They called him the Demon of the Plains. A living embodiment of all the evil in Ghana.
The superstitious believed that he was a dark spirit, come to reap the souls of the living in an eternal, bloody harvest. Few who saw the yellowed bone of his spear lived to tell the tale, thus earning him this fearsome nickname. Over the course of ten years, he had blazed a trail of carnage and blood all throughout Africa, and happily so. Some even went so far as to say that he was the third sibling of Mawu-Lisa, cast down from the heavens due to his tyranny, and enacts his revenge by slaughtering any living creature that crossed his path. But any who knew Dubaku personally would know that this was all a lie. He was just as mortal as the next man, woman, or child that he slaughtered and added to his list of test subjects.
He had been born on a Wednesday, and henceforth had been named Kwaku. He had changed it to Dubaku after his exile from the Ewe, a name he felt was much more fitting for himself. He had been a huntsman before he received his true calling as a priest, his speed and agility known throughout the Ewe as legendary. He had never met his father before, and his mother had died when he was only ten years old, killed by some obscure disease that had ravaged his people's village at the time. The emptiness he felt on that day had never left him.
Now, as he sat in the darkness of his hideout, he contemplated. His ceremonial mask, a relic he had taken from a butchered Dogon priest, lay at his side. Dubaku found that the demonic, intimidating visage was more his true face than the expressive mask he wore when it was off. It spoke to him of the darkness within his inner soul, of the torment he had had to endure at the hands of his own people. A darkness that only she could lift. The only woman he had ever loved. The first person he had ever killed.
Her name was Yayra. She was a leopard like him, but melanistic, her fur blacker than the night, her eyes greener than the most verdant of jungles. She and Dubaku had known each other since childhood and were the best of friends. The others of their tribe said that no two souls were more meant for each other. She was the youngest to have become a Vodun high priestess, at sixteen years of age. Yayra had learned the secrets of the religion faster than any who had come before, and when Dubaku had a vision during one hunt, she had been allowed to teach him the ways of the Vodun. Two years under her tutelage was all it took for him to become a priest himself. In that time period, their love for each other grew until they were inseparable.
When Dubaku had sent a pot of palm wine to Yayra's father, a tradition among the Ewe to signify his intention of marrying her, he had readily agreed. His tribe said it was a true blessing for two priests to be married, surely a favourable omen for their future together. They hoped that their union would bring an age of peace and prosperity to their people. It did, for a time. Dubaku could still remember watching the sun rise over the plains with her, the long nights of passion and lust. He would have rather died with her by his side than live an eternity without her.
When her parents had been killed by a group of nomadic assassins, he had been there for her. When he had tracked the killers down, her kiss had given him more strength and courage than the blessings she bestowed upon him. Dubaku, when gazing down the lifeless corpses of the murderers, had a revelation. Life was far too short. You are born, live for a short time, then go to meet your ancestors at the end of your days. What a pointless existence. On that day, he vowed to find the key to immortality so that he and Yayra could truly live without ever having to die.
Thus, Dubaku began his research. He studied the rocks first, always there, eroding and changing, but never dying. He had believed that the secret to living forever lay within the most primordial chaos of nature. What a fool he'd been. Years he'd wasted on this theory, trying to stop his and Yayra's death from ever happening. Immortality lay not within the rocks, the wind, the sky. The only way to prevent death was to know it like it was a part of you.
Then his research took a darker turn.
Dubaku realized that the true key to immortality lay not in nature, but in the dead. At night, when Yayra was sleeping, he would go to the burial ground and exhume corpses, often having sex with the bodies that were in good condition, whether they were male or female. He stored them in his hideout, a cave he had expertly concealed in the desert until he needed them. It was grim work; a very rare occurrence it was that a corpse would last over a week, due to his savage experiments. It was a necessary desecration. Necessary for both him and his wife, and for all of his tribe.
The idea for this part of his research came from a traveller who had once passed through his village on a long journey. He claimed to be from Mount Lalish, one of the Yezidi people. He said that he possessed ancient knowledge of a race that had vanished from this world countless of thousands of years ago. He told Dubaku how to create statues of clay or stone and animate them to be used as servants. The leopard had tried the same thing with corpses. It worked, but they were mindless slaves, an unfitting method to gain immortality for he and Yayra.
