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It had been more than an Earth month since his father had been assassinated before his very eyes, but Ngizwe's heart still pounded as if the moment were on endless loop. The pain had not subsided — it had only grown heavier, stranger, more cellular. His blood still boiled, his breath still caught on thoughts he could not utter. As he gazed sorely out the window from a great height, the hot sun assaulted Nkandla’s rolling hills like a new curse. The air hung thick with a silence that felt not like peace, but paralysis — heavy, metallic, and humming with dark secrets. The valleys below burdened with echoes of something treacherous. He stood solid. Deafened by pain, guilt and rage.
One way or another, he thought, I will take my revenge. This certainty comforted him. But the other truth, the one he dared not voice, not even in the solitude of his own mind, was unbearable: his revenge would have to be exacted against the man he loved — Marius — the man whose betrayal was now carved into the very fabric of Nkandla. That knowledge brought bitter tears to his red eyes, and his guilt worsened as his subjects did everything to console him, thinking that the soon-to-be king was weeping over his father’s unsolved murder. That was part of it, to be sure. But his grief was layered with pains he could not disclose even to his closest advisors.
In his mind, this was hardly a time for mourning. Heavy is the head — a saying he recalled from ancient times. The Bhinca kingdom, once a pastoral nation nested in the folds of the Zulu heartland, now unfurled across multiple planes — earthbound, atmospheric, astral. It had become a cosmic empire with territories spread across different dimensions, tethered to a planet rebuilt after the collapse of timespace as it was once known. Amabhinca were no longer merely a people; they were a living, breathing frequency — an entangled echo of post-planetary ambition. The royal precinct itself had long since outgrown the boundaries of Nkandla, now only one node in a vast interplanetary matrix of settlements.
The crown, once carved from polished bone, skin and metal, now carried embedded mnemonic jewels and shards — ancestral intelligences whispering in recursive tongues, each syllable an encryption of blood memory. Such fragments lived inside the architecture of every capital, all designed with living archives of holographic stone and sentient biometal that shimmered and pulsed with rhythmic flashes. All that had truly been preserved from the old world was nature, including all ancient stone ruins.
The old limitations of Earth — its gravity, its hunger, its history of conquest — had long since been shed. So too, it seemed, had her scars. The continents no longer bore the cartographic violence of colonial borders; the oceans no longer hid the bones of enslaved ancestors in silence. Earth, or what remained of her, had been restructured through centuries of cosmic migration, terraforming, and sacred code. Her blemishes — chemical, psychic, historical — had been healed, or, more truthfully, overwritten.
Amabhinca, reborn across multiple worlds, had fashioned themselves into something beyond race, beyond nation. For a time, skin no longer conferred hierarchy, and phenotype had become merely one variation among billions of bio-divergent expressions across the stars. The colonial machine — once so omnipresent it seemed indistinguishable from life itself — had been dismantled.
Or so they thought.
But even light carries memory.
And the virus that now bloomed in their system — the code-poison released directly after the king’s assassination — was not just technological. It had a shape. A logic. A bitterness reminiscent of the colonial order, that sinister infrastructure that once moved through bodies, through books, through beauty, through blood.
The truth was, Amabhinca had not escaped race. They had merely outpaced it. And now, it had caught up.
Ngizwe knew this, though he could not yet speak it. The sickness in the system was not only betrayal, not only grief. It was return. The haunting of something they had refused to believe could follow them into the stars.
A diabolical foundation for his reign.
The inauguration took place atop the Summit of Nxamalala, esisigodlweni — the royal spire of holographic obsidian and sapient glass. Around it, suspended terraces floated in mid-air, woven together by plasma threads that shimmered like spider silk in the bright light. Above, ceremonial crafts arched through the sky, releasing bioluminescent sigils encoded with ancestral memory. Drones circled like sentinels, transmitting the ceremony across the planetary grid: Ngizwe Mchunu, the new Bhinca sovereign!
As Ngizwe was crowned, the sun fractured gold, casting divine chiaroscuro over the crowd — a sea of ochre, beadwork, and thrilling praise. Techno-drums rang, their hides grafted with neuro-reactive membranes — each strike transmitting rhythm through flesh, fibre, and nerve. Songs swelled — some voices raw and analogue, others conjured from databanks of ancestral recordings, the dead singing along in exquisite delay. Epic ululations piercing through the wind.
Amabhinca elites and off-world dignitaries had arrived days prior, emerging from orbital pods and transdimensional gates that folded the air like water. Their regalia shimmered in a fusion of ancient craft and nanosynthetic weave. Elder sangomas, shrouded in multichromatic mist, conferred with Izilwane Zomoya — AI-oracles manifesting as grotesque forms: half-beast, half-code, their bodies endlessly rewriting midair like living scripture.
