DARK LORE
This Is Strength
Prompt #18 — The possession
Abike leaped at the Ifa priest, the bloody stumps of her fingers armed like talons, the remnants of her teeth bared like fangs. Rage burbled out in guttural snarls from her lips.
Her chest brimmed with the multitude of evils she planned for him. More than the need to break off the chains that pulled her to the iroko trees, she wanted to wrench his jaws apart or pound them into a bloody pulp — seal them into deafening silence just like she had done with the others.
It wasn’t the amulets he was pushing in her face or the white circle that burned her when she tried to leap across it that infuriated her. It was the words he was saying — the declarations tumbling out of his chapped lips — that grated against her frayed nerves.
“You know nothing about weakness. Where were you and your deity on that night when my stepmother…”
She gritted her teeth as memories of the blunt machete smashing against her tender fingers merged with the ugly chorus: “Why did you let my son steal from my pot?”
“Abike, you must be strong and fight that which is within you,” he replied, as though he hadn’t heard her.
In that moment, she knew he wasn’t too different. He was like everyone else — to him, she was female. She didn’t matter. She was powerless. It was because of his kind that she had walked into the forest that midnight and become what no one could ignore.
Her body quaked like a thing that held within it a hundred tornadoes and volcanoes as she fought the force within her seeking an escape.
“I am strong. This is strong,” she yelled, more to herself than to the priest.
Because for her, possession wasn’t a weakness — it was her strength.
