Chapter 37: The Felani

37

“My name is Monique. Other than that I don't know much else about myself, I guess...” Monique hesitantly begins.

“It's alright,” Jo-Mel says comfortingly. “You and I are meant to hear each others' stories. I'm here to listen. Please, take your time.”

Monique had been through a unique sort of hell. Even for an embattled black woman from the Southside of Chicago. It was an interesting sort of conundrum for her, to live in a city of millions, surrounded by the constant press of humanity, and yet to feel so alone.

Black women in America bore the brunt of an entire nation's shame. They were required to be the indomitable pillars of a shaky family structure and yet still maintain themselves as the epitome of an unreasonably skewed male fantasy.

Monique, well elevated above the simplicity of a hustler's mentality, possessed of the kind of smarts considered worthy enough for Wharton's, had it not been for the zip code, felt this more than most. She was acutely aware that one of the heaviest burdens a woman of color carried in this country was her intellect, her instinct and empathy.

These characteristics, truthfully, were more likely to be exploited rather than appreciated in women of every color.

So it was, with an understanding extending back beyond a hardscrabble childhood growing up in foster care, Monique knew that the story she was to tell was more than simply her's alone. She needed to tell the story of those women who'd borne the pain of their existence in order to form the eternal link that extended through her and beyond.

But Monique's history, as far as she could recall, and much like Jo-Mel's, consisted of two distinct, clearly delineated periods of time. A before and an after.

Before; there was nothing. Nothing for her to recall. No memories to latch onto. No history to anchor her.

For all intentions, her life began when she was fully formed, much like Jo-Mel's, and after she'd already been completely lost to a system that worked hard to de-emphasize the individuality of her humanity.

Swallowed up by the vagaries of an over-stressed, underfunded social safety net, it is easy to lose one's history, one's identity, to the press of paperwork, shuffled files and the antipathy that inevitably sets into the offices of a soulless administrative state.

Monique had spent many hard years since she was a young girl trying to come to grips with the loneliness of abandonment. But the questions had only served to feed the emptiness she'd felt inside, leaving her confused and isolated, all alone, even while surrounded in the overcrowded homes and apartments of sometimes cruel strangers.

This was hard enough. Hard enough to live through. Hard enough to remember.

It was so much easier to just leave the questions where they were less likely to do damage, buried deep in the past. But now, since the demon, Pickle-Me-Jack's meddlings, the past was demanding to be acknowledged. There were questions pressing against the barriers separating what was from what is and they were demanding answers from behind a once firmly locked door in the back of her mind.

As she sat across, listening to Jo-Mel, she realized that she'd have to open it, that it was no longer locked. She realized that she was afraid of what was hidden behind it.

But it was too late to turn away. And, in truth, she really didn't want to. It would be easier to confront her uncertainties now, she thought, after Jo-Mel offered comforting words and encouragement. A steady hand, a strong shoulder upon which to lean.

Taking a moment, Monique looks inside, this time unflinchingly. The demon had revealed to her a space. Not an absence, but an immeasurable and previously unsuspected depth, a sea of interconnected experiences.

Taking a deep breath, Monique dove in. This is what she saw.

She saw the beginning:

Before the time of the Last Reconciliation, the Earth was a wild, dark place. In between the darkness, though, stabbed through in beautiful bursts of color, like vast continent wide fields of flowers, there were the Tribes of Light.

It was here, in these islands of illumination, that civilization bloomed. Here were the Great Philosophers of Men, the God Scientists and Astrological Magicians.

Here lay the roots of the family tree that would soon enough grow and branch into the Felani.

Mamarukan the Wanderer, said to have stepped from the very heart of the sun itself as an old woman with no history, was the first of them. She slew the Great Shitani that feasted on the souls of those who lived along the Border Realms.

She then sat alone, covered in their blood, and wept. The Tribes of Light sent to her emissaries. They sat with her and offered comfort. She told them that she had been born of the endless possibilities provided of the universe and had been sent forth by the One God of Two Skies.

She foretold of a reckoning. A reunion of the two realms that would be marked by massive global upheavals.

She told them of their futures. Explained to them their destinies and set them on their course.

Mamurakan was weary. She sought solace and slept. When she awoke, several eras had passed. She had shed her skin and arose anew, fresh with the heat of her youthful blood.

She sought out the Tribes of Light and found them scattered, further dispelling the darkness. She lived and loved amongst them. She bore her first child, a boy who would grow to be king, and a second, a girl who would disappear, taking up her mother's mantle and wandering off into the unknown places.

Her son was prolific. He took many wives and grew wicked over the lifespans of many generations.

He sought to ensorcel the entirety of the continent upon which he'd built his kingdom, to protect it from that which was to come, but his magics had corrupted his people as well. They sought to subjugate their fellow man.

Many died rising up against his rule until an offspring, one of his distant descendants, a full inheritant of the blood, managed to slay him and cast him out from his fearsome power.

She was Sekunde Paa, the Second Ascendant, arisen in the time of the Reconciliation. She foresaw the Great Breaking of the Earth and led the survivors of the Tribes of Light through the devastation.

Once the Earth and the Incata had settled back into their companion orbits and the lands began to cool into their current forms, Sekunde Paa finally left her people behind in search of the original Felani, their Matriarch.

Mamarukan, who had been lost to legend long ago, had turned away in shame as her son grew to become an expression of the very darkness she had been born to fight.

As the great powers rose up along the bloodlines sired by the Mad Felani King, the Mothers began to harbor their wisdom, to gather their collective knowledge deep within their forms.

It was this ancient well-spring of knowledge that now bubbled free within Monique.

She found herself, within herself, submerged within an Eternal Sea of Life. It was connected to the blood. To her blood, the blood of the Felani.

Monique had spent the entirety of her life trapped ashore a lonely island set adrift amongst this Sea, beholden to the uncertainties of the past. Now, enrapt by the recitative working, the enchantment of the griots' Telling, she swam free.

She swam out to meet the Matriarch.