Page 78 of She Drinks the Light

I hit the ground in a hard roll along the grass and over the protruding rocks, until I came to a stop. As my body began to reshape, returning back to my human form, my friends gathered around me—Sekou, Lyle, and Naira.

“Are you okay?” Naira asked frantically.

I barely got out, “I think so—”

Someone below shouted to look into the sky, and we all did.

Effie was still suspended in the air where I’d left her. She still wore the cuffs and amulet that glowed turquoise blue, but she no longer commanded the storm. The island shuddered itself to a complete stop, like the earthquake that started this whole thing. She remained completely still. She gazed down at her chest and studied the palm-sized hole that I had left in the middle of her chest. The hole I’d made expanded, eating away at her. She looked like the golden edges of a piece of paper as it smoldered with fire, the edges blackening, curling, flaking off, then floating away.

Her mouth opened as if to speak, but no sound came out. She studied the growing hole, now up to the base of her neck and down to her abdomen.

Then she looked at me, the red within her irises changing to gold. She looked relieved. She looked like she didn’t hurt anymore. She’d lost everything. Her daughter. Her granddaughter. All for fleeting rage and a desire for revenge on people and a world that would never truly understand her or her kind. She looked up to the sky, her right arm stretching up to it as the burn crawled up her skin. It was a different kind of hollowing.

Effie reached up toward the sky above her.

“What is she doing?” Naira asked.

“She’s trying to use the keys to open the gate to the Oosoro,” I answered.

I knew it because in taking her heart, I learned what had always been in it. Her father. Going home. That had been the root of everything, as convoluted as it had become for her. She had wanted to be seen by him. She had wanted to go home.

Her body blackened in that final pose, reaching for the sky,looking to her father, who wasn’t there, or maybe he was. Nyame was supposed to be everywhere. Even on this foreign land, though it was beyond his African realm. The father who would not interfere in the ways of the human world nor aid those who did.

The burned-out, charred husk of Effie’s remains floated back down. Slowly, it dropped, settling softly onto the grass, petrified in its ash state in the same position Effie had died. Still reaching up to the sky.

The ground once again began to shake.

“Now what?” Sekou groaned, looking around frantically.

Lyle held out a steadying hand. “Wait.”

Where Effie’s lightning had ripped the tree in two, it had struck where I’d privately buried my grandmother. Beneath the Gathering Tree, at the foot of Nyame’s stool.

The cuffs and the amulet began gleaming on the ground as black ash from Ama’s grave drifted into the air, between where the tree was split, joining the bowing two halves back into one, as it had been. The ashes lifted into the air. Swirling like a tornado. On the other side of us, Effie’s charred remains began to do the same, swirling up from the ground, into the sky. Their two ashes intertwined, revolving upward into a deep funnel that suddenly appeared in the heavy clouds above.

There was something on the other side of those heavy clouds. A looming presence, big and meaningful. Something familiar and yet not, which had never been there before but was now.

The jewelry shone so bright, their light shot skyward, piercing through the black mass of the clouds like a spotlight, as if all the fireflies coalesced together to create a lit guide for the ashes’ pathinto those impenetrable clouds. They went straight up in that funnel, the brilliant light guiding them the entire way to whatever—whomever—waited for them on the other side. It stayed like that until every last piece of them had made its way up.

And then the light followed them, growing shorter and shorter as if it, too, were joining them wherever they had gone. A long, jagged stretch of lightning cut through the sky, and a sonic boom of thunder exploded—the sound was so deafening it forced us all to cover our ears.

Then the billowing clouds began to collapse in on themselves until they dissipated and there was nothing left but a cloudless night and a million stars shining bright and a big-ass moon to accompany them. The cuffs and the amulet lay there in the dirt as if they hadn’t just opened the gates to the Skies and lit the way home for Ama and Effie, returning them to Nyame the Sky God’s imperial kingdom, the beginning of our story.

I picked up the cuffs and clasped them on my wrists. Naira helped drape the gleaming amulet around my neck. I expected them to feel heavy, as weighted as the responsibility of being their keeper, but the jewelry was surprisingly light, like air. I held Nana Ama’s cuffs up, watching the gold catch the moonlight from different angles, their brilliant blue centers radiating like the stars above and the blinking fireflies floating around me.

The cuffs and amulet vibrated, warming against my skin, and I recognized it as power.

But what would I do with all of this power?

First, I had an island full of people to tend to. I was sure the locals were confused and beside themselves. I had to make sureI still had a home and parts of the island hadn’t crumbled into pieces into the Atlantic during all this family drama.

And I’d call Hailey, because after all that’d happened, I thought about her all the time and of how free I felt when I was with her and how chill she could be with me. I thought we could work it out. I thought… together we could do some things, explore the world, and see what other beings were out there, because it couldn’t just be me.

And, one day, I’d go to Africa, visit the lands of the Akans. I’d go to the Kakum Rainforest, in Ghana, from my vision—the one that was the gateway between the Oosoro and this world. I’d check out the ancestral grounds where the twin adze goddesses once roamed free, to see if maybe there were more of my kind.

Maybe Sekou and Naira would go with, or maybe they would go wherever they wanted. Didn’t matter, because in the end, we’d all end up back home where we belonged.

I’d have a word or two with my great-grandfather about some of his choices. I now held the keys into Nyame’s kingdom, the power of my ancestors. One day I’d tell him that he was a day late and a dollar short for a lot of things, the first being his daughters. But that was an entirely different story and could wait until another time.

Wherever my travels took me, I would always return home to the Golden Isle to be with my people.

I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, or what challenges I would face as the Kin’s leader, but I had Sekou and Naira, and most of all, I would always have the Light of my grandmother, Nana Ama, and my ancestors to guide me, because I was Addae Ewiem, the morning sun of the sky.