The dream came without sound.
Only heat.
Èkóyé stood in a clearing surrounded by fire—but the flames did not consume. They whispered. They beckoned.
And at the center of it all was a drum.
Black.
Silent.
Bound with red cloth and sealed with three iron rings.
He awoke sweating, breath ragged, eyes glowing faintly with emberlight.
"It's time," he murmured.
The Path No One Remembered
There was no map.
No elder to ask.
But his feet knew.
He left before dawn, carrying no tools, no weapons—only the rhythm in his chest, the echo of the river still pulsing in his bones.
Through thorn and underbrush. Past a forgotten boundary stone carved with the symbol for heat held in silence.
And at last—beneath the roots of a massive iroko tree, scorched and twisted by age—he found it.
The chamber of the first flame.
The Drum Awaits
It was not large.
Not ornate.
It sat in a sunken altar carved of obsidian and cooled ash.
The drum looked simple—but it pulsed. Not like an object. Like a being.
Each breath Èkóyé took stirred the air around it.
Each heartbeat stirred its surface.
The red cloth bindings shimmered as if resisting time.
He stepped forward.
And the air changed.
No wind.
Just heat.
Not temperature—truth.
The Voice of the Flame
The drum spoke without sound.
Straight into his chest.
"You who come without command.
You who have danced but never burned.
Do you seek rhythm? Or reckoning?"
Èkóyé stood still.
"I seek truth," he answered.
The first iron ring snapped open.
"Then you must sing what scorched the queens.
You must drum what silenced the sky."
The First Strike
He knelt.
Hands trembling.
Sweat pooling in his palms.
And then—one strike.
Open-handed.
No stick.
Just flesh on flame.
The chamber flared with light.
Walls erupted in symbols: spirals, eyes, burning trees, queens bowed in anguish.
The history that had been kept from the Archive now emerged, born from fire.
"This is the flame they buried," the drum whispered.
"Because it saw too much."
What the Flame Remembers
The first queen who spoke against the Archive's limit, and was burned in secret.
The ritual dancers who refused silence, who vanished without burial.
The child who sang an unapproved verse and was erased from lineage records.
The drummers who lit fires to truth and were branded traitor.
The drum remembered them all.
Because it had held their flame.
Now, with each strike, Èkóyé called them back.
And the chamber wept fire.
Rerẹ́ Joins Him
Hours passed.
Or days.
No one knew.
But Rerẹ́ felt the pull and came running.
She did not ask questions.
She knelt beside him, and together they struck:
Toh. Toh. Ká.
Ká. Ká. Toh.
Memory in flame. Flame in breath.
And the drum responded—not louder.
But deeper.
Not music.
Reckoning.
Back in Obade
The skies changed color.
Not dark.
But amber.
Like the light inside a truth finally revealed.
Elders turned toward the horizon and trembled.
"They've awakened it," Iyagbẹ́kọ said.
"The fire that remembers what even the river forgot."
Children whispered rhythms they had never learned.
And Echo, in her sleep, smiled.
"The buried beat," she murmured.
"Has found its flame."
The Drum Speaks One Final Time
As Èkóyé and Rerẹ́ struck the final beat, the drum broke its last seal.
And whispered:
"Truth is not warmth.
It is heat.
And it does not comfort.
It refines."
The drum collapsed into ash.
But the rhythm remained—in their hands.
And the fire passed into them.
Final Lines
Now the village had rhythm from water.
And flame.
Not to war.
But to remember through fire.
To burn away lies.
To forge story not from silence, but from heat that cannot be held.
And the river, for once, danced in light.
Not soft.
But burning.