She came first as a whisper in Echo's sleep.
Not a voice.
Not a name.
But a shape—coiled like a serpent, cloaked in mist, and crowned in a halo of bones and broken prayer beads. Her presence didn't stir air. It bent time. The dream twisted, folding in on itself like silk in fire.
Echo rose from the dream gasping, not in fear—but in recognition.
Her fingers were caked in red clay though she hadn't touched the earth.
And the drum beside her—the sacred one, bound in crocodile hide, passed down from the River Mothers—sat weeping. Its surface quivered as if struck by invisible hands, releasing slow, mournful tones that sounded like farewells and forgotten names.
When Iyagbẹ́kọ arrived at dawn, drawn by the drum's lament, she saw the stains.
She knelt beside Echo and took her hands gently.
"This is marsh-sign," she murmured. "From Ilẹ̀-Oṣumá."
Echo blinked. "The drowned lands?"
Iyagbẹ́kọ nodded, her voice rough with memory. "Where the earth swallowed both kingdom and curse."
Ola, standing near the doorway, paled. "Nothing grows there. No one lives there."
"No one living," Echo said, her voice faraway. "But someone remembers."
Journey to the Drowned Lands
They prepared offerings—not of coin or salt, but of names. Forgotten ones. Echo etched them into strips of bark, tied them around her wrists. Ola carried a drum made of silence—a hollowed-out calabash never meant to be played, only held. Iyagbẹ́kọ took a small bowl filled with soil from beneath the Remembering Trees.
They traveled by canoe, gliding over a river that changed the closer it neared the border of the drowned lands.
The water darkened, not in color—but in weight. It became sluggish. Thick. The rhythm beneath their boat changed too, no longer the quicksilver laughter of Ẹ̀nítàn's domain. Here, the water was memory burdened with grief.
The reeds lining the banks grew tall and arched over like mourners. Birds did not sing. Insects clicked their mourning rhythms.
The air was heavy.
Even the sun seemed reluctant to shine.
Villagers from settlements along the border came to warn them. Old fishermen with eyes clouded by sorrow waved them down as they passed.
"No drums past here," one rasped from the shoreline, voice coated in phlegm and fear. "She doesn't sing. She devours."
Another spat into the water. "She remembers too much."
Still, they pressed on.
Into the mist.
Into the aching silence.
Into the past that had no graves but lived still in water and rot.
Signs of the Buried Queen
The first totem appeared half-submerged in the mud, like a body that refused to drown fully. It was a woman's face, carved into obsidian, her mouth sealed with wire twisted in the old tongue of curses. Moss grew where her eyes had once glowed. Her expression was not agony—but fury interrupted.
Echo touched it gently.
A wave of heat surged up her arm.
"She is close," Iyagbẹ́kọ whispered.
Further in, they found a cracked stone bowl resting in the shallow tide, filled with black feathers—crows, ravens, owls. The creatures of night that watched but never spoke.
"They feared her," Echo said, voice low.
"They tried not just to forget her—but to bind her."
Ola stepped back, looking around the gray marshlands. "Why would one queen betray another?"
Iyagbẹ́kọ's gaze was tired and deep.
"Perhaps she wasn't the betrayer," she said. "Perhaps… she was the first to remember. And they punished her for it."
Echo closed her eyes, letting the damp wind press against her skin.
"She remembers us," she said. "Even now."
The Shrine Beneath the Marsh
Hours passed in silence.
And then—
A circle of dead trees appeared. Their trunks gnarled, twisted, yet still upright. Leafless. Lifeless. But not hollow.
Their roots jutted from the ground, gnarled together in a jagged, interwoven cage.
Beneath them, something pulsed beneath the water's surface.
Light.
Dim. Flickering. Red like the first ember.
The canoe stopped on its own—as if something beneath had grasped it.
Echo stepped out first. The mud sucked at her ankles.
Each step she took felt like walking across buried names. They moved beneath her.
Iyagbẹ́kọ followed, humming a protective rhythm, old and half-forgotten—a song that hadn't been sung since the days before Obade fell.
Ola stepped last, eyes darting to the trees that seemed to watch.
They dug.
First with hands.
Then with song.
Their rhythms pulled the water away—sluggish at first, then reluctantly yielding.
The roots trembled.
The air thinned.
