The Future Ancients

Bukata blasted off in her family drifter, accelerating into Chepela’s sky at the planet’s teeth-rattling escape velocity. Gravity pushed her stiffly into her seat, triggering the drifter’s A.I. to take over the rushed flight to orbit.

The universe’s dark, radiated womb greeted the drifter with a cushioning embrace as propulsion slowed. She was late for the clan’s final assembly before departure (outfit selection was a high art, after all), yet still turned to look back at her red-brown home for all her sixteen years. The planet called to her heart, a gentle touch that not so subtly prompted nostalgic memories of flying lessons that started before she could walk. Years of sacred teachings and a thousand flights. Just her and her mother…and Munthali.

A jolting scream filled her helmet comms, breaking the sentient planet’s spell. Bukata glared at her co-pilot’s seat, and Munthali smiled a victorious smile.

“Don’t make the clan delay evacuation because of frivolous sentimentality.” He mocked. “We’ll be back in a month anyway.”  

“You’re just jealous it loves me more than you,” she retorted, masking her anxiety. 

Leaving home was always daunting for her, even in a dream scenario like this, where a once-in-a-million-year opportunity to return to the clan’s civilisational home planet waited. A last chance to see the great civilisation that birthed the roaming clans before mass resettlement soon rendered it a ruin. Chepela awaited their arrival, already prepped for the mass migration.

Her thoughts bubbled brightly at the prospect, a mix of excitement and apprehension.

Munthali’s laugh pulled her back. “…Chepela choosing you as its Nganga-Seeker shows its low standards.”

“Go jump into a sun’s gravity well,” she sucked her teeth. The fool was so annoying; he was only a year older, but he acted like her ancestor already.

“Easy heart, sister,” Munthali’s tone turned light but still grated her ears with his soft laughter. “I joke. Come now, we can’t be late for our own return ceremony.”

“We won’t,” she smirked, facing the infinite deep. She grabbed the drifter’s flight controls, eager to pay him back. With a rub of her turquoise wrist bead in a string of five inherited stones, she said goodbye to her mother, now one with Chepela in her death.

Her mother replied from beyond the plane, her immortal essence swallowing the family drifter whole.

Munthali’s laugh died in a gulp. “Mwaiche! Don’t-” But it was already too late.

They entered the ancestral plane.

#2

Great-uncle Chilupula was always hard on Bukata whenever she visited the ancestral plane to perform “unnecessary” jumps. Luckily, the ancient soul was an outlier in the great welcoming sea that guided her through the ever-expanding canvas forever in motion. In here, old stories became new as they connected her soul into a vast immortal stream, forever speeding towards infinity and back. Untrained pilots lost themselves to the bedazzling rush, but a particular string directed those willing to listen to the old chorus. 

Bukata tapped into the first ancestors to leave the home planet on a voyage – one that now called her back home to complete the thread.

I’ve always been here, and I’ll be here again. The call was an intense euphoric high of affirmation, tempting her to stay just a little longer in her mother’s embrace…

Leave! snapped her great uncle Chilupla through her white inherited rock bead – his bead.

The push expelled her from the ancient stream before the compelling stories devoured her and stole her sense of place in time. Desynchronised, the drifter exited the plane back into physical space, right at the assembly coordinates. All around them, the clan’s drifters aligned into formation, preparing for departure to the ancient homeworld. At the centre of the fleet floated three massive cylindrical transport vessels.

“See, I told you we’d…” The jump’s psyche-jarring tag punched her mind with cold needles that felt worse than Chepela’s vicious gravity pull.

 “Bukata!” Her father’s voice rattled through her comms. “Get in here.”

At least Munthali was quiet now, equally nursing a pulsating headache. Small wins.

The lead transport ship pulled the drifter in.

#3

“You missed your final amafundisho,” Her father looked down, disappointed. It cut deep through Bukata’s hazy mind. “How do you expect me to trust you with the oldest family memory bead if you can’t show some simple punctuality?”

Because I’m the only one who can unlock its data. As far as Bukata was concerned, the teachings were all fluff since her mother had taught all she needed before transcending. But she didn’t want to infuriate her father any further, so she played the fragile last-born child act and pouted, hand to head, exaggerating the jump’s effect on her mind.

Her father held stern, inspiring a panicking urge to overdramatise her act. She ignored it, and like clockwork, his disappointment deflected to the next available target.

“How could you let her be late?” He pointed at Munthali. “She’s your little sister.”