Soon, his tribemates began to notice the disturbed graves, and were sickened at such a vile crime. They began to post guards around the burial sites he frequented. This made it quite difficult for him to dig the bodies out of their graves, and he began to have to travel farther away from his home every night to steal corpses from other tribe's burial grounds. Yayra often asked him why he was gone when she woke up, and why he came back after the morning. He had never given a reasonable answer.
Still, to this day, he wished he had. Dubaku, in the shadows of his hideout, raised her skull and stared into the hollow sockets where her eyes had been. In his mind, he could still picture those beautiful green eyes, brimming with love for him, staring into his own. Cradling her skull in his arms, he sang to her a song of loss and regret. Many nights as a child his own mother would sing the same song to him beneath the starry sky.
They had discovered him. Shortly after his tribemates had posted guards around the burial ground, one of them had seen him dragging a corpse back to his hideout. The young huntsman had ran and announced Dubaku's crimes to the rest of the Ewe. They had been horrified, naturally, but none more so than Yayra. She confronted him about his dark research, which he was happy to explain to her. She had been grief-stricken that she had been the reason he had done what he did. She begged him to stop this madness, but he didn't. He couldn't, not when he was so close. So he crucified her.
"Shhhh... Don't worry, I would never hurt you." Dubaku had whispered, gently stroking her cheek with one paw while he hammered the nail with the other.
"You should have listened to me!" He'd said, his voice hoarse with rage and anguish, prowling back and forth in front of her. Even nailed to a cross, bleeding to death, she still pleaded with him to stop. She could never have understood in this life what she meant to him. How could she? The bond they had forged was eternal, and would last even after they had passed into the void. Why didn't she understand? Did her mortal shell seek to torment him for his loyalty, his undying affection? The dead still whispered in his ears, the darkness becoming darker, his insanity growing stronger. He had cut off her head to spare her any more suffering, and then sealed her soul within the skull.
When the Ewe discovered what Dubaku had done to their High Priestess and his own wife, they were outraged. The chief, that damned, bumbling elephant, sent many hunters after him when he fled the village. People he'd once called brother, sister, mother, father. None ever returned. A Vodun fetish was a statue or a mummified body part that was to be used in rituals, and that was how they all ended up. Tools for his rituals. When the attacks didn't stop, he decided that he had reached the point of no return. He returned to the Ewe village and slaughtered everyone he found, and finished with the chief. He ripped out the elephants spine and kept it, a single shoulder blade still attached to the bloody bone.
For a long time after that, Dubaku despaired. He cast his spear into the ocean and cursed the name of Mawu. His own goddess, who he had pledged his undying loyalty to when he became a priest of the Vodun, had betrayed him. She took the only woman he had ever loved away from him, and laughed at his misery, his suffering. He wandered the plains of Africa for years, killing anyone and keeping their bodies for research and reanimation. When he found the Dogon tribe and butchered the priest from whom he had taken the mask he now wore, it all became clear.
He finally understood what Mawu had in store for him.
She hadn't taken Yayra to torment him, but to motivate him. Even the goddess herself supported his goal of gaining immortality. He changed his name to what he is referred to now, and set out on a quest that he still hadn't completed. To find the love of his life a body, identical to her former one, and let her soul take over it so she could live again. He renounced all desire of personal gain, and devoted himself, body and soul, to his new life's task. He crafted a new spear from the spine and shoulder he had taken from his former chieftain, and treated it with a special agent so that it wouldn't be flexible, more like the spear it was meant to be.
And now, his dreams were haunted. They were filled with worms, writhing, hungry worms that whispered in his ear. Even when he was awake, they were always there. They promised him a new body for Yayra, one that would be even more beautiful than her last one, and many other things besides that. Her skull never left his rucksack that he always wore, and he took it out often to speak with her. He didn't know if it was truly her voice he heard, or the voice of his own insanity, but it comforted him to know that she was still there, and still nurtured her love for him.
So Dubaku followed the worm's eldritch call, going on a long journey, not knowing where he was going or what they wanted from him, guided only by the thought of her touch again. The worms knew him intimately; they knew what he felt for her. She was his everything, his life, the purpose for his existence. Even if he had to burn down a thousand villages and kill millions of innocents, he would find a way to bring her back- so that they could truly be together forever.
Dubaku raised the skull to his face and kissed it, dreaming of the lips that were soon to be given flesh again.