At present, this posed no immediate threat.

The underworld was still young in its awakening. Most souls were now preoccupied cultivating fields, forming clans, skirmishing in gangs, rediscovering themselves. Few yet possessed the cohesion or predatory instinct required to notice the faint shimmer of a living soul tethered to them.

But Keles saw further, her realm was evolving. The rice strengthened souls. The sacrifices restored memory. Conflict sharpened identity. With each passing cycle, certain spirits were becoming more defined, more willful, more powerful.

Eventually, some would begin to look outward.

And when they did, those four shamans would shine like lanterns in the dark.

To the growing powers within her realm, the shamans souls would not appear as distant mortals.

They would appear as openings, one-way portals. From the mortal side, invocation required ritual, discipline, ancestry.

From the underworld side? nothing. A powerful soul could press against the thin membrane of connection and slip through. Once across, it would find a mortal body alive, warm, vulnerable.

A vessel, devour the resident soul. Take the body. Walk the mortal world again.

Keles did not find the prospect horrifying but inevitable. At the same time inevitability did not mean immediacy.

The four shamans had advanced her realm. Their innovation had accelerated civilization among the dead. They had unknowingly contributed to the foundation she and Ikenga were building as Origin Gods.

They had earned protection.

With a slow, deliberate wave of her hand, Keles exerted her authority.

The thin apertures embedded in their souls responded instantly. The spiritual seams tightened. The lingering fractures sealed. What had once been open conduits became structured channels, accessible only when deliberately invoked, and closed cleanly upon completion.

The glow of vulnerability faded. The one-way passage was gone, no soul from her realm would cross into them uninvited.

Far away, beneath the ancient cedar grove, the four shamans felt only a subtle shift. A lightness. A clarity in their spirit. The faint spiritual pressure they had grown accustomed to simply… vanished.

They did not know how close they had stood to catastrophe.

Keles withdrew her gaze. As for death shamans who would follow after them, future death shamans, imitators, ambitious disciples that was another matter entirely.

Innovation carried danger and power demanded understanding. If others sought to carve threads into her dominion, they would need to learn the consequences themselves. They would need to devise safeguards, refine rituals, discover sealing techniques through hardship and loss.

Growth without risk was stagnation. She would not interfere endlessly. The four had been spared because they were pioneers.

Those who came after would face a different era, one where the souls of the underworld were no longer dormant, where clans and gangs sharpened themselves daily, where ambitious spirits might actively seek escape.

Her gaze shifted again. Beyond the cedar grove, beyond the four shamans.

It settled upon another mortal, one whose hands, though untrained in ritual, had shaped history just as profoundly.

King Nwadiebube.

He was no death shaman. He did not chant invocations or thread his soul into the underworld. But it was his patronage, his decree, his hunger for continuity beyond death that had allowed the practice to flourish. He gathered scholars. He protected the first shamans from persecution. He funded the preservation of ancestral records.

Without him, the profession would have withered as heresy.

Through him, it became doctrine. Keles regarded him thoughtfully.

A mortal king who had nudged the boundary between realms and survived.

She decided she would bless him.

It would be simple, subtle reinforcement of fortune, perhaps longevity, perhaps clarity in governance. A quiet divine favor befitting a ruler who had advanced her domain without even knowing her name.

Her will began to gather but then she saw further. A premonition unfolded like a ripple across still water.

She saw his past actions layered beneath his achievements. In his desperation to secure legitimacy, in his ambition to further this path, he had committed a heavy act .

He had stolen. Stolen from a god. A branch from a garden once belonging to another god, Ikenga.

To the king, it had been an artifact of power, a means to stabilize the early rituals of the shamans. The theft had succeeded and it had borne fruit.

But offense against a god was not erased by ignorance. Keles stilled her blessing.

She could not shield him from consequence. Not when the balance between her and Ikenga mattered more than a single mortal king.

Punishment would come. Measured or severe, that would depend on Ikenga.

She could only whisper in his favor when the time arrived. A softening of judgment nothing more.

