Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

Prologue - When I'm a Magician

Two little girls run hand in hand across the magician's college campus, so small they may as well be ants on the purple lawns. The place is devoid of big girls for the summer break.

Without students for scale, these little ones dreaming of all the magic hidden beyond the walls of lecture halls, many of them floating overhead, could almost be mistaken for the pupils who actually go here.

On campus, the summer weather is held to an ideal warmth and kissed with an ideal breeze. Spells push clouds across the sky in imaginative shapes at times, and clear them to reveal an ideal blue at others.

The two run together as if running to their favorite ice cream place, a relay and not a race, because if one falls behind, the other will cheer her until she catches up.

The shorter of the two, Amafu, lets out squealing laughs as if they're beyond her control, one laugh pushed out by each stomp of her running feet. Every stitch Amafu wears dances with magic animations; on her hairband clouds billow and turn from gray to blue, shooting stars cross her black slippers and wink out, and a rainbow spreads in an arc over her lace blouse.

Her plaits, braided with a spell to make them perfect in seconds, contrast with her taller friend's. Inyanga's braids were done with hands and love by her Grandmama Amandla, sans magic. Little curls break loose, imperfectly perfect. What some might call frizz, Inyanga calls her baby curls.

Both girls' eyes are indigo set alight with the flame of immortality, an eternal life revealing itself like an electric fire in their pupils. It flickers within them like infinite brilliance behind their eyes, like the joy of a million possibilities. Flamed with potential.

It's easy to see they're friends and not sisters from the way they hold hands and run. Easy to see they chose each other. Hands clasped, they run from Kyuma, the umama of Inyanga, who took them on this visit. Kyuma traverses the grass toward the lecture halls with more patient steps.

"Slow down," Kyuma called in a loud musical voice that traveled well on the silent lawn. "If you do not wait for me now, you will just have to wait for me when we get to al-Maysan Hall. I'm not speeding myself up any time."

Ahead of them, al-Maysan looks like a moon that dropped to the earth, just not all the way down. It stopped a few hundred feet up, and it levitates and slowly rotates in the foreground of a field of other floating school buildings. Most of the others are shaped like skyscrapers, some with edifices growing up from the ground, then breaking in the middle as if to let the sky through, and continuing on again a thousand feet up, like office towers hanging from the cielo.

The girls stop and freeze like statues, look back and freeze like statues, and a combination of trotting and sprinting steps bring them to the courtyard outside and below al-Maysan, the most sublime magic school building, the one they always race to see.

It only gets better as they get closer and it gets bigger, and now that they're close they drop hands, stop, and stare. It's a spherical levitating lecture hall, and in its core, the girls know, the library has no gravity, so if you want to brave the stacks, you have no choice but to fly.

As Kyuma takes her time arriving, eyes on al-Maysan herself the whole time she's walking, those eyes, purple starfire filled as well, get glassy with tears, thinking of the day Inyanga might step into a link and teleport inside the hall named after the Orion constellation, perhaps with her best friend Amafu by her side.

Al-Maysan is another name for Orion, meaning 'the shining one.'

Done being statues, the time for handholding was done too. Amafu tagged Inyanga, and they were off again running as she dashed straight into an azaleawood tree, orange petals at the roots mirroring the ones in the highest branches glaring like coal fires or firefly butts in a bioluminescent flare.

It didn't take Inyanga long to tag her back, because her short friend may be a ball of energy, but Inyanga was all legs, even at eight and a half, and the chase reversed, with Amafu coming after her friend, feet pounding with the same rhythm as her laughs. Inyanga, being the quieter one, let out not a peep as she focused on getting away, but when she got close to the hedges bordering the maze to the entrance of al-Maysan Hall, a call from umama drew her back.

"Come back now, you're not going in that hedge maze and getting lost!" Kyuma shouted.

And as she skirted long to obey the command of umama Inyanga, Amafu darted in and tagged her, reversing the game again. Yet now when Inyanga uncurled her long limbs into a sprint not even a cheetah would be able to outrun, it wasn't so much to tag Amafu as to capture her and hug her and chant, "Magic school, magic school, here we come! We're here! One day we're going to go here and I'm going to levitate you into the highest floralwood," and Amafu said, "Promise?" and Inyanga answered her, "I promise. I'll levitate you to the very top. Then you do me!"

Drawing a purple twig she had hidden up her sleeve, Amafu said, "Evitatelay otay optay oftay lillywoodlay eetray anchbray ighesthay!" As if blasted away, Inyanga retreated backwards and just for fun or to see if she would catch air, she jumped backwards as she ran back and both girls laughed and screamed.

Seeing that her feet were still planted on solid purple grass and not on the branch of a tree, Inyanga said, "Was the spell wrong or did you run out of magic? Forget to pay your bill, Ama?"

"You know my spell casting is on point and you know I always forget things, so why are you even asking?"

All afternoon they would play with sapphire and amethyst floralwood twigs and pretend that they could cast spells, and every summer when primary let out, they would beg to come back.

Thank you for reading Inyanga's Star. I am grateful to all readers, and if you can leave a ⭐️ for me, I will always be in your debt. Starfire fuels my writing and will help this book soar high.

This prologue is brand new, so please let me know what you think! I'm so happy to share a new opening with you. Thank you so much for all your help.

And now, the prologue continues, in Part 2!