The Goldweight: Cover Reveal and Sneak Peek

At long last, we have reached the end of the road. Here's your exclusive early access to the final installment in OTC 3: The Okonore Trilogy. Book 3, The Goldweight, will be yours on 16th October.

As usual, the work of my brilliant illustrator friend, Jeffrey Kaz Aninkorah, is unmatched. Below is an excerpt from The Goldweight.

If I felt like my world had been turned upside-down, I couldn’t even imagine what it felt like for the spider who was perched next to my left arm, all silvery hairy legs and dark starburst patterns, looking as powerful a picture of despondency as a tarantula could possibly look. I was sure I didn’t look much better.

The tarantula in question—of the species Heteroscodra maculata, to be precise—happened to be my distant aunt, several times and a couple of centuries removed. Her name was Asɔ. She also happened to be a witch who had been born in the late 18th century, had been killed in the early 19th century, and was only alive right now in the 21st century by virtue of trickery and magic.

Over the past few weeks, Asɔ, myself, and all the other members of the WhatsApp group known as #TeamTarantula, had been faced with one stunning revelation after another. But this one? This one felt to me less like a stunner and more like a nuclear bomb.

“I can’t believe it,” I mumbled. “I just can’t. Of all people, Dr. Koranteng?”

I sat on an armchair in the hotel room I was sharing with Asɔ and my friend Kess, during our “academic research excursion” in Kumasi. My back was ramrod straight and my hands rested as still on the chair’s arms as Asɔ currently was. I felt dizzy, unmoored, and slightly sick. At the moment, it really didn’t help that my mind was full of static noise. It was like this every time I was close to Asɔ or one of her suman; evidence of our connection, like an app constantly running in the background. But right now, it was just making me feel overwhelmed.

The only thing keeping me grounded was the warmth of my girlfriend Kuukua’s fingers, intertwined with my own. She’d pulled up the only other chair in the room and seated herself next to me. Out of habit, I tried to calm myself down by focusing on her face. Kuukua Annan was the most beautiful girl I had ever met. Her skin was dark, her face was smooth like she was immune to puberty—although the rest of her body proved that she definitely wasn’t. But this was not the best time to be thinking about such things.

“After what you told us about how your family and Dr. Koranteng met?” Kuukua said. “I’m sorry, but the red flags were literally right there.”

“I’m sorry, Yaw,” said NK, the newest addition to our friend group and also Kuukua’s roommate at our new boarding school, where we had just completed our first semester. NK and Kess sat awkwardly on the bed. As usual, they looked a comical sight together—Kess with his larger-than-average sized head and NK with her athletic legs that seemed to take up three-fourths of her body and made her the fastest runner I’d ever met. “But Kuukua is right.”

I knew she was right. But I didn’t want her to be right. I still wanted to believe the best of my unofficial godfather, the old man who had looked out for me and my family almost since the moment I was born. I didn’t want to believe that my friendly “uncle,” Dr. Koranteng, was actually the evil wizard Ahenkorah, who had killed auntie Asɔ all the way back in 1817 and totally decimated her body.

But that was the bomb the aboatia, Maame Abom, had just dropped on us, the reason why I was sitting stunned in this hotel room. The aboatia—a type of magical, dwarf-like, forest-dwelling trickster—had had no reason to lie. In fact, when she’d dropped the bomb, she’d been at her most unguarded, bragging about having won an ↄware game against us even though we had that most legendary of tricksters, the Ananse, on our side. Little did she know that while she had won the game, we, too, had escaped with what we came for: a small, iron stone that had been hidden among the seeds of the ↄware set. It was the second of three suman that contained pieces of Asɔ’s fragmented spirit.

Having accomplished our mission, we should have felt triumphant. But the mood had been dampened by the bombshell.

Within the last twelve months, I had discovered that my best friend—now girlfriend, Kuukua Annan—was the youngest in a hereditary legacy of Ananses, where “Ananse” was not necessarily a name, but a title, passed on from parent to child. I’d discovered that it wasn’t just Kuukua and her father—the current Ananse, whom, Kuukua would succeed—but me, my friends, and even my high school principal, Mr. Kafui Dotse, who, in some ways, corresponded to folktale characters from the Akan Kwaku Ananse legends. I’d found out that I myself belonged to the lineage of Ↄkↄnↄre Yaa, which was characterized by racially convoluted genealogies and a randomized system of inherited magic; and that I, apparently, had inherited some of that magic, as had my aunt Asɔ, centuries earlier. And yet, none of those discoveries felt like they’d rocked me nearly as hard as this one.

