Book I: Father East

Chapter I: The Dominion of the Warm Sea

In an era clear as day, our story begins not with a creation, but with a claiming. You have heard the whispers of the fracture—how our own ancestral hands were turned, coaxed by the influence of Father East. It was the dominion of the sun’s warm sea, a kingdom of water stretching from the Swahili Coast to the ports of Arabia, Persia, and India. Zanzibar was his dark, beating heart. Though his lands wept minerals and oil, his true wealth was a crimson harvest, a relentless tide of lives that built his piers of power and stoked the envy of the world. His hunger sowed war like a plague upon the land, and in the chaos, the complexion of our ancestors began to change, not by nature’s hand, but by a slow fading from the very light that birthed them ...