Battle of Kirina

It is into this hour, this fragile threshold between darkness and light, that the story of an empire must begin, not with Mansa Musa himself, not yet, but with the man whose bones and blood and unbending will carved out the very throne that Musa would one day inherit.

That man is Sundiata Keita, and in the year 1235 on a field called Kirina, he is about to become a king.

The battlefield at Kirina does not look like the birthplace of an empire.

It looks instead like any other stretch of West African plain: red earth cracked in places from the dry season, scattered acacia trees standing sentinel with their flat crowns, the horizon shimmering faintly with heat even at this early hour.

But the air itself carries a charge, a tension that the birds seem to sense, for they have gone quiet in the branches, and even the insects seem to still their endless droning.

Not crawled, not shuffled.

Walked, tall and unbroken, toward a baobab tree and tore its leaves down himself and carried them back to his mother's cooking pot with the iron rod bent permanently into the shape of his desperate grip.

This is the man who now stands at Kirina, no longer the crippled boy, but a warrior king in his prime, having spent years in exile gathering allies, learning the arts of war and diplomacy in the courts of neighboring kingdoms, waiting with the patience of a man who has already survived the worst that fate could offer him.

... as a way to kill him.

So eventually, Sundiata, once he's gathered, gathered the clans, Sundiata, uh, his army goes and he faces Somauro, so the Battle of Kirina in 1235.

Now, during the battle, and this is where you start playing, um, Holding Out for a Hero, um, Sundiata looses his arrow, wounding, um, Somauro, because the w- only way to defeat a chicken is to become a chicken.

Whoa.