Chapter 30: The Lion

T'Challa paced the length of his office, his soft sandals making light tapping sounds against the polished marble floor. He ran his hand through his beard as he lost himself in his thoughts.

"It is too convenient a ploy," Okoye said, interrupting his thoughts. He turned towards the General to where she stood as straight as a palace pillar and gazed through his thoughts instead of at him. "The zimwi states that their queen desires to remove our protectors and then the zimwi suggests a plot that would do just that."

"Ni kweli, but that very slip of hers only makes me think she may be genuine. Our zimwi said he could not taste a lie in her thoughts."

Okoye clicked her tongue. "When did we decide to trust the mind reader? He could also gain from removing Bella from Wakanda."

T'Challa chuckled darkly. "You are wise to trust none, General. Your respect is a hard-won prize."

"My King, my heart lacks peace. I beg you not to send Lieutenant Barnes to Volterra. The strength of reasons to keep her close outweigh the reasons to send her to Volterra."

T'Challa nodded in assent.

"My King, why did you return the head of the Volturi ruler? Shouldn't our goal be to destroy the mazimwi?"

"Destroy them? All of them? Why?"

"They kill people."

"So do lions, but I do not seek to destroy all of them. They are as beautiful as they are dangerous. No, if I find a lion in my boma stalking my cattle, then I am within my right to end his life. If a lion seeks to harm my child or my brother, his life is forfeit. But if he has harmed neither me nor what is mine-I will leave him be. Should I kill him simply because he exists and has the capacity to kill? No.

"If Aro or his coven touch a hair on the head of any of my citizens in the future, I will not hesitate to attack, but as long as they keep their peace and leave us be, I will not bring harm on the shepherds of the mazimwi."

Okoye's dark eyes silently watched her tired king. His shoulders carried the weight of too many struggles and his eyes glazed with long, sleepless nights. She sighed.

"Enda kulala, mfalme wangu," Okoye said. "You need to rest."

T'Challa ceased his pacing and gave a short nod. The General gave him a salute and returned to her home to chase her own dreams.

T'Challa's dreams proved hard to find. His mind swirled with the influx of new information, as unsettled as mud when a well is being cleaned. He could not seem to let it all settle and so the water of his thoughts could not clear.

His mind walked halfway between the land of dreams and the land of waking when he startled awake to the vibration of his kimoyo beads on his wrist. He rubbed his eyes and sighed.

A touch of a button transmitted a projection of the person he most desired and most feared to speak with.

Ooooooooooo

Nakia sat in the quiet of her rented room. For two weeks, she found herself waking in screams and tears. It was the same dream. Always the same dream.

Fire and ice. Water and stone. They engulfed Wakanda tighter and tighter in an unbroken circle around the center of the land she loved. They swallowed up trees and villages, animals and people and crept ever closer to the heart of their Kingdom.

Her dreams told her not to return. It was not time, but how she longed to!

Her excuses for not returning had already worn as thin as the denim on the knees of her trousers. She knew T'Challa knew it was not her passion for her work that kept her away. Her heart grew heavy with her grief as she split in half between places and caused pain to the one she loved.

But it was not time. It was too important for her to remain hidden.

She would have to do it again-reach out to her tired King and watch as his eyes glistened in hope and then faded again in disappointment poorly masked with impassivity. Yet he remained her King as well as her beloved and it was the King she now must serve.

"Nakia, habari yako?" he said, his voice gruff and unrested. His face looked even more drawn than she saw him last.

"Mzuri sana, bwana. Unalala?"

"Siwezi kulala. It has been long since I was able to sleep in peace."

"Pole."

"Uko wapi? Where are you?"

"Safe and well," she said, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. She would not need to say it. He understood what she did not say.

I am not coming home yet. We cannot be reunited yet. I will not tell you where I am.

She watched his grief spark momentarily across his face until he forced it clear. He could not see her hands as they wrung more tightly in her lap. She fought just as hard to maintain her mask. She hoped hers proved more believable than his.

"My King, I had a dream."

"Sema."

"You must find the rings."

"In Volterra?"

"Yes. Send our mazimwi. It can be done."

"Will Wakanda be safe in their absence?"

"No. Wakanda is in danger whether they go or stay. But without the rings, there will be no Wakanda."

"Aya. Asante sana."

"And T'Challa, usiwe wasi wasi. It will be ok…not for a time, but in the end, it will be ok. There are forces for good that are working that are far stronger than those for evil."

"What will you do?" he asked, his heart again in his eyes.

"I will pray, each day and night, until all is well again. When the ice has thawed and the trees have been firmly planted, I will come home."

He wanted to hope, but he was too tired to. She could see it in the slump of his shoulders, the dull flash of his eyes, the tightening of his mouth.

She would hope enough for both of them.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

What is this noise?" Okoye asked, gripping her spear and ducking her head into the hut. Her proud shoulders stood to their full height again and she turned the full force of her death stare onto Edward. He couldn't help but shudder. He couldn't help but wonder how powerful the General would become if she were to become a vampire. He was convinced her stare alone could take out an army.