“Eh, ba tata, I don’t remember anyone asking me if I wanted a sibling,” Munthali ducked under the finger and walked down the row of hanging cryo-pods to the left. “Let me work in peace.”

Her father’s eyes bulged. “Such a child! No wonder, with such names, you surely carry the spirits of my great uncles come to continue their torment.”

“Well, I didn’t name myself,” Munthali said, disappearing between cyro-pod rows. 

Like a broken gauge, the response sent their father through his entire emotional range before finally settling in a defeated calm. He shook his head, eyes shimmering with bitter joy; for good and bad, traits of his lost great uncles lived on through his son.

“You can stop pretending now,” he turned back to Bukata.

“Sorry,” she couldn’t help popping a toothy grin. 

He sighed and passed on the red bead she had dreamed of since her mother told its owner’s story eleven cycles ago. This would be her loadstone to the ancient homeworld – Chiti-Chiyeye.

“Thank you!” She hugged her father, accepting her mother’s bittersweet final inheritance.

#4

High on hallucinogenic clouds that were supposed to simulate Chiti-Chiyeye’s atmosphere and feel, Bukata and her generation of pilots stumbled to their drifters. She took it for another one of Munthali’s pranks, but once in the pilot’s seat, she rubbed the red bead, and the rush of memories loosed tears she couldn’t stop. Goosebumps covered her arms as her toes turned cold despite the ship’s warmth. 

On her lips, a new repeating hymn tethered her to a home she’d never seen. 

Never forget. The ancestors sang through the bead, attuning her cells to homeworld’s call through a billion light years of epigenetic transference.

In the moment, she understood why she’d been waiting for this reunion her entire life. She loved the clan’s wandering life of perpetual exploration, but knowing she belonged to something far greater than a few thousand was a pull too strong to ignore.

“All drifters ready?” Her father called through her helmet. The other drifter pilots came in one by one with the all-clear. “Sync up.”

 Bukata called out to the first ancestors through the red bead, and they answered from the plane. The other drifter pilots were within them, sharing the connecting memory and essence that tied the clan together. She could feel their burgeoning excitement for the awaiting return ceremony as a circular portal opened between the dancing drifters, moving in tune with the ancestors’ song.

“Time to visit the ancient parent’s home,” Munthali hijacked the comms as the evacuation ships entered the portal. “Expect judgemental disapproval.”

Better that than glimpsing home through narrow archive entries. Besides, it couldn’t be worse than the usual rushed planetary evacuations involving invasions, dying stars, and black holes.

The aligned drifters jumped as one and found themselves at the edge of a mass grave.

#5

At first, Bukata thought the transport ships had all spontaneously exploded upon jumping into Chiti-Chiyeye’s orbit, but in the next bewildering flicker, she realised the debris field was a grave of more than a million ships bearing old clan designs. Any relief that none of the clan’s ships had crashed into the debris faded quickly.

Horror evacuation missions flashed through her mind. Almost always, an invasive xenophobic species was at work, but even in the worst cases, defenders barely holding on, the fight was still raging. Here, there was only silence.

“What happened here?” The question echoed throughout the fleet.

“No signals from the capital,” Munthali confirmed the clan’s fears after a long moment of blankly staring at the red planet – Chiti-Chiyeye.

Bukata tapped the red bead, asking the homeworld for permission to land. Each tap received no reply. Without a planet’s permission, clan members risked exile if they entered its atmosphere.

“Drifter pilots,” her father’s voice shocked her back to default. “Has anyone received an audience?”

The answer was unequivocal. No.

“No point orbiting then,” he continued, trying to sound professional. “Let’s investigate these wrecks. Find out what we can while we wait. The planet has our request.”

Bukata continued to tap the red bead anyway, intuiting that its larger half was just stubborn, feeding herself into the quantum message more and more until– 

Fine, you annoying tick, but only one. Chiti-Chiyeye rumbled. Its response energy felt ailing low, taxed by far greater things than humouring her foreboding reunion.

“I got in,” she took a deep breath, the route home calculated and dived.

“Take someone with you!” Her father urged.

“It only allowed one,” she said, and she wasn’t going to take the risk of the clan picking someone else, not after waiting for this her entire life.

“Bukat–”

She cut off communications and accelerated the drifter’s descent, afraid his wisdom might damper the madness urging her to see what awaited.

