The sun had barely risen when screams tore through Obade.
Not from fear but from confusion.
A little boy, barely nine years old, wandered into the village square barefoot, his eyes wide and glassy, dragging a broken calabash tied with black twine. His shirt was soaked, not with water, but with what looked like red palm dye until someone touched it and whispered:
"This is not dye."
It was blood.
But the boy was unhurt.
Not a scratch on him.
The villagers circled him cautiously. Amaka reached him first, kneeling and trying to speak softly.
"What's your name, child?"
The boy didn't answer.
Instead, he lifted his hand.
And from his mouth came a voice too deep, too old, to belong to him.
"Your Queen of Echo dares wake what was meant to remain bound.
Tell her: The Drumfather waits.
And when he rises… no name shall be remembered.**
Not even hers."
The wind whipped violently.
The final drum let out a low, guttural hum on its own.
Then the boy collapsed.
The Drumfather
Kareem helped carry the unconscious child to the healing hut, while Ola and Aleshọ́rú stood before the shrine.
"He's real," Ola said, his throat tight.
"Not just real," Aleshọ́rú replied. "Coming."
Amaka joined them. "Who is he?"
Aleshọ́rú lowered her eyes.
"The original drummaker.
The first to cut sound from silence.
The one who carved the Forbidden Drum…
using his own daughter's spine as its base."
The words hung in the air like poison.
"He was erased from history," she said. "Even Ìyá Mú feared him. She bound him beneath the river's memory. But now… the echoes have made a path."
Later that night, Ola sat alone by the old chapel, staring at the ground where the drum had been unearthed.
He remembered his grandmother's old words:
"There is a reason the first sound was a cry."
Ola had believed Ifeoma's act of remembrance was the end of the curse. That the river could finally rest. But now, that belief felt like naïveté.
Maybe they hadn't healed the wound.
Maybe they'd just torn open the stitches.
In the Forest
The crows had returned.
But now, they didn't caw.
They whispered.
Dozens of them perched around the Abandoned Drum Grove, a place sealed off for decades.
No one entered it not since the drums began to rot and weep in the night.
But that night, someone did.
A man cloaked in tattered red cloth.
His hands burned with callouses.
His face was hidden.
But where he walked, the ground pulsed faintly like a heartbeat.
He placed a small object on the earth:
A tooth.
And whispered:
"Let the drummers rise."
The crows took flight.
And far away, the river began to boil.
In her room, Aleshọ́rú lit a black candle and whispered an ancient verse.
From the shadows came a flicker then a face.
Ifeoma.
Alive.
But not at peace.
"I saw him," she said. "He's awake."
Aleshọ́rú's hands shook.
"Then we have little time," she whispered.
And from her satchel, she pulled a hidden scroll sealed in bone wax.
Ola entered just as she placed it on the floor.
"What is that?" he asked.
Aleshọ́rú looked up with fear in her eyes.
"The song that can kill a god."