She was about to withdraw her gaze when something else caught her sight.

It was n

ot the king. It was the woman sleeping beside him, his queen.

Keles focused and frowned. At first, the queen's soul appeared stable. Bright. Refined. But as Keles looked deeper, she felt the disturbance beneath the surface, an impossibility woven so seamlessly that even most gods would overlook it.

Two souls merged perfectly. So perfectly that there was no seam to pull apart, no fracture to trace. The identities had fused into one coherent existence. Not dominant and subordinate. Not parasite and host.

Unity. Keles felt anger flare within her. From the faint duvinity left behind, this was divine interference.

Her counterpart with the same autority as her had manipulated the very structure of the queen's being, folding two souls into one body with surgical precision. It was craftsmanship of the highest order. Dangerous. Intimate. Irreversible at her current stage.

Keles tested the weave. There was no safe way to undo it, to separate them now would mean annihilating both.

Her anger dissipated as quickly as it had risen. What was done was done.

With acceptance, came understanding which settled heavily upon her. If she had been present, fully attentive, this would not have occurred unnoticed. She could have intervened. She could have contested the act. She could have prevented her counterpart from altering a mortal queen in such a fundamental way.

But she had been away and in her absence, something irreversible had taken place.

Just like that, Keles realized she owed them. Not because the king was righteous nor because the queen was innocent.

But because a boundary under her jurisdiction had been crossed while she was not watching.

Responsibility lingered where oversight failed.

She could not undo the fusion but she could offer help in another way.

She would bless the king after all, but not with fortune or power. She would give him knowledge.

That night, as the king lay in uneasy sleep, Keles reached down to stir his dreams.

The vision would be sudden but clear.

He would see a field split by a river. Two currents flowing into one another until they became indistinguishable. He would see a throne balanced upon shifting earth. He would see a shadow behind him, always present.

With this dream was also a time limited blessing where the king sight would be the same as hers, the king would see souls just as she does and that was enough.

Enough for the king to know that something within his queen was more than it seemed.

Enough to tread carefully, enough to prepare. It was the only repayment she could offer.

A warning disguised as revelation.

Keles withdrew her gaze from the mortal world and allowed her eyes to close.

It had only been a short while she was gone, yet so much had shifted. Death shamans had risen. Clans and gangs had formed. A mortal king had stolen from a god. A queen carried a fused soul.

Too much had occurred in her absence.

She needed a full accounting.

Her siblings were resting. Their presences dimmed, withdrawn into cycles of restoration. She had so much to ask them but instead, she decided to summon her herald "Wardenwild".

Wardenwild would know.

He had remained when she departed. He had watched the first sacrifices fall. He had witnessed the birth of the first clan and the first theft. If there were patterns hidden beneath these events, he would have traced them.

But before she called him fully into her presence, a different signal brushed against her awareness.

Two distinct signatures.

Familiar.

Two presences stood at the threshold of her dominion, requesting entry. Her daughter and her son.

They were knocking.

Keles lips curved faintly. Even as civilizations formed and gods meddled with mortal queens, motherhood remained.

"Let them enter," she whispered into the fabric of her realm.

Meanwhile back in Ikenga's realm which now echoed with the aftermath of celebration.

Bodies were sprawled in careless heaps across the open grounds. Laughter had faded into heavy breathing. Treant limbs tangled with stone benches. Aqua lay half-submerged in a pool he had conjured mid-celebration. Even Osisi, whose physiology resembled an ancient tree more than flesh, leaned sideways against Brix, both lost to intoxicated slumber.

It had to be acknowledged.

Ikem had outdone himself.

His brewery was no ordinary craft.

He had managed to create a brew that did not merely dull the mind or inflame the senses, it affected the soul. A fermentation of essence itself. It bypassed physical resistance, slipping directly into spiritual channels.

Even treant physiology dense, resistant to corruption had succumbed. Ikenga surveyed the scene with quiet satisfaction, this too was growth in his eyes.