Turn back, her heart raced, filling her arms with hormones that made them quake. If she let the thought rule, she would lose the strength to ever land and see for herself what made the capital silent. She pushed the drifter to the limit, fighting the persistent thought until the ancestral settlement came into view, empty of life.

The drifter levelled out as a rising sea of emotion threatened to swallow her whole.

#6

Barren clay shimmered deep velvet where her ancestral clan settlement should have been. A thick slab on the settlement’s burial hill was all the ceremony left to indicate anyone ever cultivated the dry lands. To the uneducated, it would be ridiculous to imagine massive shipyards once built her family’s drifter here ten millennia ago.

Oddly, the vast purple earth surrounding the modest grave made for a hauntingly beautiful sight. Her body quivered as the drifter approached, knowing someone would have to pick her up once she landed.

Suddenly, genetic instinct snapped her hands back, and the drifter rose as a thousand lithe thorny plants resembling a wave of crimson glass shot up all at once. The ship’s A.I. froze, overwhelmed by the plant’s sudden explosive germination, its calculations already skewered.

Bukata barrel rolled the drifter, slipping under the impaling wave rising at an acute angle to the left. She then accelerated out of the strange field, slowly gaining altitude, and escaped.

The A.I. rebooted, generating a song of praise using the ship’s alarms. The praise did little to ease her adrenaline-fuelled rage, and she made it known to the planet.

The red bead vibrated in what she translated as a shrug. It wasn’t Chiti-Chiyeye’s job to make peace between the millions of species living on it. As far as it was concerned, they were all freeloaders.

“Clan leader,” Bukata reconnected the comms. “This’s Nganga-seeker Bukata.” There was silence, but she knew her father was listening. “The settlement…” her voice became a rising cry. She closed her mouth, endured its peak, and swallowed it at its trough. “The settlement…is gone.” 

No response came; the pain wasn’t hers alone. She thought the silence would drone on into the coming twilight, but another call connected. 

“Nganga-seeker Bukata. Cibinda waba namutakenya Bulayi, here,” the firm voice took Bukata back to her initiation jump into the plane. Her shoulders and back straightened instinctively; she knew the all-female council was listening in. “We have our male icisungu counterparts here with us.” 

That meant they needed her to feign professionalism befitting her title.

“Understood.”

“A quick survey of the debris field has picked up shipwrecks bearing old designs from clans: bena mbwa, bena fulwe, and bene koswe,” her uncle’s husband, Katongo, stated. “The degree of damage appears minimal. If any survived, their escape pods would have launched them to their homelands.”

“What survival chances are we working with here?”

“Quite high,” Cibinda Bulayi’s words surprised her, filling Bukata with hope she instantly dreaded. “We’ll send you the last known coordinates from the archives.”

She didn’t need them to direct the drifter’s flight. After learning about the clan’s first ancestors, she had voraciously scoured the archives, looking for any stories about this great civilisation from which the wandering fleet originated. Just a glimpse to quell the many questions that kept her awake: 

How did these distant siblings live? What did they wear? How did they play? Did fighting siblings resolve their petty arguments with backhanded compliments like her and Munthali, or did they die with bitter grudges, vowing never to speak, like her mother and uncle?

The archives had no answers, only hard details and skills training courses passed down for generations: how to tie your soul to a planet in exchange for mutual control – nothing about the people themselves, but details on settlement representatives, their names, what the settlement achieved, starting from this season to that election, and who replaced them. Things she couldn’t tie herself to and make her feel she belonged. 

For a tribe obsessed with the precise feel of every place in the universe, her people sure kept their own home a blurry echo.

The only exceptions were the clan settlement coordinates. Each came baked with brutal insults their clan, bena nsofwa, had invented for their numerous clan cousins. The insults came with unique stories – usually embellished – about each insult’s birth, its proper use for maximum lethality, and the history referenced.

These tiny, complex footnotes were her only window into life back home. Now…

Uncle Katongo was speaking again. “…the planet has allowed us to set up a satellite – we’ll have an image of the capital in three hours. We suggest you avoid going there until we have real-time data to advise your approach.” 

She sensed something amiss. “Cibinda. Don’t steal my sight here.”

Cibinda Bulayi cleared her throat, and Bukata braced. “It’s the Mwinsa. Their ships are among the grave.”

The drifter’s A.I. recalculated its limit at the mention of the name and gave Bukata the option to go all out.

She didn’t exercise it, already knowing what she would find.