"You mean my music?" Edward responded.

"Si muziki. Ni sauti….this isn't music, this is noise," she said.

"This is Linkin Park, one of the greatest rock bands of all time," he responded.

"Your taste is music is worse than that one," she said, nodding her head in the direction of Bucky, who had followed Okoye and Shuri into his hut. "He sits around listening to classical music all day."

"Glen Miller and the Andrews Sisters are hardly classical music," Bucky interjected, laughing. "I'll have you know they were the bee's knees in my day…and scandalous enough to make my nanna flush."

"How old are you?" Edward said.

"I was born in 1917," he said.

"That is why he is too too stubborn," Shuri interjected, sticking out her tongue at him. "And is too rigid in his taste in music."

"I was born in 1901," Edward said quietly.

"So you remember the days when music was actually good," Bucky said with a grin. "And don't get me started on the movies…it took me a week to convince Shuri that there was an era when wazungu could dance."

"I'm still not convinced," Shuri chimed in. "The wazungu today have lost the art. I've watched enough MTV to know. Those old, dead movie stars you showed me could dance. Now, Bucky, you are further proof. I've seen you dance and if you were not already taken, I'd marry you simply for your graceful feet. I am not so convinced that you shared your skills with my future husband. How did you miss taking him dancing with you?"

"You can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink," Bucky said. "He's too shy for that. Getting Steve into a dance hall could not make him brave enough to ask a dame to dance."

"Future husband?" Edward asked.

"Shuri's had a crush on my childhood best friend since the day she met him. She's trying to convince him to marry her and it hasn't worked yet," Bucky said.

"But you should see him blush when I try! He turns as red as a tomato and that alone is enough to steal my heart. Someday, maybe I will succeed in getting more than two words out of him," Shuri said. "Until then, I will content myself in sending him love notes and watching him feel embarrassed."

Edward pictured an old man with white hair and he gawked slightly. Shuri caught his look and laughed.

"Captain Steven Rogers is like Bucky. They were both genetic experiments during the war years and they are both, what word can I use? Well-preserved for wazee. I hear that we gain wisdom with age…which is why I have my heart set on an older man, but I would rather have the best of all worlds. So I will choose a man who is old at heart but not in body," she said with a wink.

Okoye rolled her eyes and mumbled something under her breath.

"What was that?" Bucky smirked. "I can't quite hear you, General."

"It sounded like she said some do not gain wisdom with age," Shuri said with a laugh. "I believe she is directing that at me. However, I will argue I have gained wisdom with my age. You see, I have not argued about what is 'real music' and what is not. I know when I should wage war, General, and I am wise enough to know a battle I will not win in the present company."

The General rolled her eyes. "If it has no rhythm, no soul, then it is not music. This-what is this?" she said, motioning to the music playing. "They are whining and yelling and for what? 'Oh poor me and my First World problems?' Ugh!"

"Speaking of First World problems," Shuri said. "I believe we are here to discuss our problems with the First World and an actual looming battle instead of our definitions of music."

"Indeed. Turn off that noise and let us proceed," the General said. "The King has requested we bring our minds together and consider different avenues of invading Volterra and the probability of success of each. Let us begin."

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

It wasn't until the afternoon that the sun finally chased away the grey rain clouds and broke the sky into a white and gold and blue mosaic. The humidity weighed almost oppressively on puddled lands and deep mud, drinking the moisture back into the sky and ensuring the return of another fierce storm that night. The perfume of wet earth and freshly showered trees clung to the small compound by the sparkling green lake.

Edward sat in the sun, reveling in the warmth and his newfound freedom to bask as a creature of the daylight. Earth still clung to his fingers, leftover from his morning chores with the soldier.

He stretched his long legs out from where he sat on the three legged stool and lazily drew patterns with a stick in the dirt by his toes.

The soldier sat in front of a fire where his hands sliced vegetables at a quicker than human speed. The silver saucepan of crackling oil soon sizzled with browning onions, garlic, and ginger.

By the side of the lake, Bella bent over a basin of soapy water and clothes. Her hands brushed back and forth at a human speed. She hummed contentedly to herself. Already, two lines of clothes swung in the golden light, anxiously soaking up the precious waning rays of the sun.

As she bent, her white tank top pulled down and exposed the beginnings of a striped scar on her shoulder. It stretched from her left shoulder blade and her tank top hid its ending from sight.

"Bella, what happened to your back?" Edward asked, walking closer to where she washed.

She stood and let the foam drip from her hands. She wiped her hands on the colorful cloth wrapped around her waist and blew a strand of brown hair off her forehead.

"I dunno. When I woke up from the change, it was there," she said. Edward stared intently at her and came closer to examine the scar.

"The scars from your human life should all have healed," he said.

"They didn't," she said and showed him the crescent on her wrist. He growled.