Throughout the festivities, in brief moments of respite, the new king retreated and from his private chamber suspended at the spire’s midpoint, Ngizwe watched it all unfold. The atmosphere throbbed with something beyond ceremony — something relentlessly unnameable.
The horizon was wavering.
It was said that the ancestors had engineered this new world to preserve the essence of the old — of mind and matter, of cattle and rain, of war and song. But it was now clear to Ngizwe — clear in the deepest marrow of his bones — that his mistake had broken more than just trust. It had endangered the very synthesis that held their post-Earth world together. Somewhere along his path towards kinghood, under his father’s strict, sometimes cruel tutelage — he had faltered. A moment of faith misplaced. A gate opened too wide. And in that faltering, something sacred had been lost.
Amabhinca had never claimed to master the future. They had only sought to steward its unfolding — to braid the unbroken logic of their ancestors with the delicate uncertainty of the stars. Their techno-rituals were not about domination, but balance. Each satellite station, each algorithmic field had been calibrated not only for precision, but for resonance — for harmony with the spirits scattered across constellations. A synthesis that was now fraying at the edges. And the more he tried to contain it, the more Ngizwe felt it slipping through his fragile fingers.
He had not merely let Marius in.
He had let something older in, too. Something so sinister.
And it would not be satisfied with just the throne.
It wanted the code of Amabhinca itself.
Tormented by these thoughts, Ngizwe’s handsome reflection flickered in the obsidian glass of the chamber. Remembering himself, he swiftly lifted his shoulders from an accidental slump. Though love had always been his kryptonite, he was by no means a soft man. Broad built and strong to look at, and forcefully proud with his words. He told no unnecessary lie and therefore, often found himself unintentionally hurting his subjects with his harsh words. He had some degree of remorse for this, but he was his father’s son, and he had always known he would be king. So, he expected every being he came across, save his father, to surrender to his will and meet his exacting standards. Yet in this moment, his face was marked with mournful weakness, a realisation that he had not only failed himself, but everything and everyone he held dear. Loss and defeat had brought him to his proverbial knees.
He may have been crowned, but he did not yet feel like king.
He felt like a glitch given form.
Given the circumstance and the hidden shame, Ngizwe found the inauguration embarrassingly grand. He had survived it, but he barely had the will to carry the crown. He wore the robes of kingship. He bore the codes of the land’s most sacred neural archives. He had become not only a monarch, but a symbol of balance, of progress, of resurrection. Yet inside, he was hollow. Not from the weight of duty alone, but from the truth he carried like a blade buried beneath his ribs.
It had been Ngizwe who’d opened the door to Marius.
Who’d given him access to the inner sanctum.
Who’d ignored the trembling warnings in the bones.
Who had loved him — deeply, dangerously — and been loved in return, until that love became something else. A weapon.
And so he stood now, king and traitor, both.
He had not told the people what he had done. How could he? How could a nation mourn a murdered king while exalting the son who had, unknowingly or not, allowed the killer to enter through the gates? He held the guilt in his throat like the name too despicable to speak aloud.
Marius had vanished from Ngizwe’s bed the night of the killing. The last time they locked eyes was the moment of the killing. Escaping through an encrypted portal, his lover had disappeared without trace. Disposing, it seemed, easily, of their secret love. Since then, no sightings. No transmissions. No digital footprint. It was as if some black hole had swallowed him whole. And yet Ngizwe knew — felt — that he was alive. Somewhere. Waiting. Watching.
Finding him would mean confessing. And confessing could mean losing everything: the crown, the people’s trust, the fragile peace. The only thing more dangerous than Marius’s betrayal was the truth of their shared past.
And so he had remained silent.
The week after his inauguration, as was custom, the royal maiden parade took place. Thousands of girls from across the realm were brought to the royal grounds, adorned in ceremonial dress, chests bare, skin glistening with oil and sunlight. It was a day of joy and pride, where bloodlines were offered for union, and futures fatefully sewn into the rhythm of the drum.
Ngizwe had sat on the throne under the gaze of his council, his face composed, though his soul thrashed beneath the regalia. He had not intended to choose a wife that day. He had not felt capable of it. But then he saw her.
Siphelele.
She moved through the parade like a river running through stone. Barely more than a girl, but with a bearing that made the world around her blur. Her skin was the deep brown of fresh clay, her lips and buttocks plump, but her breasts slight and her eyes wide and luminous, filled not with flirtation, but something meeker, yet wisely watchful. She did not dance seductively for him, but submissively. She did not smile; she bowed. She walked well, steady, bright and upright, like she had something others did not.
