BLACK PANTHER: Page 26 of 26

Publication Date: 29th Aug 2020
Written By: Monolith.
Image Work: Douglas Mangum.
Biography

BIOGRAPHY - page 26

For five long years, the Maroons did nothing. Their operating capacity had been crippled, and M'Baku ordered an end to combat operations while the group rebuilt their manpower and assets. T'Challa was a man of action and could not accept the order to stand down, so he retired to a remote area of the Wakandan Empire. He left the Spear of Bashenga with Nakia, but she eventually came to find T'Challa and force him to accept what it means. N'Yami had shared her suspicions about T'Challa's origins with Nakia before she died, and the sudden appearance of the sacred artifact of Wakanda's first Black Panther in T'Challa's hands only verified the conclusion. As M'Baku prepared to reactive the Maroons as a fighting force, T'Challa returned to their side as a warrior, and possibly, a king. [Black Panther (7th series) #5]

The Maroons' next offensive was to target the heart of the Empire itself, the Archive which was a digital copy of all the Nameless' stolen memories and buried secrets. Purging the Archive would cripple the Empire of its pilfered knowledge and restore the Nameless to their true identities. T'Challa continued to prove he served as a great warrior, but a poor soldier. Charged with retrieving a shipment of raw Vibranium to power to Djalia device they would use on the Archive, he discovered a second cargo aboard the ship of slave prisoners, destined for the mines. T'Challa disobeyed M'Baku's orders and rescued the prisoners along with the Vibranium, bringing hundreds of refugees for the Maroons to care for as well. [Black Panther (7th series) #7-8]

T'Challa and Nakia sought out the Jengu's scale from Agwe, home of the Teku-Maza race like their fallen captain N'Yami. Rival revolutionary factions on the planet each tried to claim the other was secretly in league with the empire, leaving the Maroons uncertain who to trust. Farouk, leader of the faction who held the Jengu herself, captured T'Challa and Nakia to explain what the Jengu truly was. Last of an ancient race of leviathans, the Jengu held the ancestral memory of the Teku-Maza. It was through her scales that the Nameless Teku-Maza regained their knowledge, and how the Djalia device would be empowered. Jafari, leader of the second faction, planned to sell the last Jengu to the Empire to sue for peace. [Black Panther (7th series) #9]

The Empire arrived on Agwe and engaged the Mackandal while T'Challa and Nakia were operating on the planet below. The Manifold and the Askari seemingly secured the Jengu for the empire. However, General Achebe surprisingly turned on Jafari, executing the Teku-Maza traitor and triggered self-destruct mechanisms in all the Askari warriors, in the name of Bast. Emperor N'Jadaka had been busy in the Maroons' absence, it seemed, confronting the Panther God on the ancestral plane and claiming much of her power as his own to become a living god. An aspect of Bast remained, however, and she possessed the body of N'Jadaka's prepubescent daughter. The princess Zenzi and Achebe freed Manifold to restore his true senses, and they had all come to lend their strength to the resistance.

Eden Fesi remembered his time as an Avenger and friend of the crown, but the Maroons only saw him as the killer of N'Yami, straining the new alliance. Bast warned them, however, that their plan to assault the Archive was doomed to fail, for the emperor already knew they were coming and his powers were vast now that he had claimed her might. Instead, she proposed an alternative route to the same goal. With the help of the Jengu's scale, Bast could restore T'Challa's full memories as her avatar. Once restored, he could access the Wakandan plane of ancestral memory which the Djalia device was named for, restoring the Nameless through spiritual intervention. T'Challa accepted Bast's intervention on his mind, and soon he remembered everything that came before his time with the Nameless and the Maroons. He remembered Wakanda Prime, and Shuri, and Ororo. All of it. [Black Panther (7th series) #10-12]

With his mind restored, T'Challa became a man obsessed. The return of his scientific and technical knowledge left him convinced he could send a signal home to Earth by modifying the Mackandal's communications systems. While his mind was revitalized, his soul remained troubled. Recognizing that the Wakandan Empire was descendant from the science team he first sent through the wormhole, displaced two thousand years in time, T'Challa saw Wakanda's future looked much like its past. After learning that Wakanda was founded on the forced annexation of the Originators' land, and seeing his people evolve into conquerors again with the Empire, T'Challa was questioning the values of Wakandan exceptionalism like never before. His renewed faculties and royal prerogative led him to ignore M'Baku's commands even more than ever, taxing the Mackandal's power supply for his task. He brushed off M'Baku's authority to the point where the two men came to blows, just as Shuri inadvertently completed T'Challa's link on the far side of the wormhole, connecting the Maroons and Wakanda Prime for the first time in weeks from Shuri's perspective, but years from T'Challa's. [Black Panther (7th series) #13]

Wakanda had experienced great peace and prosperity in T'Challa's absence. This was in part because the other Orisha returned to the homeland after Emperor N'Jadaka's assault on Bast. Queen Mother Ramonda and Regent Shuri were therefore reluctant to reintroduce conflict to the nation by challenging the Wakandan Empire. T'Challa and Nakia laid out how the Empire was not only the direct fault of Wakanda Prime's actions, it was also an imminent threat that knew of their existence and coveted the homeland over all else. The discussion was tabled when Emperor N'Jadaka finally responded to Agwe, searching for his lost general and stolen daughter. Farouk had prepped a planetary explosion to catch the emperor in the blast, sacrificing his entire homeworld. Manifold had been hard at work evacuating the population in advance of this ambush, but the Empire arrived too soon. Farouk and a full fifth of the planet's people died in the eruption, but N'Jadaka's flagship and the emperor himself were seemingly consumed by the conflagration. [Black Panther (7th series) #14]

[Black Panther (7th series) #15...