Chapter One
✭
The acrid stench of smoke filled the air.
Blinding, choking, smothering.
The smell of burning. The smell of death.
Broken glass littered the ground. Cars without their windows. Bodies lying on the street. Distant sounds, fading in and out. Wind. Running footsteps. Sirens. Screaming.
Louder and louder and louder.
Amidst the rubble, a body stirs. Slow, delirious. Dust falling from heavy shoulders, an ashen ghost rising from a swell of carnage. Coughing, wincing. What parts that haven't been washed out by ash were darkened black by blood. Cuts and scrapes all over. Some superficial, some not.
But they didn't hurt.
Not as much as the sight around him.
He stumbled forward, chest aching from impact with the ground. The street around him was a haze of still-falling dust and debris. Shadows rushed too and fro, ghosts. Crying out words he couldn't make out past the ringing in his ears. Red and blue lights pierced through the gray mire.
And then he saw.
A body, lying motionless across the ground. Once, a proud king. Taken away, his crown, his throne, his grace, like a big cat lounging in a tree.
The ghosts, rushing around him.
His father.
No, no. Not his father.
"Baba!"
The prince rushed forward, but his knee was bad, and more ghosts appeared, their warm bloody hands grabbing him, pushing him, pulling away. No, no, don't they see. His father, his father needed him. He couldn't be dead. The prince won't allow it.
He wasn't ready. He wasn't ready to be alone.
There was still so much he had to learn.
A child should never have to watch their father die.
At last, the Prince somehow managed to break through, the hands falling away. He gasped and stumbled, falling to his knees at his father's side. He hoped to hear breathing, just the faintest wheeze of his lungs.
But there was nothing. Nothing except the blood leaking from the king's nose. His eyes shut.
"Wake up," he didn't recognize his own voice, a hoarse whisper. Hands going to his father's, those old rough paws that were so gentle. Now cold. Cold and unmoving.
"I'm sorry," a ghost says by his ear. "Help is coming. But there's nothing else we can do."
The prince tried to push them away, lies, lies. It couldn't happen this way. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. His father was supposed to die peacefully, of old age, in his sleep, surrounded by his wife and daughter and son. All the people who loved him. Not in some damnable foreign country on a false hope of peace.
There was nothing he could do.
The prince choked down a sob. Baba, no.
His chest ached with a pain he's never known before.
This pain, he knew. The pain would last generations.
Whoever did this. They would pay.
T'Challa would make sure of it.