#7

It took her four days to visit all the clan cousin’s settlements. The only difference between them was the number of burial hills left intact. Her father called and gave her the option to join the clan in orbit and mourn together.

She thought about it when she returned to her drifter and opened the archives.

1. Mwinsa – foreigner: usually uttered with xenophobic vitriol.

2. Mwinsa – A planet-invading empire that kills any terrestrial life capable of significantly manipulating a planet’s biosphere.

3. Mwinsa – The homeworld’s unified capital.

Bukata followed the archive’s hyperlinks to the explanation for the multiple conflicting definitions. The long story entry involved a diverse multi-planetary conglomerate, the Twalipena, whose first contact with the multi-galactic wandering clans made them so bitter they transposed the homeworld capital’s name to mean any inter-galactic visitors that they didn’t like – which was all of them. One of those succeeding contacts happened to be with a belligerent multi-species genocidal collective and mysterious arch-enemy of the clans. By the time clan ships returned to the Twalipena solar system, only a fast-fading city remained of the once sprawling species. What followed next was one of the oldest recorded planetary evacuations in collective tribe history. After relocation to the closest, less xenophobic federation, the survivors spread their tale. Both their killers and helpers carried the same name, Mwinsa. That conflicting dichotomy raged on to this day.

She closed the archive screen and slumped against the white walls of the drifter’s decontamination chamber, staring at her tattered exploration suit on the wet floor.

Once back in the pilot’s seat, she mulled over her father’s offer, sighed, and set course for the unified capital tower.

#8

The satellite had detected nothing near the abandoned capital, not even her tribe’s killers. She was alone on the hill meant to house millions.

“Sisteerr…” Munthali’s voice droned, sounding uncharacteristically sombre, as it filled the drifter’s humming halls. “It’s been a day since you reached the capital, and you’ve yet to leave the drifter. The A.I.’s worried about you.”

“What’s the point? Everyone’s gone,” Bukata choked on the words and let the tears fall at last, angry at the first ancestors’ hubris in thinking the homeworld was immortal. “It’s just…burial hills.”

Munthali picked up after a moment, letting her sob. “Look at the bright side; at least there’s no one to see you embarrass your entire lineage wearing that fabulous granny chic.”

“Shut up,” she coughed a laugh through the streaming tears. It’s more like a future ancient reborn.”

She had worked so hard to replicate the light-wear outfit from the images: a gold choker with three amethyst laces, connected to a green-blue top with dangling cotton laces over her bare stomach, finished off with a short skirt decorated with multi-coloured beaded triangles, each bead made of materials from planets the clan had visited since departing the homeworld.

“And you worked so hard,” he comforted. 

“And made us late,” she chuckled dryly as the tears ceased. “All for nothing.”

“That’s only true if you keep sulking in that bay. Go out and explore our mother home,” he pushed. “With Chiti-Chiyeye still refusing our requests to land, you’ll probably be the only one to experience it. Come on. Go grab a final feel for the rest of us.”

That popped her self-pitying bubble and put her back into reluctant work mode. She wouldn’t make the same mistake her first clan ancestors did. Even ruins were a treasure for a seeking descendent.

“Munthali. Thanks.”

“Just don’t tell ba tata about it; he might start hoping again.”

Two suits with exoskeleton support hung by the doors. The heavy option – for those evacuations when one had to plough through an army, and her favourite, the light armour, built for exploration – the clan’s true essence.

The suit synchronised to her body, simulating a new skin layer. Once complete, she put on her helmet and opened the drifter’s doors.

Chiti-Chyeye’s evening sun kissed her simulated skin effervescently, radiating gentle warmth that mimicked the welcoming embrace for a child loved. This was still home to a piece within her. Nothing would ever change that.

“Hey,” Munthali’s voice returned once the drifter’s doors closed. “Remember those drug clouds I gave you? Yeah, they contained persevered nano-organisms from Chiti-Chiyeye that helped you feel it better, but now they are about to mature and will likely liquefy your brain in the next thirty hours.”

“Eh…”

“I would have given you the antidote already if you’d come up to orbit, but don’t worry,” he continued, placating her with false laughter. “You can find the antidote ingredients around the surrounding hills.”

“So that’s why you really needed me to go out?”      

“Eh, two things can be true at once.” She could picture him shrugging his shoulders. “And remember, those who ask never get lost.”

Ask who? The capital was an empty lone ruin, towering empty highlands full of ghost footsteps she sensed through her bead, but whose owners she couldn’t see – likely the poison at work. 