“I have a really bad feeling about the fact that he’s helping us,” NK added.

It was a feeling I shared but wished I didn’t. I also wanted to know why Dr. Koranteng would kill Asɔ and completely decimate her body, only to befriend the family of a distant relative of hers a couple of centuries down the line. Did he know that Asɔ was still alive—albeit, as a tarantula—and that we were trying to find the scattered pieces of her spirit so that we could help her to finally die? If so, was that why he was helping us? Because he wanted Asɔ dead once and for all? It was his intel that had pointed us in Maame Abom’s direction; if not for him, we might still be looking for the second suman by now.

I felt a headache coming on, from the mere attempt to slow down my cascading thoughts. Feeling helpless, I focused once more on Kuukua’s face, on the Ananse Ntentan-shaped birthmark above her eyebrow. Whether or not my girlfriend knew it, she was often the reason I even managed to hold myself together at all, lately.

Kuukua’s face was grim with concentration as she worked through the puzzle of Ahenkorah with much more efficiency than anyone else in the room. “Alright, here’s what I know,” she said finally. “Number one: none of this is a coincidence for Dr. Koranteng, or Ahenkorah, or whatever he calls himself. He’s been stalking you since you were born, and he’s been stalking you especially hard since Asɔ showed up last month.” I cringed at the use of the word “stalking.” It was still difficult not to think of him as my eccentric, friendly uncle.

“Number two: Ahenkorah is like, way weaker than he used to be. The evil wizard who was powerful enough to try taking over the entire Asante kingdom now needs a dwarf to give him a magic walking stick for extra strength? Nah, at this point, he’s being held together by vibes and prayers. He’s a whole dinosaur that should already have been extinct.”

Before we’d left Maame Abom’s shop, Kuukua’s father had pressured the aboatia to give us more details about the walking stick she’d sold to Ahenkorah. Apparently, it worked something like a power bank. It “charged” by drawing strength from a person’s body, and when it was in use, it supplied that stored energy to whoever was holding it. Maybe it was old age; Ahenkorah was, at this point, more than two hundred years old. But if he’d bought the walking stick from Maame Abom, it definitely suggested he was finding it a little hard to keep up.

“Number three,” Kuukua continued, “Like NK said, the fact that he’s trying to help us is so not a good sign. But if he already knows about our plan, what we need to figure out right now is what his plan is. And since his plan is probably evil like he is, we need to make sure it doesn’t work.”

Sometimes, I appreciated Kuukua for how blunt she could be, but this was, like, my godfather she was talking about. “What if his plan isn’t evil?” I asked weakly.

In response, Kuukua gave me a look that said, But of course it is. You have to be out of your mind not to see that it is.

“If what he wants is Asɔ dead,” I continued, with a little more confidence, “is that really so bad if it’s what Asɔ wants, too?”

To that, at least, nobody voiced any objection.

I turned my gaze towards the silvery, patterned Togo Starburst tarantula who hadn’t moved a centimeter in the last half-hour. “Asɔ,” I called softly. “What do you want?”

Asɔ, who understood only local languages, mainly Akan, had been totally left out of our English conversation. However, whenever I spoke English to her, as long as I was speaking directly to her, she could understand me perfectly. The two of us had a telepathic connection that translated our words to each other because we shared blood and, apparently, family magic. For me, hearing Asɔ felt a bit like hearing a less fluid version of Siri performing text-to-speech translation.

Peace, Asɔ said to me. Weary as she was, her voice in my head sounded even softer than usual, but it was the exhaustion which, even in her almost-robotic tone, threatened to break my heart.

About 200 years ago, Asɔ had just barely succeeded in protecting the Asante stool from Ahenkorah’s juju-powered usurpation plan. She’d lost her life—and any hope of reviving her physical body—in the process. She’d prepared for the former, but not the latter. Her backup plan—infusing pieces of her spirit into three magical objects, called suman, and dispersing them across the world with a spell and the help of the Ananse at the time—had backfired. Sure, it had made it impossible for her to truly die, but with the pieces of her spirit so far apart in the scattered suman, it had been impossible to manifest her consciousness either… until last month, when she’d spontaneously appeared in Kuukua’s room as a tarantula.