And from beneath the muck and bone-colored weeds, a shrine rose.
It wasn't grand.
It was fierce.
Rough-carved into stone and ash, draped in time. Bones of animals—and perhaps men—circled its base. Symbols once struck from every Archive were etched along its base.
But the name—the one they said had been erased from history—glowed softly, defiant:
Ọwẹ́n.
Iyagbẹ́kọ stepped back, her eyes wide.
"The first Queen of the River," she breathed.
"Older than Ẹ̀nítàn," Echo whispered.
"Banished," Iyagbẹ́kọ continued, "for remembering the blood-toll."
Ọwẹ́n Awakens
The air thickened.
The marsh stilled.
Even the insects silenced themselves.
Then—
A ripple through the shrine.
Not outward—but upward.
Water churned, but made no sound.
And from the center of the shrine, something began to rise.
Not flesh.
Not bone.
Grief, given form.
What rose was a woman, and not.
Her skin shimmered with oil and shadow. Her eyes were obsidian voids, without light. Her limbs flowed like smoke. And where her heart should have been, there pulsed a small ember—red, steady, ancient.
She did not walk.
She glided.
When she spoke, her voice cracked the silence like a drum beat felt through the earth:
"You seek songs."
She looked at Echo.
"I carry screams."
Echo trembled, not from fear—but resonance.
"We remember Ẹ̀nítàn," she said. "The river weeps with her name."
Ọwẹ́n's gaze did not soften.
"You remember the mother who wept," she said.
"But I am the mother who burned."
The Forgotten History
Ọwẹ́n's voice was thunder whispered across centuries.
She spoke of a time before Ọba and priest.
Before Archive and scroll.
When the river had not yet been bound by chant or chain.
She had ruled not from a throne, but from the water itself. Her court was storm and silence. Her crown was made of eel-bone and lightning. Her guards were rhythm itself.
And then—
The first war of forgetting.
A gathering of kings and priests who feared a river that remembered its own justice.
They brought songs dipped in lies.
Scrolls that rewrote the waters.
And spears forged from guilt.
They came not to fight her—but to erase her.
They struck her name from stone.
Buried her totems beneath gospel.
And when she refused to be forgotten, they called her curse.
"Even Ẹ̀nítàn," Ọwẹ́n said, "rose from a silence I carved. But even she could not free me."
She looked at Echo.
"Your Archive remembers pain like poetry," she said. "But I was the line they dared not write. Because I did not die gracefully."
"I cursed them as I sank."
Iyagbẹ́kọ, silent until now, stepped forward.
"And now?" she asked.
Ọwẹ́n leaned close. Her face shifted—sorrow beneath fire.
"Now I want nothing but a name returned."
"Not glory. Not vengeance."
"Just the rhythm of truth… unfiltered."
A Bargain in the Marsh
The shrine pulsed brighter.
The air shimmered like heat.
Echo turned to Ola.
"We're building a new Archive," he said, stepping forward, voice steady. "One without chains. Without silencing."
Ọwẹ́n tilted her head.
"Then let it include me."
"Not as myth. Not as warning."
"As foundation."
Echo knelt and reached into the base of the shrine. The water parted like memory yielding.
She pulled free a shard of obsidian, jagged and warm, etched with a single symbol:
Three rivers, spiraled around a flame.
"This," she said, holding it toward Ọwẹ́n, "is where your rhythm begins again."
Ọwẹ́n's form began to flicker.
Not fading.
Transforming.
Her voice shifted—no longer thunder, but truth in dusk:
"If you carry me…"
"Then remember this—"
"Not all truth sings."
"Some truths scream."
"Let your people be ready to hear that."
Return to Obade
The grove stirred as they returned.
No wind passed.
But the Remembering Trees began to hum—a note deeper than any they had ever sung.
The shard of Ọwẹ́n was placed beneath the oldest tree. The soil accepted it instantly.
A new root curled around it.
Dark.
Firm.
Intentional.
And from the canopy above, a new leaf unfurled.
Its veins ran black, edged in a firelike hue.
Not poison.
Not curse.
But warning.
And truth.
And life.
Final Lines
Not every queen ruled with rhythm.
Some ruled with fire.
Some with silence—broken by screams.
But every queen who was erased—
Will rise.
When the land is brave enough
To name her.