The Pride That Ate Itself
Nia’s Folly
A Gothic African Folktale
This is not a story of redemption.
This is what happens when ambition becomes a cancer
that consumes everything it touches.
This is what happens when ambition becomes a cancer
that consumes everything it touches.
Nia did not want to hunt.
She wanted to possess the hunt itself.
Her skill was not a gift to the pride —
it was a weapon she sharpened in the dark.
The old lion Kojo saw the rot in her soul.
“The pride is not meat to be consumed,” he warned.
“When you eat your own, you only feast on your future.”
Nia laughed — a sound like bones breaking.
“The future belongs to the strong,” she hissed.
“And I am the strongest.”
She waited for drought, when the pride was weak with thirst.
Then she struck — not at the king, but at his cubs.
One by one they vanished into the long grass, never found.
Kojo charged her in blind rage.
It was what she wanted.
She did not just kill him —
she made a spectacle of his death,
tearing him apart before the pride as a lesson in her new order.
A throne built on betrayal is never stable.
The hunters she recruited with promises of glory
now looked at each other with hungry eyes.
Nia’s reign lasted one moon cycle.
The pride turned on itself.
Hunters became assassins.
Mothers hid their cubs.
The strong preyed on the weak —
until there were no weak left, only the desperate.
When the hyenas came, there was no unity.
Just individual animals, picked off one by one.
Nia fought like a demon —
but even her legendary skill could not save her
from a dozen hungry mouths.
They found what remained of her at dawn —
a patch of bloody grass and the memory of her arrogance.
Old Kojo survived — the last of his pride.
Sometimes, when the wind blows from the east,
he tells young lions of other lands about Nia.
Not as caution.
As a curse.
“Her spirit still walks these plains,” he whispers.
“A lioness made of shadow and hunger,
forever hunting for a pride that no longer exists.”
Some victories are more terrible than defeat.
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