'm not a Seer."
She tilted her head. Something ancient sat behind her eyes.
"I am what you fear most."
She leaned in, voice soft as a death knell:
"I stand at the pinnacle of all à??weavers. I have ascended to Onishe."
The creatures surged.
Jabara moved.
She swept low, driving a compressed gust along the floor that took three creatures off their feet simultaneously. Before they landed she was already turning, staff carving a tight arc that released a blade of focused wind through the nearest shadow. It split cleanly. She stepped through the gap before it dissolved.
More came.
She caught the first with a wind whip across its chest. The second she redirected — catching its momentum, spinning it into the third with a sharp pull of redirected pressure. Both went down. Her à?? burned at the edges of her hands, white-gold and steady.
She was still standing. Still breathing. Still fighting.
But she could feel it now.
Each wave arrived faster than the last. Each creature hit harder. The Onishe raised her hand without looking, without effort, and three became six became ten, and they came from every direction at once — ceiling, floor, walls — and Jabara's wind was everywhere but it was not enough to be everywhere.
A claw caught her across the thigh. She staggered, redirected, kept moving.
A set of jaws closed on her shoulder. She tore free, the wind shrieking around her in a burst that scattered the nearest creatures, bought her two seconds.
She used both of them.
A focused spear of compressed air punched through two creatures in a single line. She spun the recoil into a shockwave that cleared the space around her feet. Her breathing had changed — controlled still, but the margins were shrinking.
Across the room the Onishe watched with her hands clasped loosely at her waist. She had not moved. She had not summoned anything in the last thirty seconds.
She didn't need to.
The poisoned lash came from the left, faster than the creatures, faster than reflex. It caught Jabara across the ribs and drove her into the wall. Stone met her spine. Her vision fractured at the edges — not black, not yet, but cracked, like glass before it gives.
She pressed one hand against the wall.
She pushed herself upright.
Her staff rose.
“It’s almost admirable,” the woman in black mused. “Almost.”
She looked at Jabara. "It's too bad. You may have stood a chance, but you spent so much energy trying to protect those children last night"
Jabara gathered the last of her strength. “If you harm those children I swear—”
“Oh,” the woman said with a smirk. “We already have plans for them.”
That was the last thing Jabara heard.
A final burst of purple light washed over her then darkness swallowed everything.
By nightfall, her chamber was empty.
No body.
No blood.
No sign of struggle.
Only the faint earthy scent of fungi lingering in the air.
Whispers spread through the palace by the next day:
Some said High Seer Jabara had fled the capital, abandoning her post.
Some said she ascended to commune with the Orisha in secret.
Some claimed the crown silenced her for treason.
None knew the truth.
Only two women dressed in black one with a smirk, and one still wearing Amara’s face.
Ase and the ranks of power work:
1. The Average Person Most people use Ase internally. They can flow this energy through their bodies to strengthen their muscles, toughen their skin, or sharpen their reflexes. It is the foundation of every great warrior and laborer.
2. The Aseborn Some are born "blessed"—possessing significantly more Ase than the average person due to a closer connection to a patron Orisha. An Aseborn typically chooses one of two paths:
-
Aseweavers: Combat-focused users who weave their energy into martial arts and elemental strikes. Aseweavers tend to be the warriors and soldiers of the Aseborn world, their power visible and physical.
-
Aseseers: Spirit-focused users who lean into the spiritual side, focusing on divination and the unseen. Aseseers move differently through society, often becoming priests, advisors, or seers whose influence is felt rather than seen.
3. The Alaase Through intense meditation and by acting in alignment with their Orisha’s nature, an Aseborn can ascend to become an Alaase. At this stage, their patron grants them the ability to directly affect the world around them to a greater extent without tiring. An Alaase can use the abilities of aseweavers and aseseers.
4. The Onishe The pinnacle of power. An Onishe is essentially a god walking the earth. They possess world-altering strength and are often worshipped as living avatars of their Orisha. The Onishe do not need to say spells, prayers, or weave sigils to use their power. But the catch is an Onishe loses their free will. They cannot act in any way that contradicts their Orisha’s desires. To have the power of a god is to become a tool for one.