The mountainside plaza brims with millions of scaled ones – with <span class="mu-i">Ngwenya</span>, and never before have so many been gathered into one place. Before the plaza, an enormous temple – a vast, ordered assembly of slate, hewn from a neighboring cliffside. The temple shudders with the weight of their bodies; the breeze that laps up at the temple-top is saturated with squeals, grunts, coughing barks and harsh chanting of the lizardmen below. They chant with religious fervor to their master, their grandfather, their priest, their prophet, and in return, Umzukulwana regards his spawn from his obsidian throne upon the pinnacle of the temple, with his legendary spear in hand – looking upon them, the old, dull hunger rises in his gut once again.

Not for flesh, but for power.

How long has he prepared for this day? It is unknowable. It is not the way of his people - of the <span class="mu-i">Ngwenya</span>, to tally such things. It is said that are only the two cycles - the little cycle of the morning, the day, the evening, the night, and the Great Cycle of muddy wet season, brief frost-time, tempestuous spring, sweltering dry season - and they are endless. Umzukulwana does not know how old he is – and does not care, because he knows that he is strongest.

He will always be strongest.

Victory is finally here, after so much time... how many generations has he fathered, feasted upon and pruned weakness from? How many of his scaled children were crushed into mortar for the assembly of this temple district? His bloody maw, still drenched with the blood of his morning feast, opens widely, and his tongue waggles grotesquely in excitement. Above, the sun reaches its zenith in an endless blue sky – the time of awakening is here!

Umzukulwana rises to his clawed feet, his mighty claws gripping the midnight stone – his limbs are heavy with muscle; fresh scars are laid over ancient ones upon his weathered hide. His sturdy tail drags heavily over the roughened stones of the temple-top, the platform scored deeply by his mighty talons over countless sermons. His keen eyes, undimmed by time, gaze below at the endless number of his children and grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren – they roar, scream, cough, bark and hiss in adulation, a roiling ocean of scale and talon and reptilian flesh and empty bellies. The angled stone of the plaza has been carefully constructed with sluice-ways and drain pipes, leading directly below Umzukulwana’s temple platform – underneath, the central pit beckons, a bore-hole excavated over long cycles for today’s final ritual.

<span class="mu-i">The time of awakening is here.</span>