The morning after the lightning strike, the sun rose over Umu-Oka with a deceptive, golden warmth. To any stranger passing through, it looked like a peaceful day. But for Adadiogo, the world had been remade in cold, jagged glass.
She woke up feeling a strange, humming vitality in her limbs. The exhaustion of the previous day was gone, replaced by a restless energy that made her fingers itch to touch the earth. She didn't feel like a victim. She felt like she had been sparked into life.
"Mama, can I go out?" Adadiogo asked, her voice small but eager.
Ugomma looked at her daughter from the hearth, her eyes red rimmed from a night spent in prayer. She looked at the singed edges of Adadiogo's wrapper and the way the girl's eyes seemed a fraction brighter than they had been twenty four hours ago. She wanted to say no. She wanted to lock the door and hide her child under the bed for the next twenty years.
But she saw the hope in the five year old's face and relented. "Stay close to the compound, my heart. Do not go past the big mango tree."
Adadiogo didn't need to be told twice. She skipped out into the sunlight, her heart thumping a happy rhythm. She saw Chidera and Obi, the two boys she had chased through the mud just yesterday, sitting beneath the shade of the mango tree, playing with a set of carved stones.
Her face lit up. To the child, yesterday's terror was already a distant dream. "Look! I'm okay!" she shouted, running toward them. "The sky just gave me a hug! See? I don't even have a scratch!"
The boys didn't wave back. As Adadiogo approached, the air seemed to drain out of their lungs. Their faces went ashen, and they scrambled to their feet, dropping their stones in the dust.
"Don't come near us!" Obi shrieked. He didn't sound like a playmate,he sounded like a man facing a leopard. "My mother says you have the devil's fire in your skin! She says if we touch your shadow, we'll turn into charcoal!"
Adadiogo stopped mid stride, her dusty feet skidding in the red dirt. The smile died on her face. "I don't have fire," she said, her voice trembling. "It's just me. It's Adadiogo."
"You aren't Adadiogo anymore," Chidera whispered, his eyes wide with a cruel, inherited fear. "You're the Bride. You're the Butcher's thing."
They turned and bolted, their small legs carrying them away toward the safety of their own compounds. Adadiogo stood alone under the mango tree, her hand reaching out to the empty air. A confused, hot tear pricked at her eye. She looked at her hands,they looked the same. She looked at her feet,they were still stained with the same red earth.
She decided to try the stream. Surely the girls would be different,girls were gentler.
As she walked toward the water, she noticed a change in the village rhythm. Usually, women would call out greetings to her, commenting on how she was growing like a weed. Today, as she passed the huts, conversations died. Women pulling water from the wells turned their backs. Men sharpening their machetes stopped their work and stared at her with eyes that weren't full of anger, but something
worse,superstitious dread.
She reached the stream and saw a group of older girls skipping a rope made of twisted vines. As soon as Adadiogo's shadow touched the edge of their circle, the rope dropped. The rhythmic slap-slap of the vine against the mud ceased instantly.
"Go away, Adadiogo," a girl named Nneka said. She was only ten, but her voice held the cold, hard edge of a judge. "My father says if we touch you, the Thunder will find our house next. He says you are a ghost girl. He says you belong to the Butcher, and the Butcher is jealous."
"I am not a ghost!" Adadiogo cried, her lower lip trembling violently. She stepped forward, desperate for a touch, for a hand to hold. "I'm real! Feel my hand, it's warm! I'm not made of lightning!"
But the girls backed away in a synchronized wave of horror. One of them tripped in her haste to get away, letting out a sob of pure terror. Within minutes, the stream was empty. The laughter that had filled the air was replaced by the lonely gurgle of the water over the stones.
Adadiogo stood in the mud, her chest heaving. She felt the mark on her waist,the silver and charcoal tattoo hidden beneath her cloth,pulse with a sudden, sympathetic heat. It felt like it was humming, a secret language between her skin and the sky.
The shunning didn't stop at the children.
Later that afternoon, Ugomma went to the market to buy palm oil. Usually, she was greeted with the warmth reserved for a woman who had survived ten years of barrenness. Today, the market was a wall of ice.
"I need a measure of oil, Mgbeke," Ugomma said, holding out her coin.
The oil seller, a woman who had been Ugomma's friend since childhood, didn't look up. She kept her eyes fixed on her pots. "I have no oil for you today, Ugomma."
"But the pots are full! I can see the oil!"
"It is promised to another," Mgbeke snapped, her voice shaking. "Go home. Do not bring that... that thing into the market. We have children here. We have houses that can burn. We want no part of the God's business."
Ugomma returned home with empty hands and a broken spirit. She found Nnanna sitting in the center of their hut, his head in his hands.
"The elders came," he said, his voice a ragged ghost of itself. "They say Adadiogo is no longer allowed at the communal feasts. They say she is 'Sacred Ground.' That means she is a pariah, Ugomma. They have turned our miracle into a curse."
Day by day, the circle around Adadiogo grew smaller and colder. The village didn't cast her out,they were too afraid of Amadioha to physically hurt her but,they erased her. She became a solitary figure in a village of hundreds.
She would sit on the outskirts of the village square, watching the other children play from twenty paces away. She watched them share mangoes, watched them braid each other's hair, and watched them grow together in a world she was no longer allowed to enter.
She stopped asking to play. She stopped trying to catch the other children's eyes. The vibrant, laughing spark in her was replaced by a quiet, observant stillness.
When the other children looked at her and saw a monster, she began to wonder if they were right. She would look down at her waist, feeling the faint, warm thrum of the silver mark. If the earth didn't want her, and the people of the earth were afraid of her, then who did she belong to?
She began to look up.
In her loneliness, the sky became her only companion. She would sit for hours, staring at the shifting shapes of the clouds, wondering about the "Butcher" who had claimed her. She felt a burning resentment for the God who had stolen her childhood, who had made her a "ghost girl" before she had even lost her first tooth.
But deeper than that,hidden in a place even she didn't yet understand,there was a seed of fascination.
He wants me, she thought, a dark, forbidden thought that made her heart race. Everyone else runs away, but He reached down and touched me. He didn't hide his eyes. He didn't turn his back.
The Great Shunning had achieved the exact opposite of what the village intended. Instead of keeping her away from the God, they were driving her straight into his arms. They were stripping away her humanity, leaving nothing behind but the "Bride."
By the time the first moon of her sixth year rose, Adadiogo had stopped crying. She had learned the power of silence. She walked through the village like a young queen in exile, her head held high, ignoring the whispers that followed her like dry leaves in the wind.
The God had sent his first sign, and the people had done the rest of the work for him. They had built the walls of her prison, and now, they were handing him the key.
And in the high, silent reaches of the heavens, the King of the Bolt watched the tiny girl sitting alone in the dirt. He felt her loneliness, her anger, and the budding, twisted craving for the storm.
He smiled , and the distant horizon flickered with a silent, violet light.