Worst brother ever.

#9

Bukata followed Munthali’s suggested coordinates as the cloud’s poison turned the thick woodland hills alive with afterimages of a dead past. Over a hundred spirits from the original clans leapt through what for them must have been a plain – to her, a hill – finally giving some mad logic to the strange steps that dogged her since leaving the capital. The hallucinations joked with one another as they led her to an area where she found the needed plants and clay for the antidote.

She lingered a while, watching the visions before the suit’s ported A.I. beeped red through her helmet’s view, interrupting a calming sight that had finally silenced the stalking footsteps in the earth.

“I know they’re not real,” she said, wanting to feel these perfect illusions, likely constructed from her limited knowledge of the planet’s past and broken hopes.

The A.I. didn’t care to humour her futile desires and continued its alarm. 

I must be in really bad shape. She pulled herself away with effort and looked back at the capital from a distance. The imagined past took over there, too, morphing the hilly landscape into a plateau. At the tower’s base, the annual gathering ceremony played out her dream return scenario: the single permanent tower structure was shorter and unmarked by invading Mwinsa colours, the trees were aglow, the infectious drums beat loud, and hot meals competed for her nose.

As it should have been. She thought, maybe just a little longer–

A hot plasma spear meant for her heart exploded off her lightly armoured chest, harmlessly skirting away, and startled her awake to the danger around her. She rolled, dodging two more spears aimed for her head, spun around, eyes darting in a wide arc, trying to identify the source. Nothing but silent trees.

She backpedalled, slow at first, confused, then faster when she realised the racing feet swarming around her were not just in her head. Her suit’s protective protocols kicked in and suddenly released a puff of yellow gas around her. Within seconds, a dozen burning screams erupted as the cloud spread and diffused, revealing a myriad of flailing bipedal bodies that had been invisible before then.

Invisibility. She remembered the velvet sand back at the clan’s dead settlement. No, camouflage. It seemed everything on the planet had gone that way…

That meant the clan satellite report couldn’t be trusted, and the ghost’s footsteps she’d felt earlier were real. Clarity came too late, as all around her the bushes exploded, pouring out a hundred screaming attackers intent on adding her corpse to her ancestors’ hill. “Mwinsa” was all she understood, and from their furious expressions, she knew which connotation they meant.

She tapped the red bead, but Chiti-Chiyeye refused her full request, according her only surface control of its body. It would have to do. She called to the earth beneath her feet and asked it for help, and it rose in a circular pillar around her.

The attackers, undaunted, threw homing spears. She twisted the rising earth pillar into a winding path and directed it towards the capital tower, sending insults at her angry pursuers from above as she fled. 

Fools. Didn’t they know what happened when her kind got angry? Planets died, solar systems went dark; she had the dead waist beads as a cautionary tale.

She restrained such thoughts, mind focused on stemming the poison’s growing illusions.

The army followed.

#10

 Bukata called the drifter’s central A.I. upon reaching the rising steps to the capital tower’s base. Munthali answered instead.

“What’s going on down there? The A.I. is screaming at ghost armies we can’t pick up.”

“It seems everything went the way of the coward.” She stared up the steps, exhausted at the prospect of conquering the climb. “They have some sort of camouflage that evades most detection. It’s likely powered by pulling on Chiti-Chiyeye’s life energy.” No wonder its responses felt so low.

“That’s it, I’m coming down. Screw this planet’s autonomy.”

“Don’t,” she breathed heavily. “You’ll get expelled from the clan.”

“Damn exile,” His breath sounded more frantic than her own. “I never liked you people anyway.”

“Ba kalamba!” she pleaded using his honorific, doubting Chiti-Chiyeye could handle one more like her. Munthali’s breath slowed at that. “Trust me. I can handle this…”

“Fine,” he relented. “But I’m telling the A.I. to send you the heavy suit.”

His trust spurred her on through the illusions that invited her to take a break, drink, and eat—she would fit right in. 

No! She trudged on. The ancient past wasn’t her place; she knew that now. Below, her attackers raced to aid the drug cloud’s madness, but for once, the ascending steps worked in her favour, proving an equal torment to her pursuers as well.

They looked so angry, one would think she had killed their grandmother and stolen their harvest. As if her people didn’t belong here either. 

Xenophobes. 

She was almost at the top now.

#11

The drifter was gone. More precisely, she couldn’t see it through the façade of the gathering ceremony in full swing. The excited sounds overwhelmed, and the vibrant sights blurred everything into a colourful festive mirage that mocked her current situation.

