The river no longer roared.
It murmured.
Whispered.
Not like the old days, when its voice surged with fury and drowned the bones of the unforgiven. Not like during the months when silence clung to its banks like grief. This sound was different. It was the breath of a wound healing slowly, rhythmically, like a song humming through burnt ruins.
Obade was rising from ash.
But healing never came without ache.
Ola stood at the threshold of the new Remembering Place, watching as the final beam of carved cedar was hoisted into place. Children passed baskets of river stones between the elders, their tiny arms trembling with purpose. Nearby, Echo crouched beside a small basin, arranging fragments of ancestral charms brought by the returning families. Some were broken, but that didn't matter.
What mattered was that they were remembered.
And memory was power now.
Not just power—but protest. Resistance. A living act.
Ola exhaled and felt it again—that low, pulsing thrum in his chest. The weight of the voices. The echo of ash and song that now threaded his body like veins made of story.
The gourd he carried no longer shimmered. It had released its truth, emptied into the basin, sanctified into the shrine.
But something new stirred beneath his skin.
He hadn't told Echo.
Not yet.
Because it wasn't just the old names that called out now. Something deeper—a second current beneath the surface—had begun to hum louder each night since they returned from the Hollow. It wasn't memory.
It was warning.
That evening, as dusk painted the village in strokes of ochre and charcoal, a fire was lit at the base of the shrine. Not for warmth, but for witnessing.
The oldest woman in Obade, Mámi Teni, stepped forward with a wrapped bundle in her arms. Her spine was bent like a crescent moon, but her eyes still held the defiance of a girl who once dared to speak during the time of forgetting.
She knelt beside the fire and slowly unraveled the cloth.
Inside were ashes.
"Sọ̀rọ̀ yìí ni mo gbé jù sẹ́hìn," she said quietly. This is the silence I carried too long.
Ashes of journals.
Of family tokens burned during the Culling.
Of names struck from ledgers and songs erased from ceremonies.
She scattered them into the flames.
Then turned to Ola.
"Will you sing for us?" she asked, her voice barely louder than the crackling wood.
Ola's throat tightened. "I don't know if I can."
"You don't need to know," Mámi Teni replied. "Just remember."
He stepped forward.
Echo handed him a drum—not the ritual one from the shrine, but a small, beaten hide stretched over wood worn smooth from generations of use. It belonged to his grandfather once. Then his father.
Now, it pulsed beneath his hands like a second heartbeat.
The villagers gathered in a loose circle, every eye fixed on him. Not expecting a performance. Expecting a truth.
Ola looked to Echo, and she nodded once.
So he began.
Not with lyrics.
Not with rhythm.
With breath.
Inhale. Exhale. Then again.
And then came the tone. Low. Ancient. A hum buried under centuries of forgetting.
Then, he opened his mouth.
And a song emerged.
It was not his own.
It was stitched from pieces of others—mothers who buried children without naming them, fathers who hid charms inside tree trunks before being dragged away, daughters who bit their tongues until they bled so they wouldn't speak sacred names in front of soldiers.
The ash rose from the fire like smoke-drunk spirits. And it swirled.
And it danced.
Not visibly—not to the eye. But to the bone. Every person standing near that fire felt their blood shift, just slightly, as though something old inside them was waking from a long, dark sleep.
The song grew.
Hands joined.
Echo added her voice. Then Ọmọjolá. Then the children. Then the weavers, the fishers, the silent ones, the stammerers.
The forgotten found a rhythm.
And the air became sacred.
Then Ola's voice broke.
A sharp, unplanned cry left his throat—not pain, not fear, but release. A final phrase that ended not in words, but a tremor that passed through the village like a shiver through the soil.
Then silence.
Complete.
Until Mámi Teni whispered, "We are heard again."
That night, the river sang louder.
Not with violence.
With memory.
And in Ola's dreams, he heard her voice.
Not Ẹ̀nítàn.
Someone else.
A girl.
Drowned not by curse or ritual.
But by accusation.
She stood in a clearing of flame-touched water, her hands folded, her eyes as wide as the moon.
"You remember me now," she said.
Ola stepped forward. "Who are you?"
Her voice quivered. "The one no one spoke for."
Then her skin cracked like fired clay, revealing the black ichor of the Hollow underneath.
"Not every silence was sacred. Some were cowardice."
Ola woke gasping.
Sweat clung to his skin. He stumbled outside his hut and bent over the riverbank, fists in the mud.
It wasn't over.
The names they remembered were only the beginning.
There were others still lost.
Still trapped.
Still twisting.
He looked up—and found Echo watching him from the shadows, her face unreadable.
"You saw her," she said. Not a question.
"I don't know what she is," Ola replied.
"She's not from the Hollow," Echo said. "She's from before."
Ola's chest tightened. "Before what?"
"Before we began lying to ourselves about who deserved remembering."
The silence that followed was heavier than any drumbeat.
By morning, the first cracks in the Remembering Place appeared—not in the stone, but in the people.
A young boy—Tajudeen—refused to enter the shrine.
He cried, not from fear, but rage. "My sister isn't in there," he shouted. "No one sings her name. They said she brought shame. They said she deserved it."
Echo knelt before him.
"What was her name?" she asked gently.
He looked down. "Ìmísí."
Ola's heart dropped. He remembered the story—barely whispered years ago. A girl accused of being 'unnatural' for speaking to spirits as a child. Labeled possessed. Vanished. No one asked questions.
Echo stood.
"Then we will build her space."
"But the shrine's finished," someone murmured.
"No," Echo said. "It's only begun."
And with that, she took a stone from the path, walked to the edge of the Remembering Place, and placed it in the soil.
"This is her altar now."
Others watched in silence.
Then another elder stepped forward. "My brother's name was never sung either. They said he was weak for crying."
She placed her stone beside Ìmísí's.
Then another. And another.
By sunset, a second circle had begun to form outside the shrine—raw, unsanctioned, personal.
A ring of the erased.
The songs carried through ash were no longer enough.
They would have to dig deeper.
That night, Ola stood with Echo at the border of the new ring.
"There's more," he said.
"There always is," she replied.
"What if we uncover something… monstrous?"
Echo's eyes were steady. "Then we remember it too. Truth isn't sacred because it's clean. It's sacred because it survived."
Ola nodded slowly.
And beneath them, the river whispered again.
A lullaby with a jagged edge.
The song of ashes.
The song of guilt.
The song of truth.