With no body and a disjointed spirit, Asɔ had basically been floating in oblivion for the last two hundred years. At the end of last year, in 2017, she was able to reconstruct her consciousness for one reason: the suman she’d created had traveled so widely across the world that they’d landed, once again, remarkably close to their places of origin: the country now known as Ghana. With the pieces of her spirit now so close to each other, Asɔ had enough strength to manifest herself physically, in ahoboa form. In Akan tradition, an ahoboa was an animal that witches sometimes used as their “familiar,” or, in Asɔ’s case, their alternative body.

Asɔ had been seriously amnesiac when she’d first appeared, and had believed herself to have been cursed. After being reunited a couple of weeks ago with the first of her suman—a silver cowrie—she had gotten her memories back and realized that she hadn’t been cursed, but killed. And now she was finding out that the person who had killed her was still alive and kicking, and that her nephew from several generations down the line called him “uncle.”

The second of Asɔ’s suman—the iron stone we’d just tricked out of the aboatia—sat in my pocket, nearly forgotten in the face of the Ahenkorah revelation. But if I was being honest, there was more than one reason I hadn’t given it to Asɔ yet.

A few weeks ago, when I’d returned the first of her suman to her—a silver cowrie—I had felt the force of her memories returning so strongly that I’d thrown up on my girlfriend’s father’s garage floor, passed out, and lucid dreamed my way to Kumasi. Who knew what would happen if I were to reunite her with the iron stone right now? I needed to be alert to figure out what our next steps were. There was still one more suman to find, and we would have to leave Kumasi in three days to get back to Accra in time to prepare for our second semester of boarding school. I had no time to be indisposed.

Freedom and peace, said Asɔ, sounding so tired that it made me want to cry. After centuries of semi-conscious restlessness, all my auntie wanted was to finally be allowed to rest in peace. Why couldn’t she have that?

There and then, through my own exhaustion, I decided that nobody was going to stop her from getting what she wanted. She deserved it too much.

“But what I don’t get,” Kess complained, “is that, how can Ahenkorah still be alive?”

Kuukua responded, “Juju,” just as I said, “It doesn’t matter.”

Everyone turned to me, wearing the same quizzical expression.

“What do you mean, ‘It doesn’t matter’?” Kess wanted to know. “You just found out your creepy uncle is an immortal wizard who murdered your witch aunt!”

“Yeah, I did,” I said. As my resolution gathered inside me, I felt the strength returning to my limbs. “And whatever his game is, our mission is still the same. We’re going to find the third and last of Asɔ’s suman, reunite the pieces of her spirit, and then she can finally pass on for good.”

“Aren’t you worried that Ahenkorah is going to try to stop us?” asked Kess.

“He wants Asɔ dead, doesn’t he?” NK reminded us. “So why would he try to stop us?”

I nodded in her direction, because she had a point. Kuukua still looked uneasy about it, but before she could object, there was a knock on our hotel room door, and—chalk it up to being spooked by the discovery that we’d recently been face-to-face with an evil, murderous wizard, but—everyone except Kuukua nearly jumped out of their skin.

“Come in!” Kuukua called.

Her father walked in, a cloudy mixture of emotions on his face. He seemed preoccupied, and preoccupation, as far as the Annans were concerned, meant that some trickster concoction was brewing in the background of their minds. In the foreground, Uncle Jo was full of fatherly concern, directed not towards his daughter, but, a little to my surprise, towards me.

“Yaw, my boy,” he said, “ɛtesɛn?”

I tried to offer a smile, but it probably looked more like a grimace. “I think I’ll be okay,” I said.

He nodded back at me, understanding all the things I wasn’t saying, with that frightening, nearly psychic level of Ananse intuition. “I assume we’re proceeding with the mission as planned?”

I nodded, not daring to look any of my friends in the face.

“Alright,” said Uncle Jo. “Well, in that case, I have a less than noble reason for bring up some very unfortunate news.”

“Oh no!” groaned Kuukua. “Who died?”

NK frowned at her. “Kuukua, why is that the first thing that comes to mind?”

But I was looking at Uncle Jo, because he should have been laughing at Kuukua’s melodrama, but he was not. The Ananse looked at each of us in turn and asked, “You wouldn’t all happen to have brought some formal, black attire along, would you?”

The OTC project is finally coming to an end, but I'd appreciate it if you told a friend. Send them the link to the On the Ceiling website and keep the Ananse/Okonore magic alive.

Until Thursday,

Akotz (the Spider Kid)