Chadwick Boseman has died.

When I wrote about the speculative brilliance of Black Panther, I knew I was striving to tell the truth beneath the truth: that Wakanda does not exist, but we must dream it to be so.

In a world that so brutalizes black lives, Wakanda became, on the screen, a glittering zenith of black industry, black commerce, black technological superprowess, the black superlative nation dependent on no one but itself. That mattered, that manifestation.

It mattered in the way black men wrote T'Challa for comics, graphic novels, and the film industry: Christopher Priest. Ryan Coogler. Joe Robert Cole. Ta-Nehisi Coates.

This isn't about reducing Boseman to one role. It's about uplifting him in the role of which he was most proud, in his own affirmations, in what his family have said of him, now that he is dead.

You could call it the work of a dutiful intern, but it feels fitting that Boseman's Twitter profile background is of a leaping, empyrean Wakandan panther, presiding over the mists.

You might wonder, too, why the death of a celebrity hits this hard, in a year when so many have died and will yet die because of gross national incompetence, police brutality, and the self-serving directives of massively powerful industrialized war states.

And the truth is that it's because a black king has died. In the imagination, which is, as you know, a direct bleeding line to the heart.

To the spirit that resists the officer catherine-wheeling his truncheon. To the mind that dares to defy the white woman on her cellphone, bringing you out of your birding reverie.

Chadwick understood that he stood for a refutation of the reality black bodies and black intellects have been conditioned to accept.

Black Panther, call it childish, call it blockbuster fodder (neither of those is untrue, but there's wisdom in what children love) refused to live with the weight of that reality like a nazarene's cross.

He, through the work of black writers, black directors, black visionaries, did more with reality than many allow themselves to believe possible. And our gift from him is that we can always find him there.

Reigning, sovereign and imperfect and wise. Keeping watch even in an age of incredible death. Keeping watch for us from the black perch of an uncowed empire: a territory where it might be possible for a virus of the heart, spirit, and season not to enter.

All the funerary lights are glowing in bioluminescence, in phosphorescence, in eternal vibranium, tonight.

#WakandaForever