Mwari Chronicles

Chapter 5

Mwanza groaned in pain upon the rough ground, his mind asking him how it had come to this. "Idiot, you should have known better." he mentally cursed himself for his brash decision to leave the palace.

He had known that he would regret it when his mother found out, but this, all of this felt like fate itself was disproportionaly punishing him for having the audacity to disobey his mother and she had not even gotten her hands upon him yet.

Every sight, sound and taste of this day had been a foreign and yet  euphoric shock to his senses. The pungent aroma of the market both saculant and foul were preferable to the scented air of the palace,  the fact that he moved amongst people without anyone so much as caring or the endless fields of maize at the capital's rural edge was a welcome freedom.

To cap off his experience he had decided to board a train for a fun ride around the city in silence and peace without a Vortiguard towering over him as an unwelcomed shadow. He enjoyed it, until his carriage door began to bang furiously from the outside. Mwanza leaped to his feet, the word mother caught in his throat as a wave of panic quickly seized him.

"It can't be her, she couldn't have found me already." he fearfully thought.

When the steel carriage door was finally blown in, it was not Natasha Hachibambo come to get her foolish young son but a young man who came tumbling to the floor with an odd looking silver box in hand.

He watched in frozen confusion when the box was forcefully taken from the young man by a group of five masked strangers. Mwanza was only roused from his petrified confusion when he heard the young man plead for aid and in a panic he made a serious error.

The memory of the old N'anga, Grandmaster Nachikufu explaining that Mwari weaving ordinarily felt like grasping ahold of a warm piece of string and dictating it's size from there before pulling it, the context of this memory was benign and yet to Mwanza who always felt his Mwari cold and heavy chains that he barely had a grip of, it was a stinging mockery.

Instinctively he pulled on his Mwari thread and rather than controlled ice, an arctic burst and ice shards that wrenched steel apart erupted from his hands and disintegrated half of the carriage near instantly.

The blast sent Mwanza and the young man spiraling through the air, the train in the air quickly becoming a blip as they hit the city pavement a hundred meters below with a sickening bone shacking thud that knocked the wind out of Mwanza’s lungs. They both remained upon that empty street for five minutes groaning and whinging in pain.

"I survived that?" the other guy muttered in between pained grunts as he sat up first.

"Yes we did, sweet Leza-Mulungu it hurts bad." Mwanza muttered in response, his body littered with bruises.

"Are you okay?" He asked the other man who now sat up and propped himself to lean against the wall of the building that they had landed next to.

"I think so, it still hurts bad."

Mwanza cast his gaze across the young man's body and though he could see some skinning of flesh across his left elbow, he looked health enough.

"Thank you for your help." He stated surprising Mwanza.

"Help?"

"Yes..." the stranger paused and regarded Mwanza cautiously. "You were helping me, were you not?"

"Yes, I was... its just that." Mwanza gestured around them. "I don't think that my help has amounted to much."

"You saved my life at least. Even if..." the stranger looked at his empty hands and threw his head back with a sigh "...Thorn is going to kill me."