The marketplace was louder than usual — not with trade, but with tension.Word had spread before dawn, moving through Egba the way fire moves through dry grass: fast, low, and impossible to stop once it had taken hold. Not rumors this time. An announcement. A gathering. A declaration. By midday, the central square was filled with the kind of crowd that forms when people sense that something is about to be decided for them, and they come not to participate but to witness, because witnessing is the only power they have left.Merchants had abandoned their stalls. Children were pulled close to their mothers' sides. Elders stood with narrowed eyes that had seen enough of history to recognize its patterns. Even the palace guards lining the edges of the square were not watching the crowd for trouble — they were watching it to read it, measuring which direction sentiment was moving the way a sailor measures wind.At the center of the square stood a platform. Newly built. Deliberately placed o

The sky darkened long before the sun had any reason to set.At first the people of Egba told themselves it was just weather — the air growing heavy, winds shifting direction without warning, clouds gathering in slow deliberate layers above the rooftops as though the sky was deciding something. But ordinary storms moved. This one waited, stationary above the city, pressing down on the morning like a held breath.By the time word spread through the markets and side streets, the central square was already filling with soldiers. Not a patrol. Not a show of routine force. Rows upon rows of the king's men — armored, armed, alert — arranged with the specific geometry of men who have been told exactly what to expect and where to stand when it arrives. Torches burned despite the early hour, their flames trembling in the heavy air. At the front stood the king's enforcers, known not merely for their loyalty but for the particular efficiency of their cruelty. Behind them, less visible, moved the

Rain fell over Egba like a warning.Not the wild, violent storms people had begun associating with the masked protector — but a slow, heavy rain that soaked the earth and turned roads into mud, the kind that settled into everything and stayed. Traders hurried beneath worn cloth coverings. Guards complained beneath palace roofs. Villagers shut their doors earlier than usual and told themselves the weather was the reason.But far beyond the city walls, beyond the farms and the rivers and the places ordinary men stopped traveling after dark, movement stirred beneath the mountain.Not one man. Not ten. Hundreds.Torches flickered through narrow stone paths hidden between ancient cliffs. Boots crushed wet leaves in disciplined rhythm. Low voices moved through the darkness as men arrived in organized groups, guided by silent scouts who knew this terrain the way hunters know their traps — not by thinking about it, but by the body remembering. The hidden camp of the Thunder Warriors was no lo

Rain drifted quietly over Egba, covering the streets in silver reflections while traders hurried to protect their goods from the deepening night. Torches flickered outside homes. The distant sound of drums echoed from the entertainment quarters of the city, and if you listened only to the surface of things, the kingdom sounded ordinary.But beneath the ordinary rhythm, tension moved unseen.People whispered more than they used to. About disappearances. About corrupt officials found beaten in the dark, alive but diminished, their authority somehow smaller after whatever had found them in the night. About a masked figure who appeared where injustice was loudest and left before anyone could confirm what they had seen. Some called him a spirit. Others called him a curse. But among the poor — in the market stalls and the water-carrying lines and the places where people spoke only to those they trusted — another name had begun moving carefully from mouth to mouth.The God of Thunder.Inside

The rains had ended three days earlier, but the roads leading west of Egba still carried the scent of wet earth and crushed leaves, the land holding onto the memory of water the way it holds onto everything — slowly, and longer than expected. Caravans moved along the trade path in the easy rhythm of commerce, oxen groaning beneath sacks of grain, iron tools, animal skins, and salt. The sounds of ordinary life doing what it always does between disasters — continuing. At the center of one caravan rode Omogun. Not as the God of Thunder. Not as a prince reclaiming a stolen throne. Simply as Ogun — a traveler, a trader, a man learning the texture of the kingdom he intended to govern by walking through it at ground level rather than surveying it from a ridge. It was, he had found, the most honest education available. Adeolu rode beside him, watching the road ahead with the habitual alertness of a soldier who has never fully learned to be a civilian, even when the situation calls for