PRL Serials

“Here we go,” Nyame said. “I have never seen Jo fight before.”

“I am sure that their battle has been raging since Jo sensed the Wizard being attacked,” Gleti said. 

“I can see that,” Nyame said with annoyance, “but don’t you see that they are both ready to bring this out of their mental construction and into the physical? They are too evenly matched this way.”

“Jo is tentative,” Obatala said. 

“In what way?” I asked, staring at the Vodun, Jo, and the enemy, Unea, floating in the aether outside of Aido Hwedo. They faced one another and neither of them had moved for a considerable amount of time.

“Are you not watching their battle?” Nyame asked and I felt stupid that I didn’t understand what she was talking about.

“Their spirit forms are inside of their bodies,” I said, grasping for something so that I could save face. 

“He doesn’t know the mental realm,” Gleti said, “Sakpata wouldn’t have taught him because he hardly ever uses it himself. The mental realm is a place where manipulators of the pattern who have a strong physic ability can exist without their physical bodies. It is a shared mental space and for those who can attain it, it is possible to do anything they can imagine. Battles fought there are intense and often last for much longer than is perceived in our physical realm.”

I had heard of something just like that before in my own reality. Maria, Wazad the Wonderful of our home universe, and Wazad the Transverse of the Multiversal Structure, had told me about a mental realm that the ancient Wazad used to tame the first Lightning God, but like Sakpata, apparently, I didn’t use it enough for it to be top of mind, and I didn’t realize that the battle in front of me had been waging for what I would consider to be weeks on the mental plane. I only caught the tail end of it, when Jo, as two large, white stars that pulsed with energy, smashed into what seemed to be a large serpent made of Unea’s tendrils. The serpent was dwarfed by the size of the stars that clapped together with the tendril serpent at the center and there was a bright explosion that rippled the fabric of the mental realm and pushed us all back into our bodies where we were spectating the Vodun and Unea at a distance, only now, it seemed that they were actually squaring off against one another and on the verge of attack.

“I told you,” Nyame said with enthusiasm that is rare for her.

“Jo could have easily bested her there,” Obatala said. “She was just being overly cautious in the event Unea was holding back, but I’m sure that Unea was exhausting herself mentally and Jo could have delayed that last attack.”

“Why tire herself when she can get a full assessment of her opponent?” Gleti asked. “Jo has her just where she wants her.”

“She should be ending her quickly if she can,” Obatala said. “The enemy’s black wall of death approaches.”

Obatala was right. I had been distracted since Unea broke the spacetime loop spell, but her enforcements were close to entering the aether around the Fonlands and they would appear as the same black wall of death that had moved across the Talj Junction. The Fonlands would be completely sealed away behind the orbit of planets and stars from the Disc of Jo, the thick layer of ocean underneath the orbiting stars that was the Vodun Agbe and others from her Disc, and the even thicker layer of iron under the ocean that was made by beings of the Disc of Gu and manned by armies that were in large formations all across the surface. Despite all that, I was worried about the black wall entering the aether around the Fonlands. We had all watched the destruction that it wrought on the Talj Junction universe that Pultine and Alia had freed from Une’s taint, but the damage had been so severe that the existence didn’t survive the eradication of the wall. It was possible that the same could happen to the Fonlands, that the mere presence of the black wall in the same physical space would harm the Discs of the Fonlands and Aido Hwedo himself, but we would only know for sure when it arrived and we were prepared to face it and eradicate it if it did cause damage. 

“Leave that to me and the Orbitals,” Gleti said with a smile and her body began to glow like a full moon as she flew away from the line of spectators and toward the aether where the enemy’s reinforcements would arrive. 

“I should go and help her face what is coming,” I said but Obatala put a hand on my shoulder. 

“We are backing the Vodun,” he said as the serpent form of Damballa laughed.  

“She is summoning the Orbitals, Wizard, that is all the help she needs.”

I missed the start of the battle between the Vodun and Unea because I had to find out what the Orbitals were. Gleti is a Luminary of the Disc of Jo, a moon goddess in the religion of the Fon people of the history of my home universe, and that meant that she was a being of immense power. The Luminiaries of Jo’s Disc are among the greatest powers of the Fonlands, but I had never seen any of them in action, and I was curious how Gleti’s powers would manifest.

As she moved away, the space around Gleti was distorted, pulsing like a standing wave, and I watched as this effect seemed to replicate, like there were many standing waves around Gleti creating a bubble of distortion that began to expand out into a wall. The wave wall pulsed with glowing white light and soon, it towered before Gleti. 

“That is beautiful,” I said with wonder, looking along the massive size of it as it continued to form in either direction, setting the aether aglow. 

“And very deadly to anything that passsesss through it,” Damballa said. He seemed captivated like I was, though he had seen Gleti’s Orbitals many times before. “The light waves are hard light moving at devastating speeds, Orbitals that can tear anything apart. Gleti is a wonder,” Damballa said and I could hear his admiration for her in the way he spoke. 

