The God of Thunder

CHAPTER 7 The First Vision

It came without warning.

One moment Omogun was asleep. The next he was somewhere else entirely — standing in the middle of Egba Kingdom's main market square, surrounded by people who could not see him, in a body that cast no shadow and left no footprints in the dust.

He knew immediately that it was not a dream.

Dreams had a softness to them — blurred edges, impossible logic, the feeling of moving through warm water. This was sharp. Precise. The heat of the afternoon sun pressed against his skin with full conviction. The smell of the market reached him completely — roasted corn, fresh palm oil, the particular smell of too many people in too little space on a hot afternoon.

He was ten years old and he had not seen Egba in five years.

It looked nothing like he remembered.

The market he knew from childhood had been loud with a particular kind of loudness — the loudness of commerce, of haggling, of women laughing across stalls at each other's jokes. His mother had brought him once, disguised in plain cloth, and he had been overwhelmed by the abundance of it. Color and noise and life pressing in from every direction.

What he saw now was different.

The stalls were sparse. Half the market spaces sat empty — abandoned or simply never filled. The traders who remained sold less and watched more, their eyes moving constantly toward the palace gate at the market's northern edge.

Guards moved through the crowd.

Not peacefully. Not the way palace guards had moved in his father's time — present but calm, a reassurance rather than a threat. These guards moved with ownership. They stopped vendors without reason. They lifted cloth from displays and examined merchandise with the deliberate slowness of people who want you to understand they can take as long as they like.

An old woman selling ogi porridge from a clay pot flinched as one passed too close.

She flinched.

In her own market. At a guard who was supposed to serve her.

Omogun's hands tightened into fists — and then he remembered he was not truly here. He had no hands that could do anything. He was only watching.

The helplessness of it sat in his chest like a stone.

He moved through the market the way visions move — without walking, simply arriving at the next thing that needed seeing.

He saw a farmer arguing with a tax collector at the grain stalls. The farmer's voice was quiet, desperate, explaining something with the careful patience of a man who knows that raising his voice will end worse than losing the argument. The tax collector was bored. He had heard it all before. He marked his ledger, took more than was written, and walked away.

The farmer stood for a moment looking at what remained of his grain.

Then he began repacking it in silence.

He did not cry. He was past crying. His face had the particular blankness of a man who has recalculated his family's survival too many times and run out of different answers.

Omogun looked away.

He did not want to look away. He forced himself to look back.

Remember this, he told himself. Remember exactly this.

The vision pulled him toward the palace.

He did not want to go. But visions, he was learning, showed you what you needed to see rather than what you wanted.

Adewole Ogunwole sat in the throne room on a throne that had been altered — raised higher, its carved symbols partially replaced with new ones. He was older than Omogun's memory of him. The softness of the uncle he had known — the one who had bounced him on his knee and called him Little Thunder — was entirely gone.

What sat on the throne now was something that had consumed that man and taken his shape.

He was giving audience to a line of chiefs and petitioners. His manner was smooth. Reasonable. Even generous in certain moments — he laughed at the right times, nodded with apparent wisdom, granted requests with visible magnanimity.

Watching him, Omogun understood something that Wisdom had been trying to teach him without saying directly.

The most dangerous tyrants were not the ones who raged.

They were the ones who smiled.

Then the vision moved again.

Away from the palace. Away from the market. Down through the city's southern quarter where the craftsmen lived — workshops and small compounds, families crowded into spaces that were comfortable enough but had the careful neatness of people who knew better than to appear prosperous.

It stopped outside a woodworking compound.

A girl sat on the front step.

She was ten years old — his age — with her hair freshly plaited and a faded red ribbon tied around her wrist instead of in her hair, the way children repurpose treasured things when they begin to wear out. She was doing nothing remarkable. Simply sitting in the late afternoon light, a small piece of carved wood in her hands that she was examining with focused attention, turning it slowly, looking for something in the grain.

Omogun stared at her.

He had not thought about Kike in — he could not remember. The mountain consumed time strangely. He had not forgotten her exactly. She had simply become part of the before — the life that existed on the other side of the night the thunder wept, sealed away in the place where he kept things too painful to regularly examine.

She was not what he expected.

He was not sure what he had expected. In his memory she was the girl from the palace steps — small, bright-eyed, whispering secrets. The girl in front of him was still small. Still bright-eyed. But there was something else now — a quietness that had not been there before. A watchfulness.

