---

🔥 THE BRAWL AFTER THE FUNERAL

Otis the Rounder Presents: The Day the Bronx Held Its Breath
Setting: One Block From Blackman Mansion — 1963, July heatwave
Tone: Cinematic. Reverent. Fierce.
Narrative Weight: Legendary. Etched in collective memory for 30 years.

---

It began the way many myths do—in silence, in sweat, and in the shadow of death.

The funeral of Draymond Blackman, crime boss and monarch of the Bronx underworld, had just ended. Not a soul cried honestly. Only Ellis Blackman, 15, who had killed his father two weeks prior to protect his mama, held his silence like a shield.

Beside him walked James Blackman, age 13 but grown beyond his years. A farm boy from western Pennsylvania. Leather-tough hands. Steel in his posture. Levi Blackman’s grandson—though most didn’t know it yet. He had just arrived in the Bronx, and fate was about to baptize him in blood and bone.

The walk from the cemetery to Blackman Mansion was only six blocks. But on the fifth block, the gods of war whispered. A rusted playground stood crooked like an altar. And at its gates—three girls, radiant and rooted like goddesses out of time, were surrounded by nine street wolves.

These weren’t just any boys.
They were the worst kind of predator: broken boys who broke others.
Tattooed with neighborhood scars.
Raised by corners and concrete.

One of them grabbed India’s wrist—the quiet one, the one who hadn’t spoken until she was twelve.
Another reached for Maria, who stepped back, fire already lit in her dark eyes.
Oya, tall and whirlwind-voiced, spat before they even touched her: “Try it, bitch. You’ll leave here boneless.”

Ellis moved first.

Didn’t ask. Didn’t wait.
He broke the first boy’s nose with a hook that sang of righteous rage and Blackman blood.
James was right behind him, farm-strong, tossing a thug into the swingset with a shoulder tackle that cracked ribs.

The street froze.

But it wasn’t just the boys.

India moved like a ghost with a knife no one saw.
Maria ducked, twisted, jabbed—street ballet with blood.
Oya leapt from the monkey bars, dropped like thunder on a back-of-the-neck.

It wasn’t a fight.
It was a Bronx prophecy.

---

Five minutes later…

Nine street thugs lay bleeding in the gravel, their pride stripped, faces rearranged, limbs twitching like marionettes cut from strings. The sirens didn’t come. Not that day. The neighborhood watched from windows. Old men didn’t intervene.
They just nodded.

Because they’d seen it before, long ago, when other warriors had returned in flesh.
Because they knew: something ancient had just awakened.

---

Ellis bled from the lip.

James’s knuckles were raw.

India stared at them both like a storm remembering its name.

“Y’all don’t know who we are yet,” she said, voice like thunder wrapped in velvet.

“But you will.”

Maria smirked, cleaning blood from her fingernails.

Oya grabbed James’s face and kissed his forehead.

“Welcome to the real Bronx, country boy.”

---

And that was the day.

The day whispered through fire escapes.
The day old folks told their grandkids.
The day the Bronx almost caught fire.

The day five kids—fifteen, sixteen, no more—rewrote the streets.

And from that day forward, the world began to turn differently.

Because gods had returned to the Bronx in human skin.

And their war… had only just begun.

 

---

⚰️  Nightfall at the Mansion

 

---

Blood on the Knocker

They didn’t speak the rest of the way.

Not Ellis. Not James. Not the girls. Only their footsteps talked—five shadows stretched long by the setting sun, trailing heat and history down Valentine Avenue.

The mansion sat like it remembered pain.
Blackman Mansion.
Three floors of stone and sorrow. Black iron gates curled like claws.
Porch columns thick as tree trunks. Glass windows fogged with a kind of breath that hadn’t belonged to the living in decades.

James stood still at the bottom of the stone steps.

“This… where you live?”

Ellis didn’t answer. He just pushed the gate open with his forearm, and the iron groaned like something waking up.

India paused beside James.

“You feel it?” she whispered.

James nodded.

It wasn’t cold. Not exactly. But there was a drop in something—temperature or time, he couldn’t say.

The door loomed.

And carved into it—not etched, not nailed, but grown into the wood itself—was the Blackman sigil: a serpent eating its own tail, wrapped around a keyhole dripping with dried wax.

“Don’t touch the knocker,” Ellis said.

Too late.

James already had.

It was hot. Not metal-hot. Not Bronx-summer hot.

Spirit-hot.

A surge went through him, and in one blink of pain-light, he wasn’t standing on a porch anymore.

He was—

---

🌑 Interlude: James’s First Dream in the Mansion

A red grove. Silent trees pulsing with flame beneath bark. Sky, cracked and violet. The air hums like a choir underwater.

In the center of the grove—
Zubari.

She stands naked but unashamed, her back covered in ritual tattoos of firebirds, suns, and one crescent eye. She is India before time. The one who hadn’t spoken till twelve because language is too small to carry memory.

She turns.

“You found me,” she says, voice like charcoal wind.

James can’t speak. His tongue is ash.

Zubari touches his chest, and his shirt melts away like mist.

“You are Jurgatha,” she says. “You are mine.”

Her hand pushes through his chest.

---

The Parlor of Queens

James wakes up gasping. Chest wet. But there’s no blood. No wound. Just sweat.

He’s in a bed now—an old four-poster carved with stories. Stories of warriors, wombs, and things with wings.

At the foot of the bed stand three chairs, empty but facing him.

“They’ll come when you’re ready,” India says from the window.
“The Queens.”

“Queens?”

“The ones who run this country. And your grandfather made a deal with them. That’s why you’re here.”

James sits up slow.

“What kind of deal?”

India turns fully. Her eyes are ancient now. Older than the fight. Older than the Bronx.

“The kind you inherit.”

---

  “Queens Beneath the Floorboards”

The floorboards will creak tonight.

And from the crawlspace beneath James’s bed, something female, ancient, and serpentine will whisper his name in four tongues—each one older than empire.

Because the Blackman Mansion is not just a house.

It’s a contract.

And James just opened the door with blood still on his hands.

---

🔮 NEXT CHAPTER:

“The Floor That Remembers Feet”
Where Ellis’s nightmares return. Where Maria dreams of water. Where Oya hears drums no one else can.
And the four Archon Queens send their first vision.

—