Disclaimer: I do not own Marvel, Twilight, or the Chronicles of Narnia. Plenty here belongs to mythology or history, but not to me.

Part 1: The Kenge

Chapter 1: Awake

Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

Her ears woke first. A sudden cacophony of sounds exploded into her lethargic consciousness. It was the unrecognizable scritching and scratching sound that first inspired her to open her eyes. She struggled, as if her eyelids were dusty from disuse, like a rusty curtain rod.

She blinked.

Golden light danced off a thousand floating, swirling specks of glitter in the air. At first she thought she awoke into a blizzard, until she realized she could see the brilliant purple of a jacaranda blooming in the distance.

Dust. She could see the dust. Every single, individual particle exuded a myriad of shades of ochre, taupe, beige, and ivory in the rays of light.

She lifted her eyes and noticed the intricately woven grass thatched roof above her, attached to circular wattle and daub walls. An open doorway revealed the jacaranda regally raining violet petals on all her loyal banana tree subjects below, violently green in the late afternoon sun.

She became conscious that she not only could see the banana trees, but she could see the individual veins of each leaf, each ant crawling up the base, and even the delicate pairs of antennae on each ant.

Her brain momentarily swirled like the dust particles in the anomalous sensory overload.

Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

Bella quickly sat upright and found herself on a simple foam mattress covered by a plaid blanket on the dirt floor of the hut. Squatting directly across from her came the source of the noise.

Silver claws drew patterns in the dust at the feet of a figure garbed entirely in black, darker than the shadows that first shielded him from view.

She sprang to her feet and automatically crouched into a defensive posture, surprising herself both in the litheness of her movement and the existence of the defensive instinct. She stared at her stance momentarily before turning back to the figure.

He continued to crouch in the shadows, flecks of light reflecting off of claws and the silver claw-like necklace around dark shoulders.

"Who are you and why am I here?" Bella asked, her throat suddenly on fire as she took in the scent that surrounded her and heard the rhythmic beating of a heart. She threw her hands around her neck in surprise and tried in vain to swallow the flames.

"I could ask you the same question," the figure replied in a deep, male voice lilted in the soft cadences of an accent she could not identify.

"My name is Bella Swan. I do not know where I am and I do not know why I am here."

The figure stood to his full height, towering at least a foot taller than Bella. The entirety of his broad, muscular body remained veiled by form-fitting black regalia crowned with a cat-eared mask.

"Bella Swan, you are in the kingdom of Wakanda," he replied. "And we do not know why you are here."

ooooooooooooooooo

"T'Challa, what have you done?" the old king asked wearily. He rubbed his creaking hands over the thick crease lines on his wizened forehead.

"Nakia said…," T'Challa began to respond, but the old king interrupted.

"Hapana. Do not tell me Nakia had a dream. Nakia will not be the one to deal with the tears of the mothers who have lost their children as prey to a young mazimwi," T'Chaka replied. He slowly lowered himself onto the brightly cushioned chair near him, gripping the sides of the chair to maintain his balance. His eyes, now dulled by a lifetime of being the eyes of his people, strained to see the distant mountains past the villages guarding the borders of their fortified capital. He turned to his son.

"You should not have let her live through the first night. Why did you not free her spirit to join her ancestors and give the girl a chance at peace? Instead you have condemned her to a life of blood. Sometimes death is the greatest mercy."

"Baba, if it was any other dream, I would not have hesitated to free her from her changing body. In my heart, I know I have done the right thing, though I do not yet understand it."

"Sema. Tell me her dream."

"Aya. Before the girl was found, Nakia came to me. In her dream, the spirit of the Black Panther came to her. She bowed and Panther bid her to follow him into the bush. He took her to the base of an acacia tree. There, Panther bowed deeply to a lion larger than a bull elephant. The Lion licked the forehead of Panther and then gave Panther a gift wrapped in bark cloth. Panther unwrapped the gift and found Kenge, a monitor lizard, and Panther tried to throw it away in disgust. Lion took Kenge in his paws, tore off the skin, and Kenge transformed into malaika wa vita."

T'Chaka paused to weigh his thoughts, though they felt like grains of sand being swept by wind in the dry season.

"You are wise, my son. I spoke out of fear and not out of wisdom."

"Nakia's dreams have never been wrong, or I, also, would have been guided by my head and not by my heart."

"How did the girl come to us?"

"We do not know. A boy from the borderlands between Wakanda and Uganda went out to herd his goats and heard a woman screaming. He found the woman writhing like the lost tail of a lizard and he thought she was possessed by a spirit. He fetched the village elders and the mganga. One mzee recognized the bite on her neck and the scar on her hand and called for Zuri. Zuri and I went immediately.