She had learned, he realized, to be careful.

Children who lived through turbulent times learned that early, without being taught — the particular alertness of someone who has understood that the world can shift without warning and it is better to see it coming.

She looked up suddenly.

Not at him — she could not see him. She looked up at the sky.

At the mountain.

For a long moment she simply looked. Her expression was difficult to read — not longing exactly, not sadness exactly. Something quieter than both.

Then the sound reached him.

Three of the palace guards had turned into the craftsmen's quarter. They were moving with purpose — not browsing, not patrolling. Moving toward the woodworking compound specifically.

Kike stood immediately. She put the carved wood inside the door of the workshop and then stood in the doorway — not retreating, not advancing. Simply placing herself in the entrance the way people place themselves when they want to be seen before anyone gets to whatever is behind them.

The guards stopped in front of her.

"Your father," one said. "Tax assessment. He is three months behind."

"My father is working," Kike said. Her voice was steady. She was ten years old and her voice was steady. "He will come when he has finished."

"He will come now."

"He will come," Kike said, "when he has finished. He is a craftsman. If he stops in the middle of a joint, the wood warps. Then the piece is worthless. Then he cannot pay any tax at all." She looked at the guard with those quiet, watchful eyes. "Unless that is what you want?"

The guard stared at her.

She stared back.

There was a long pause.

Then the guard made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite annoyance — the sound people make when they have been outmaneuvered by someone they did not expect to outmaneuver them.

"One hour," he said.

"Thank you," Kike said. Politely. As though it had been a gift rather than a retreat.

The guards moved on.

Kike watched until they turned the corner. Then her shoulders dropped — just slightly, just briefly — before she straightened them again and went back inside.

The vision dissolved.

Omogun came back to himself on the cave floor, breathing hard, the mountain's blue light pulsing around him in steady waves. For a moment he simply lay still, staring at the ceiling, letting the images settle.

The farmer's empty face.

His uncle's smile.

Kike, ten years old, standing in a doorway facing down three armed men with nothing but careful words and steadier nerves than most adults he had ever seen.

The Spirit of Judgment stood at the edge of the chamber.

"How long have you been watching?" Omogun asked.

"Long enough," Ìdájọ́ said.

"Was it real? What I saw?"

"Visions from this mountain do not deal in comfort," the spirit said. "Only truth."

Omogun sat up slowly.

"The girl," he said. "In the craftsmen's quarter."

"What about her?"

He was quiet for a moment, organizing something inside himself.

"She was not afraid of them," he said. "She was afraid — I could see it. But she did not let it make her small." He paused. "She has been living like that. Under him. Under all of it. For five years."

"Many people have," Ìdájọ́ said.

"I know." His jaw was set. "I know. I just—" He stopped. Then, more quietly: "I made her a promise. When we were children. I said I would always be there."

The spirit said nothing.

"I have not been there," Omogun said. "I have been here."

"You have been becoming," Ìdájọ́ corrected. "There is a difference. A promise kept too early, with too little, is not kindness. It is comfort that cannot hold." The spirit moved closer. "What she needs is not a boy who kept his word. What she needs is what you are becoming."

Omogun looked at his hands.

"Then I need to become it faster," he said.

"No," Ìdájọ́ said firmly. "You need to become it completely. Faster and completely are not the same road. You have learned this before."

Omogun was quiet.

Then he nodded.

Slowly. Reluctantly. But genuinely.

"I know," he said.

He rose and walked to the mouth of the inner passage. He stood there looking toward the mountain's lower path, in the direction of the world below — the world he could not yet reach, the people he could not yet protect, the promise he could not yet keep.

Thunder moved above the peak.

"Tell me when the next trial begins," he said.

His voice had changed. Still young. But underneath it — something that was not young at all.

Ìdájọ́ watched him.

"It has already begun," the spirit said quietly.

That night, Kemi found him awake long after the mountain had gone quiet.

"Vision?" she asked.

He nodded.

"Egba?"

Another nod.

She sat beside him and did not ask what he had seen. Some things needed to be carried quietly before they could be spoken.

After a long time he said: "Kemi. Tell me about Kike's family. Everything you know."

Kemi looked at him carefully.

Then she began to speak.

And the thunder listened.