I stared for a long time, but I had to turn when I heard a voice cry out in anguish. I had never heard anything like it, and it was likely that none of us actually heard it but felt it as an expression of deep, mental anguish. When I turned, I gasped to see the physical forms of Jo and Unea were much larger and Jo gripped what turned out to be Unea’s severed arm in a fist. It hung limply in Jo’s hand and Unea looked more shocked than in pain. 

“You should leave this place now!” Jo screamed in her way that could be heard by anyone paying attention with a mental link. 

“I will not leave until your Mother-Father is dead and Pultine sees this bright, vibrant reality succumb to my influence.”

“You are doing this to humble a mmoatia?” Jo asked with derision and she laughed at Unea. 

“The existence that bore her must pay for her insolence, and then she will serve me for an eternity.” Unea seemed to be breathing heavily and she had her hand on her shoulder where the arm had been ripped off. She seemed to be in pain, but she mustered vitriol for Jo. 

“You cannot take a Vodun?” Jo asked. “You settle for second tier when you could puppet Vodun and Gods.” 

“Those like you think too much of yourselves,” Unea sneered. “It is better to erase you from existence completely.” As she said this, tendril shot out from the space where her arm had been and Jo used the arm as a weapon to deflect them. Unea was delighted at this, as Jo failed to notice the tendrils creeping out of the severed arm and soon Jo was wrapped up enough that Damballa, the Luminaries, the glowing planet Mosu and I worried that Jo might need help. 

“You are a coward!” Jo yelled, letting the tendrils wrap her tightly. “And I don’t believe you are capable of destroying a Vodun.”

As she said this, Jo’s body began to glow inside out and as the glow intensified, the tendril began to smoke and burn. As she swelled into her star form, which I wasn’t aware Jo had, the tendril split and flailed away. Unea was visibly frightened. 

“I would tell you to leave,” the giant white star form of Jo that pulsed with green, yellow, and violet magic, said in its way, “but we mean to burn you completely out of existence. You will threaten life in no other realm.”

Beams of fantastic starlight that followed the invisible lines of the Pattern in the direction of Unea shot out from the incredible body of the star and these beams impacted, then encapsulated the form of Unea, trapping her in a prison of hard light that made it appear as though she was trapped in glass.

“Very well executed,” Obatala said. 

“Maybe this form was unnecessary,” Damballa said.

“There’s no way it’s that easy,” Nyame said and she flew toward the Vodun who was returning to a smaller size. “Is that really all she had?” she asked Jo when she floated the space beside her and they stared at Unea in glass. 

“Not by a long way,” Jo said, sounding more disheartened than I imagined she would after such a successful maneuver. “I worry that all we can do is trap her. I wanted to obliterate her, but something about her nature makes me apprehensive to do that. When the Wizard had her in the loop, she only used that time to get stronger, and when she figured a way out, she was stronger than the Wizard. The Wizard is not a light weight, he was our vanguard for a reason, I never worried that Une or Unea, or even the black wall if it had arrived first, would be too much for him and she wasn’t until she was. When we battled, I calibrated my powers in the mental realm and I could see that her nature is to learn and adapt. Fighting her is like teaching her and she is an extremely fast learner. I haven’t brought all that I can bring to bear against her because if I face her again, it won’t work a second time.”

“Then we burn her to ashes,” Nyame said and extended a hand in front of her that was inundated with a bright white light, “and then the ashes to dust, the dust to nothing. We are quite literally made for this.”

“I don’t think that it will matter. Kill this Unea, the energy she harnesses returns to Une along with all of her knowledge, and Une can make another Unea. She can send anything at us, she can make powerful copies of us. We have to figure out a way to eliminate Unea so that it is severed from Une, at least then, we will actually be chipping away at Une’s lifeforce. Unea is powerful and she will be more powerful when she manages to shatter the glass. How do we take her power?”

“We need a black magic user with the will to deny Une,” Nyame said. She still aimed her light at Unea, hoping for a reason to blast her. “They are the only ones who can change the nature of the power that Une wields into something that will hurt her or reject her.”

“What about your son?” Jo asked. “Anansi is strong in Sublime and Transmogrification, and he is wise.”

Nyame looked to Jo. 

“I will find Anansi,” Obatala said and disappeared from my side. 

“Do you think Anansi can do what Nyame described?” I asked Damballa.

“I guess anything is possible,” he said. 

I had never met Anansi and was eager to see what he could do against the enemy. I thought about Jo’s logic and how difficult it was to face an enemy like Une who could make very powerful and expendable proxies to fight on her behalf and exhaust her enemy. That skill made her more powerful than the Vodun, because even though it would take an amazing expenditure of arcana facing them, a Vodun could become exhausted. And Unea had only gotten more powerful, who knows if there was a limit to how powerful she could become. 

Jo’s victory, and the beauty of Gleti’s wall of Orbitals, shrunk in my mind as I eyed Unea in the glass from a distance.