Chapter Text
The night the Matriarch vanished into the forest and did not return, the Super-Eruption of 74,000 BP plunged the hominins into years of cold darkness. They made up names for the catastrophe; names lost among the snowdrifts of time like so many milestones of ancient prehistory. But soon, there were no names left. Ttheir tongues were bound in black knots, frozen in place by the volcanic winter, and all that remained were primeval prayers and cried unheard. Then it was all over.
Light returned in smears of ochre dawns through the clouds. The surviving hominins were hesitant to leave their caves, for the grasslands were dead and black, trees just barely clinging to life. But fearing the worst for the Matriarch, they sent out Adomo to do their bidding of finding her. He traveled for miles with firm and deliberate steps. His eyes probed and scanned every curve of the landscape, but she was nowhere to be found. On the seventh day, he gave up. He rested to recover his strength for the journey back.
When he awoke, before him was a banyan tree that wasn’t there before. Standing bare and leafless, slowly moving, it crackled with electricity as if charged by lightning. At the top of the tree was a pink fleshy tumor-like cranium. Though it had no eyes, he could tell it was staring at him. And when it spoke, he immediately recognized it as the Matriarch. She comforted him with a sweet voice, uttering assurances and promises. Then a stream of matter expelled from the void and formless infinite of her mouth, pouring into the mouth of Adomo. It filled him with visions of the future. He saw his sons and their sons, and he saw the pain and the good and the bad of the men who would follow. A surge of electricity shot through his veins, and he awoke not from unconsciousness but from unknowingness.
In time, he returned to his kinship. He told them of the Matriarch’s evolution and the powers bestowed upon him. With controlled breath, he could fire his neurons to generate a great surge of bio-electricity, allowing him to either heal or hurt; he did not have the language to convey such complex concepts, though. They simply knew that Adomo had been touched, and when he spoke, they would listen with reverence. He demonstrated his abilities by healing an injured fellow of his tribe.
They asked what he wanted in return. He said nothing for himself.
He felt no greed. He only wanted to help his brothers, his sisters. He touched them with his bio-electric power, and they, too, were elevated in mind, filled with his knowledge and understanding. They had not the training to master their powers yet, but they could feel the potential, and they didn’t need magic to unlock their fullest potential. So over the course of many years, Adomo and the tribe continued to evolve, learning to perfect their craft of technology and art and science and medicine, while Adomo taught his own children to master their inherited power.
But one hominini saw it unfair that despite the tribe being touched, only Adomo and his children could actually wield the power. Then two. Then more. Soon, a fracture formed in the tribe. They had grown arrogant and lazy. They demanded more power. Adomo refused, for he knew that without discipline and understanding, the power would corrupt them. But they persisted, and one day, Oncilla, Adomo’s own son, betrayed his father for their sake by taking a sharp blade and removing his heart.
They ate greedily at his heart and flesh and became poisoned, sickened by the bio-electricity now surging through their veins, yet they were still untrained to wield it. It was Oncilla who discovered that they could channel the blood itself