Superhuman: Nikki Sanders

Ezinma came awake slowly. She had fallen asleep sometime during the day from sheer exhaustion. She had been left with her hands and feet in shackles for days now without as much as a sip of water. Sometimes, she believed that they had forgotten all about her and she would just die here without anyone even realizing it. Not that anyone cared anyway.

Ezinma was Osu,  an outcast, sub-human, inferior to the Diala. She had been brought to the king's palace as a slave when she was just seven. She didn’t even know where she had come from originally and hardly remembered what life was like before her days of servitude, but she reckoned it must have been difficult because everyone talked about the outcasts with revulsion and disdain. As far as the villagers were concerned, they were the embodiment of evil, the vector of misfortune. Even among the slaves, the Osu were at the  very bottom of the barrel. 

The curse of the gods had come, with skin white as the shawl of Ala's priestess. Ezinma had never seen an albino before but she was sure they could not be as frightening as these oye eboe. Even though the king had embraced them and welcomed them into the village, exchanging gifts with them, Ezinma knew they were a curse from the gods and would only bring trouble upon the land. 

The stories from villages far away said the white men had taken slaves and put them on monstrous beasts upon the ocean banks. Some people said they sacrificed these people to their strange gods whose messengers were the monstrous beasts. Some said they took them away to their land at the edge of the world. 

Ezinma knew the king wanted the favor of the white men and their gods. She knew he coveted their gifts, like the bewitched ihe ojoo that now stood against one wall of the hut in which she'd been held. On the surface, the thing looked like a perfectly still pool of dark water, only it was completely solid to the touch. Even the carved patterns on the wooden frame that surrounded that terrifying surface was strange, like nothing Ezinma had ever seen before. It could show you your perfect reflection, much better than looking in the muddy waters of the Oramiriukwa ever could. In fact, it was as if your very own twin had been summoned by the evil spirits within the thing. The white men had revealed their ihe ojoo during Iwa-ji and the king had been bewitched by it. Even if they had asked him for his own mother, he would have given her up just to have the white man's special gift. In order to have just that  one piece of evil that wasn’t even as tall as she was, he had given them over three hundred of his people, both slaves and free. He had even offered the white men yams before making an offering to the ancestors. And they called her evil and cursed. The king had committed the greatest type of Aru Ala, an abomination and insult to Ala, as far as she was concerned, and she was sure there would be grave repercussions.

The white men had put the slaves given to them in shackles. They had then inspected their new possessions like goats on Orie market day and had separated them into groups. They had all looked Ezinma over in the same lascivious way the king’s chief steward had started to look at her, right before he had started to force his way with her. You are Osu, he would say. You are common property for me to use as I wish. When the white men put her and four other slave girls in a separate hut, she knew what they had in mind. They were definitely not thinking of sacrifices to their gods. They had come for the other girls in the last few days and she knew that if she didn’t die of starvation first, she would follow suit soon enough.

The men came at dusk. There were five or six of them. She couldn’t really tell because everything was blurry  to her. They were drunk and rowdy and the first of them didn’t even wait to take off her shackles before trying to spread her legs apart. The others cheered him on and in the fading light of the sun, Ezinma saw her reflection in the evil gift of the evil man who was going to show her no mercy. Rather than look frightened or even defeated like she felt, her reflection gave her a defiant half smile and then winked. It was the last thing she saw before the world went pitch black.

When she came to, her evil twin was gone but had left carnage in her wake. The scene around her was so gory that her stomach heaved and she threw up a string of foul tasting, green bile from her sunken stomach unto a lifeless face whose unseeing eyes stared grotesquely at her. She looked around her in horror.  It was as if her evil twin had gone through the hut with death's scythe, slashing men to pieces, both black and white. Outside the hut was the same, the palace courtyard was strewn with mutilated bodies. The only sign of life was from a few other female slaves cowering at the entrance of another hut. 
Run! The thought came to her clearly like someone had said the words out loud. She dashed back into the hut and hefted the white man’s magical gift onto her head with her bloodied hands, marveling at the ease with which she picked it up. It was evil, no doubt, but at that moment, she just knew somehow that it was her only chance of survival.