Page 40 of Dark Witch: Entangled Fates

Ani nodded. "That is what the scriptures say, but I doubt it. Do you know why?"

"Enlighten me."

"Patterns. The universe is made of patterns, and things repeat themselves. So, if there is a hierarchy in the physical world, there is also a hierarchy in the spirit world. They might not use the same criteria for who is better than whom, but I am sure they have them. Besides, can you imagine how boring it would be without any intrigue and backstabbing?"

Sofri shook her head. "You are as incorrigible and irreverent now as you were when we were girls. You just mask it with a lot of royal attitude."

Ani canted her head. "I am a free thinker, Sofri. I never accept dogma."

"I know." Sofringhati reached for her hand. "That is why you are the unofficial leader of the resistance; its beating heart."

Ani squeezed her friend's hand. "That was very nice of you to say." She glanced at Aria. "Is it time?"

The young goddess dipped her head. "Yes, my queen. I will check if Aru and the heir are ready."

"Annani likes to be called the Clan Mother," Ani said. "I think it says a lot about her."

Sofri nodded. "It does. She is a shepherd at heart."

Ani hoped that she and Sofri were not projecting their wishes onto Annani and making her out to be someone she was not. What if she was more like her grandfather than they realized?

They did not need another Eternal Queen who would do everything to stay in power, no matter who she needed to murder to do that.

From what Aru had told them, though, Annani had left the leadership of her clan to her children and functioned more as a spiritual figurehead than an active ruler. It indicated that she was not power-hungry.

But who knew?

She might develop a taste for it like her grandfather had. El had been a brilliant leader who had united Anumati's factions and brought peace and prosperity before his heart had turned to stone.

"They are ready, my queen," Aria said.

"Send my warm greetings to Annani, her son, and his mate if they are with her."

Aria closed her eyes for a moment. "They are, and they send their warm greetings as well. Your granddaughter awaits her first lesson on Anumati's history."

There was so much to tell, so much history and knowledge to impart. But where to begin? How to condense the complex, often turbulent story of their world into a narrative that would both inform and inspire?

Ani took a deep breath, casting her mind back to the earliest days of Anumati, to the tales passed down through the generations of gods and goddesses, some of them recorded by oracles from the past, some by scribes and scholars.

"Not much is known of the early days of our kind's creation. There are legends, of course. The Kra-ell believe in the Mother of All Life who created every living being in the universe, and they claim that we believed in her as well before we lost our way and severed our connection to the land, deciding that we were gods—the creators of our world and many others."

She sighed. "But I am getting ahead of my story."

"When our civilization was young, millions of years ago, our lifespans were not endless like they are now. On average, we lived about a thousand Earth years, which is long compared to your humans, but a blink of an eye compared to our lifespans now. There were conflicts, as in any civilization, power struggles, and wars, but there were also long periods of peace, during which we lived in harmony, exploring the boundaries of our abilities and shaping the world around us. As the eons passed, our numbers grew, our technology advanced, and space travel became a necessity, first for the harvesting of resources and later for colonization. Naturally, power struggles and differences in opinions created division. Factions arose, each with their own vision of what Anumati should be and how its people should live and govern themselves."

Ani twined the chain of her pendant around her finger. "Most of the struggle was political and economic, and the leading families who owned the large manufacturing conglomerates became the royalty of Anumati. They controlled the genetics labs and dictated who got which traits. Those who had the means invested in their children's future, giving them a genetic advantage over those with lesser resources, and over time, a huge divide formed between those who called themselves royals and those who they called commoners."

30

ANNANI

"So that was how it began," Kian murmured as Aru paused to listen to his sister Aria's telepathic relay. "The divide between the glowing and non-glowing Anumatians."

"I wonder if that schism was the start of the resistance," Syssi said.

Annani had a feeling that even more complex political machinations had been at play in those early days of their ancestral civilization. Regrettably, it seemed to be a universal constant that in every society there were leaders and there were followers. And more often than not, those who rose to power came from the privileged echelons, even when they claimed to champion the cause of the downtrodden masses.

It was almost never about the masses. It was always about power and wealth.

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