He felt something move inside him.
He chose her that same day. With certainty. Not lust. Not out of strategy. But because something in her stillness met something in his chaos. Because in the wake of death and deceit, she was the only thing that seemed to make sense.
Their union was to be consummated the following day.
He was grateful. She was the perfect bride. Beautiful. Devout. Entirely untainted by the shadows that trailed him like ghosts. He knew she would serve the role of queen well. And yet, as the sun set on the eve of their sexual rite, Ngizwe could feel no joy. No arousal. No anticipation.
Only the same silences. Only the same questions.
Where are you, Marius and why have you betrayed me?
On the day of consummation, he mustered the strength. The coronation dust had not yet settled. The drums still echoed somewhere across the plains, like distant thunder mimicking a heartbeat that no longer belonged to him. When the time was right, Ngizwe made his way. He trailed the tall reeds surrounding the royal consummation bay and approached the riverside in the hot daylight. His shadow stretched long over the body of the girl — the virgin, the chosen, the offering — and he felt the full weight of the crown not on his head but in his chest, where his heart stammered beneath bones that felt too narrow for his grief.
Siphelele lay on the consummation mat, young as morning, luminous as water. As he knelt before her, she lifted her head from the reed mat and extended her arms, gently touching, not grabbing, both his muscular shoulders. Her limbs, lean and honey-burnished, carried none of the stain that weighed his own. Though he could sense she was a clever girl with depth, she was yet untouched, untroubled, and radiant with the kind of unknowing that could break a man open. Her eyes — wide, dark, and solemn — held no seduction, only a deep, unflinching trust. That trust was the cruellest thing of all.
She had prepared herself with care. Her hair tightly braided in protective fractal designs. Her body was smooth and glistening, oiled by the elder women in a clandestine ritual he had not been permitted to witness. Her beadwork shimmered with ancestral motifs, contouring the luscious curve of her hips, the soft rise of her breasts, the tender hollow beneath her navel. Everything about her was new — skin unstained by pain, mouth unbroken by betrayal. She looked at him not as a man, not even as a king, but as something truly holy. That gaze scorched him more than any fire.
Ngizwe put his hands on her knees with reverent hesitation. She did not flinch. Her thighs opened with an almost ceremonial grace, as though some ancient choreography had been awakened in her body, passed down bone to bone. She reached for his wrists, her fingers light and trembling, but though his penis thickened with need, he could feel no real desire within himself — only a vacant, albeit carnal, throbbing where the wound still writhed.
Marius.
The name struck like iron to the spine. Even now — now, as he arched his back and pounded dutifully in this sacred act, this blessed binding — he could taste the salt of that other, forbidden mouth. The one who had awoken parts of him he never knew were there. The one who had once traced the length of his back with fingers that shook from what seemed like loyalty, not fear. The one who now rode against him, traveller turned enemy, lover turned ghost.
And yet here beneath him was Siphelele, gasping as he repeatedly entered her, more from shock than pain. Her breath came quick and uncertain, like an impala’s first steps, and he moved with loaded gentleness, half in ritual, half in apology. Her legs wrapped around him like a garland offered to a god she did not yet know how to worship. He felt her stretch around him — hot, quivering, wet — and still his mind spiralled backward, toward broken promises and the bitter intimacy of betrayal.
Her body yielded entirely. She gave everything, without resistance, without knowledge of the ruins inside him. Her moans grew louder, blooming like wildflowers under his heat and weight. But every pulse of pleasure that ran through her seemed only to echo the absence within him.
Ngizwe bent over her, burying his face in her neck, where the scent of riverwater and oils mingled. He moved as he was expected to move. He made love as he was meant to. He gave her what he could. And still, Marius was there — in every breath he could not release, in every cry he could not allow to rise.
When Siphelele came, clutching at him like straws, her eyes fluttered open with awe, searching his face for something she could not name. But what she found — what she must have seen — was a man who was not fully there. She could not have known that Ngizwe was a half-king who had given his body to the nation, but his whole heart to a rogue Afrikaner who had been sent to destroy him and his people.
Following orgasm, out of breath, Ngizwe attempted to roll his heavy body over, but his young bride beckoned him to stay inside. The king obliged. He was yet to say a single word to her, and he remained silent. He simply lay on top of her, damn near crushing her, the sun hot on his back, the crown invisible but immovable. And in the silence that followed, the river Ntumbeni went on singing.
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Author’s Note
While based on real people, places, and histories, this story is told through a speculative lens. Resemblances are intentional but not literal.