"Zuri first tried to see if his medicines could cure her. But at that point it would have been like telling a half-formed butterfly to become a caterpillar again. She was too far in her transformation to return. So, we took her to a village deep in the bush somehow near Rushenyi. We evacuated the residents and set up a 40 kilometer perimeter to keep her enclosed. We've also placed a tracking device in her earlobe so we can see if she manages to break through the shield. Zuri left me to guard her till she woke and we could see how she behaved."

"When did she wake?"

"A day later she quieted her screams and it was very little time after that she woke and stood. We spoke briefly before she disappeared like a leopard in the forest."

"Did she attack you?"

"Hapana. She found a herd of impala and drank from about three before she hid herself in a tree for a day."

"Did she tell you how she came to our borders?"

"Hapana. She is not from here. She looks young, not much more than twenty. Her accent sounds American."

"Wewe, simwafrika? She is mzungu?"

"Ndiyo."

T'Chaka cursed under his breath. T'Challa met his father's dark eyes with his own.

"Another thing, Baba. The village elders said there were no human footprints in the area the girl was found. There were no vehicles. She did not walk there. The only footprints they found were those of an unusually large lion."

ooooooooooooooooooo

Author's Notes:

First off, while I would prefer to stick with East African legends and mythology, I sometimes pull from other regions when I find them interesting. Please note, this is a bit of a quadruple cross-over. I am combining characters from the Twilight, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Black Panther. The actual characters used from the Chronicles of Narnia are limited (most vanished after The Last Battle so there's not a lot left to work with. My Narnia influence here is seen more in philosophy of writing, i.e. pulling in supernatural creatures and mythology from East African legends into the story line (similar to how C.S. Lewis pulled Anglo-Saxon mythology and creatures into the adventures in Narnia...I'm simply using a different framework for my mythology).

Second, I want to place Wakanda into a geographic and historical place that makes it more believable. Captain America gets to be from Brooklyn and fights in WWII-sure, Hydra might be pretend, but the Nazis were not and the aims of Hydra were not so "out there". Ironman is situated in a real time and real places (Manhattan/Malibu) , even if the story lines are fantasy. The Hulk smashes Harlem. Wakanda receives only the vaguest and most undefined connection to place and time. I suppose one of my goals here is to "Captain America" Wakanda and give it that sense of credibility that comes in tying the fantasy into real life.

In keeping with my second aim, here are two notes on this chapter:

A.) Language: in the Black Panther movie, they speak Xhosa, a South African language. Yet, the fictional country of Wakanda is shown on a map to be in East Africa, or over 2,200 miles away from where Xhosa is spoken. Therefore, I am going to use Swahili as my African language of choice (also a Bantu language but a commonly spoken one across East Africa). Technically Swahili doesn't even make sense to be their main language either as its a trade language that developed from a mixture of Portuguese, Bantu, and Arabic, but it makes more sense than Xhosa in this context...and, if I'm honest, Swahili is easier for me to use than any other potential language in the region. Since the majority of you, dear readers, do not speak Swahili, I'll add in translations at the bottom of each chapter and around phrases characters are speaking to aid in understanding. It would be too boring to have it 100% English.

B.) Location: Wakanda is shown in some cases to be in north western Kenya on Lake Turkana. But, really, who wants to live in the middle of a desert? The Wakandan kingdom doesn't strike me as pastoralist nomads so we will leave the Turkana and Samburu there and move Wakanda to western Uganda/eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Theoretically, an unconquered, uncolonized kingdom of Wakanda maintained their hold during the Scramble for Africa so they maintained their land (from about Masaka to Nebbi on the Uganda side into a good chunk of the Maiko National park on the side of the DRC. This leaves them with the Rwenzori Mountains, Lake Albert, Lake Edward, and a good bit of the White Nile. I envision the Wakandan capital to be near the Rwenzori Mountains, not far from Kasese.) For the purposes of this story, I have not developed a detailed backstory on how they avoided colonization. Maybe I'll add that to a future story. It's enough for here to know that they managed to avoid it.

Translations from Kiswahili to English:

Hapana: no

mazimwi: legendary evil creature that does harm and mischief to humans. Sometimes translated as ogre or goblin. Other times translated as cannibal or man-eater. I am going to expand it to vampire here as another evil creature of legend.

Sema: Speak, tell me.

Kenge: monitor lizard. Very large lizards that grow up to three feet long.

Malaika wa vita: roughly translates to angel of battle or warrior spirit. Malaika are viewed as good spirits sent to help people, sometimes in human form, but sometimes in other forms.

Mganga: this is translated as either traditional healer or shaman. They are healers who work in both the natural and supernatural realms.

Mzee: old person, a descriptive term and a term of respect.

wewe, simwafrika: you, she's not African?

mzungu: originally meant someone who was lost. Currently means someone of European descent or foreigner.

Ndiyo: yes

Baba: father, also a term of respect.