The Hollow King was faltering.
His hold on the river's rhythm—on the delicate balance of memory and silence—was unraveling. Names long buried were rising again, shimmering like fireflies in a dark forest, refusing to be lost.
But restoring names was only the first step.
The river's song was not yet whole.
To complete it, the silence still holding its breath had to be broken by flame.
And for that, Echo would have to step into the fire.
The Path of Ember
The air was thick with smoke and the scent of charred earth as Iyagbẹ́kọ led Echo away from the village center, down a winding path to the edge of the woods. The trees here twisted unnaturally, their gnarled branches reaching skyward like desperate hands, curved as if questioning the very heavens.
"This place was once sacred," Iyagbẹ́kọ said, her voice low and steady, "a cradle of our prayers and stories."
Echo ran her fingers along the rough bark of a tree, feeling the scars blackened by flame.
"But the Hollow One," the elder continued, "turned flame against us—against the very heart of our legacy."
Echo's gaze hardened.
"What is it now?"
Iyagbẹ́kọ's eyes flicked to the center of the grove where a ring of blackened stones stood, scorched but unyielding.
"A mirror. A test. And you must walk through it."
Inside the ring, dry wood was stacked with careful precision in a tight spiral. It looked fragile yet potent, as if a single breath could either ignite a fire or collapse the whole design.
No breeze stirred the leaves.
No birds dared sing.
Only the weight of silence and the promise of flame.
"Enter the Spiral Flame," the elder said quietly. "And finish the song that was stolen from your line."
Echo Remembers the Warning
Echo's mind flickered to a distant memory—one long buried beneath years of pain and hope.
As a child, her grandmother had once sung the first three lines of a forbidden song, her voice trembling with reverence and fear.
Only once.
Then the old woman had wept for hours, clutching her hands as if warding off unseen shadows, whispering of footsteps stalking the dark corners of the house that night.
"The fire listens, child," her grandmother had said, "but it is not always kind."
Those words had clung to Echo like a second skin ever since.
Now, standing at the edge of the Spiral Flame, she was no longer a child, no longer protected by innocent hope. She was marked by the river—by loss, by legacy, and by rhythms too old to fit within one heart.
She squared her shoulders and stepped forward into the ring.
Iyagbẹ́kọ raised her staff.
Flames erupted—not fierce or wild, but patient and watching. They circled Echo, licking the air, casting shadows that danced like forgotten ancestors.
The fire did not consume.
It waited.
The Song Begins
Echo closed her eyes, inhaling the acrid smoke mingled with something ancient and sweet—like burnt cedarwood and memory.
She released her grip on the Archive, on Ola, on the Dancers, and even on the Hollow King who still loomed in the shadows of her thoughts.
She reached farther back, beyond the present, beyond pain.
To the firelight flickering in her great-grandmother's hut.
To the silence after her mother's burial—the heavy quiet that settled like dust.
To the night when the river itself had wept, and the world seemed to hold its breath.
And she sang.
Her voice rose, fragile but fierce:
"Àlà ní'lé,
Tó fi rọ̀run sí omi,
Ṣé ò rí bí a ṣe ń sunkún?…"
The spiral of fire tightened.
The grove darkened as the flames grew hotter, brighter.
The world dissolved into shadow and heat.
Inside the Fire
Suddenly, Echo found herself in a vast field of ash—gray and silent.
She was not alone.
A figure approached, tall and robed in shifting shadows and flickering light.
The woman's face was both unfamiliar and intimately known—Echo's own, her mother's, and her mother's mother's, layered in time like ripples on water.
"Do you know what you carry?" the woman asked, voice both gentle and fierce.
Echo swallowed.
"A song," she whispered.
The woman's hand pressed against Echo's chest.
"No," she said. "A wound made into a key."
In that moment, Echo saw it all:
The moment the Hollow King first shattered the rhythm—turning truth into weapon, and song into silence.
The women who had stood against him, their voices snuffed out but their spirits unbroken.
The final line of the forbidden song—the one that scorched the tongue and burned in the throat.
It was hers now.
"Sing it," the woman urged.
"Even if it breaks you."
Echo Sings the Final Line
Echo's throat tightened.
Her skin seemed to peel with every remembered sorrow.
Her voice, raw and trembling, carried the weight of centuries:
"Ẹ̀sìn a bọ̀,
Ṣùgbọ́n orin á dákẹ́…
Títí tí a fi jẹ òtítọ́ pẹ̀lú iná."
The fire exploded.
Then collapsed inward—like a heart surrendering its final beat.
From the collapsing silence, a new light emerged.
Echo rose.
Her skin glowed with the embers of ancestral fire.
Her eyes blazed with the rhythms of generations.
Around her, the grove bloomed—not with destruction, but with revelation.
Flames danced that did not burn, but illuminated the path forward.
Iyagbẹ́kọ Weeps
Iyagbẹ́kọ fell to her knees, tears carving clean lines through the soot on her face.
"She did it..." she whispered, voice thick with awe and relief.
The Spiral Flame had not consumed Echo.
It had remade her.
She stepped forward, more than human—more than mortal—a vessel of every soul who had burned for truth and rhythm.
The flame did not follow her.
It had taken refuge inside her.
The Hollow King Reacts
Far away, in his darkened chamber, the Hollow King screamed—a sound like breaking stone and drowning wind.
Ink poured from his chest in thick, dark plumes, staining the air with his failing power.
He clawed at his throat, writhing in a fury he could not silence.
A song had entered him.
A rhythm so true, so fierce, that it shattered the silence he had long imposed.
"She carries fire," he gasped through cracked lips.
"And now it burns beneath my name."
Final Lines
Echo walked back into the village.
She was no longer the girl who had feared the fire's judgment.
Nor simply a voice raised in resistance.
She was rhythm made flesh.
Her every step beat with the pulse of ancestors.
And when she opened her mouth to speak—
The wind bowed.
Because this time,
The song would finish.