"Cursed James….no, the only scars I have ever seen on a vampire are those inflicted by another vampire. This," he said and pointed at her wrist, "is of vampire origin and so it follows that it would be carried over into your next life. But this," he said and pointed to her shoulder, "doesn't make any sense. If it is from your human life, then it should have healed. But this doesn't look like it came from a vampire…it looks almost animal, but I have never seen an animal capable of piercing our skin. And I've seen a lot try."

She shrugged. "It was there when I woke up. The Watu Wa Wanyama said it's the 'mark of the Lion'."

"What does that mean?" he asked.

"Ummm, how do I explain it? Ok, you know how in the military, there are different divisions and different levels of leadership and they have different symbols to show rank on their uniforms?"

"Yes."

"Well, it's the same in the spirit world. There are spirits in charge of particular territories and spirits in charge of different nations. There's a hierarchy, see? Like Wakanda-they are the people of the Panther spirit but the Alur are the people of the Buffalo. The Kingdom of Buganda has an entire pantheon of gods and goddesses who rule over the different spirits. Then, there's the spirits that inhabit certain trees or lakes or rivers or regions.

"Overall these, there is the great Creator God who made all the others and holds them all in place. The Watu Wa Wanyama-or what you would call shapeshifters, consider themselves his children because they are not bound to geography or particular people groups or even to one manifestation of creation. They are people who walk the borderlands between the world of the flesh and the world of the soul, between the world of animals and the world of people.

"To them, this highest of all beings, or whom they call the Ancient One or the Ancestor….to them, he is symbolized by the Lion, who is king of the animals. In the same way, this deity is the king of the spirits. Yet, they say, he is like them because he is not bound to the animal world or the human, to the spirit world or the world of flesh and blood. He can cross back and forth between the worlds, sometimes appearing in the flesh of an animal or a man and other times in the body of a spirit being. He comes to dwell with people when he chooses and returns to the high heavens when he chooses. He is the one who all the others must bow to-even the goddess Bask of the kingdom of Wakanda or the Balubaale of the kingdom of Buganda.

"The Watu Wa Wanyama said that I have been marked by their most sacred deity and so I am their chosen leader. It is why they sought me when they feared being turned to stone."

"That all sounds ridiculous," Edward said with a frustrated huff.

"Which part?"

"All of it. I grew up in a time that believed in science and the power of man and didn't buy into all this what we would have called 'superstition' and 'primitive beliefs' in spirits and powers. But then I woke up as a vampire. Carlisle's era prepared him more for his new life than mine did. Learning my perceived view of the world was all a fabrication kinda left my worldview spinning."

"I can see why," Bella said. "You have to understand that the worldview you grew up with is really an entirely different world than the one you are in now. The spirit world is as much a fact of daily life here as gravity and Newton's laws of physics are facts of daily life in your world. It's a living, breathing part of the fabric of reality and part of what causes and influences the human world here, for good and bad."

"So where does our kind fit?"

"We are categorized as liminal beings along with the Watu Wa Wanyama. We are all seen as belonging to both the human world, since we were once human, and the spirit world, since our souls have essentially transcended our human bodies and been replaced with a supernatural body."

"But our kind don't have souls," Edward said.

"What makes you say that?" she asked.

"We lost our souls when we became this," he said, waving his hand over his granite body. "We lost our opportunity for an afterlife and any idea of divine favor."

Bella laughed. "You wouldn't be here if you didn't have a soul," she said. "You'd be an empty shell. Yeah, your body is different than it was before, but the essence of you, that part of you that was already eternal, is still in there. Its house has just been renovated."

He shook his head. "We lost them in the transformation as the price of immortality."

"You are hardly immortal," she said. "Your life may be longer and harder to taken than it would have been before, but you will die someday."

He shook his head and Bella shrugged. Edward's next thoughts were interrupted by a transmission. Bella projected an image from the beads around her wrist.

"Lieutenant Barnes," the General said. "Your presence is requested immediately. I am afraid our situation has grown immensely more complicated. There has been an attack on the borderlands."

Oooooooo

Translations:

Ni kweli: It's true

Zimwi/mazimwi: vampire(s)

Boma: enclosure where livestock are kept

Enda kulala, mfalme wangu: Go to sleep, my king.

habari yako?: How are you?

Mzuri sana, bwana. Unalala?: Good, sir. Are you sleeping?

Siwezi kulala: I am not able to sleep.

Pole: sorry

Uko wapi?: Where are you?

Asante sana: Thank you very much

usiwe wasi wasi: don't worry

mzee/wazee: elder

mzungu/wazungu (plural): originally meant someone who was lost. Currently means someone of European descent or foreigner.

Balubaale: Guardian spirits of the pantheon of the Kingdom of Buganda in what is now central Uganda. In many traditional African religions, there is a supreme God or Creator in the highest level of power and then secondary (for example, the Balubaale of the Baganda) and tertiary levels of spirits (ghosts, spirits of trees, etc.) that take eager interest in the everyday affairs of humanity.