She stumbled towards the tower, the only constant through all the madness. Strangely, even after all this upheaval—invasion, neglect, quakes, and her foolishness—Mwinsa was a consistent beacon unlike its meaning, just as the ancestors intended.

The earth shook with the sound of approaching mechanical footsteps, alerting her to the heavy suit’s nearness. The rumbling earth tethered her back to reality, and the illusions faded a little, just in time for her to see another armed force rushing at her from the opposite side of the tower. They wore loose, plain chitenge, akin to the clan’s modern style, except they wore the invaders’ colours.

She fell to a halt, glaring at the new approaching force, her temples boiling, calling for revenge.

You stole it all from me. The heavy suit arrived and swallowed her into its deadly metal frame, giving her the opportunity.

She aimed its massive guns. 

The encroaching force stopped, and the frontrunners fell over, pushed by those following behind. The group was just as diverse as the first army in terms of structure and biology, but here, with her safety reassured, odd similarities to her own people made her trigger finger tremble.

“Back off!” She denied the possibility.

They screamed, weapons raised in perplexed surrender. She couldn’t interpret most of their words but understood one too well.

“Ancestor,” they called to her. 

She shook her head. “No!”

Her first pursuers scaled the steps behind her en masse, stopped, shocked at the sight of the new force, recovered with swallowed grit and then attacked. She saw herself in them too.

“No…” weaker.

 The second group surrounding her screamed a war cry in reply to the first and charged. The confusion horrified her still as she braced for the impending clattering clash. She understood violence, but her clan’s essence as wanderers and scavengers only permitted her to see this as pointless loss.

Abruptly, the earth pulsed bright, birthing a large wall between the two rushing forces. The two groups stopped before the wall, roiling harmlessly as they hurled insults from the archives at one another. The most stubborn ones threatened to scale the wall but quickly fell silent when the earth shook again and sent everyone on their asses like clumsy children.

On top of the wall, five new faces of varying ages suddenly emerged from the earth, their clothes’ designs matching Bukata’s ancient replica. The oldest woman among them stared at Bukata and smiled. “Not the return ceremony you envisioned?”

Bukata shook her head in vehement denial, turned, and dashed into the tower, praying that once she had the antidote, this would all be a bad high.

#12

The antidote flowed cool in Bukata’s veins, eliciting a sobering clarity she needed to accept the uneasy facts below. From the observation platform on the tower’s twenty-fifth floor, it seemed the two groups were one. A casual observer would be forgiven the error of that one-dimensional view, but she couldn’t accept such simplicity as Nganga-seeker.

Up in the sky, the clan ships descended, Chiti-Chiyeye finally giving permission, reassured they wouldn’t add to the grief their brothers and sisters below had given it.

The old woman opened the door behind her and approached after Bukata’s dejected nod.

“What?” The old woman groaned as she sat. “Did you expect home to remain the same?” She said. “Are we not allowed to change, to be complicated?”

“Not into that! That tribe tried to kill me on sight.”

“Five tribes, actually.” The old woman chortled. “They hate each other, but your ship reminded them of their common oppressors that fled to the stars.”

“I look exactly like some of their kin.”

“A fact that makes the memories more painful.” The old woman’s words stung her silent, strumming dangerous mental strings. “Do you want to hear the story?”

She suspected she knew how the tale ended, looking at the other group in Mwinsa colours that had proclaimed her its ancestor. Her chest ached. “We are the invading Mwinsa too, aren’t we?”

“No, mwana,” said the old woman bluntly. “Sharing an origin point doesn’t make you the same. Have you ever invaded a planet? Killed its children and left it bare? You’re you, Bukata, a Nganga-seeker of bene nsofwa.”

Bukata nodded, avoiding asking how the woman knew her name, afraid of smashing too many anthills at once. The old woman’s skin radiated the ancestral plane’s calm as if containing it whole underneath. 

“They’re still our kin, though.” Bukata fixated.

“True, but estranged siblings are allowed to be complicated too.”

Along the steps below, more groups ascended to the tower courtyard, filling Bukata with curious dread as to what complication they brought to the already messy sight. Either way, she would face it straight. No illusions.

Bukata breathed out, “So what you’re saying is no tribal reunion meal anytime soon.” 

The old woman scoffed, “I’m sure we can wrangle those fools down there into some order. I’ve overseen worse return ceremonies.”

The End