The Mark of the Orisha
The Elders’ Warning
The sky burned violet when the elders summoned her.
Night had not yet surrendered to dawn, and the twin suns still lurked beyond the horizon, painting the heavens in streaks of fire and shadow. The village lay wrapped in the hush of pre-dawn, but within the sacred council chamber, silence was a living thing—thick, pulsing, expectant.
At the center of the gathering stood the Golden One.
She had no name yet, not in the way mortals understood names. She had always been, and yet, she was only just beginning. The river had whispered her purpose, had wrapped it around her like a second skin, but she did not yet know what it meant to carry divinity in her veins.
The elders sat before her, a half-circle of figures carved by time and wisdom. Their bodies bore the sacred markings of those who had seen beyond the veil, their eyes shadowed by knowledge too heavy for most to bear. Each of them had once stood where she stood now—before the threshold, before the choosing.
But none had been chosen.
Not like this.
The eldest among them, his skin the color of midnight, his voice like the rustle of wind through ancient trees, was the first to speak.
“You have seen her, have you not?” he asked.
She did not need to ask who he meant. The vision of the river goddess still pulsed in her memory, still wrapped around her like a second heartbeat.
“I have,” she answered.
A murmur rippled through the elders, not of surprise, but of confirmation. They had known. The moment she had been called to the water, they had felt the shift in the air, the weight of something vast pressing against the fabric of their world.
“You stand at the crossroads,” another elder said, his voice brittle with age but sharp as flint. “The blood of the Orisha runs in you, but divinity is not a gift. It is a burden. And if you choose to carry it, the trials will come.”
The Golden One did not flinch. “What trials?”
The eldest leaned forward, the firelight catching the deep grooves of his face. “The same trials faced by all before you. The trials of the first gods. The ones who rose—and the ones who fell.”
The wind stirred through the chamber, carrying the scent of burning resin and something older, something metallic—like the taste of storm-winds before the rain.
Another elder, her skin lined with the ink of generations, lifted her gaze to meet the Golden One’s.
“Long before the stars settled in their orbits, before the first stories were written into the bones of the earth, there were the Before-Gods. They were raw, unshaped, as wild as the rivers and as endless as the sky. They did not yet know what they were, and so they fought to define themselves. They devoured. They created. They unmade.”
She traced a line in the air, and the fire at the center of the chamber flickered, twisting into shapes unseen before by mortal eyes—figures of light and shadow, shifting and writhing.
“It was the Orisha who tamed them,” she continued. “Who forged the first order from chaos. But order is never without cost.”
The fire twisted again, and suddenly, the figures of the Before-Gods crumbled. Some vanished into smoke. Others shattered into a thousand burning fragments, falling like dying stars.
“The ones who could not bear the weight of divinity were unmade. Their names lost, their light scattered across the void. Only those who endured—who embraced the trials—became Orisha.”
The Golden One watched the flames, unblinking.
“And now,” the eldest elder said, “the trials come for you.”
Silence.
Outside, the first rays of the twin suns broke the horizon, painting the chamber in gold and crimson. The elders did not move, their eyes locked on her, waiting for her answer.
The Golden One breathed in the firelight, the weight of prophecy settling into her bones.
She could feel it now—the river’s call, the shifting of fate, the echo of those who had come before.
She could turn away. She could let the waters forget her name, let the gods choose another.
But that was not why she had been born.
She lifted her chin, her voice steady, unwavering.
“I accept.”
The fire roared.
The elders closed their eyes. Some in sorrow. Some in reverence.
None in doubt.
For the trials had begun.