The day of the procession dawned too brightly, like a smile stretched over bad teeth.
Women in the market tied on their best wrappers, muttering prayers as they did. Men polished drums and oiled spear shafts. Children darted between adults, excited by the promise of music, half‑comforted by the thought that if all the priests and warriors walked together, nothing too terrible could happen.
Ifabola dressed in white.
Baba had argued against her coming. The queen‑mother had insisted.
"If the people see her hidden," she had said, "they will think we fear her. Better they see she walks among us under my eye."
So now Ifabola stood near the center of the procession line, tucked among the younger apprentices of Ifatedo, her marked hand wrapped in a strip of cloth. She wore a small calabash pendant over her chest, its hollow filled with river sand and chalk.
"Do not stray," Fẹ́mi told her for the third time. He wore a white wrapper with blue edging, divination bag at his side, face solemn. "And if anything feels wrong—anything—you grab my cloth and you do not let go."
"I know," she said.
He squeezed her shoulder and moved ahead to join Baba near the front, where the leaders of the shrines gathered.
The procession formed slowly.
At its head, palace guards in gleaming bronze marched, drums beating a slow, steady rhythm. Behind them came the queen‑mother and Prince Adetunji on horseback—symbols of continuity in a kingdom that still felt like it had lost its spine.
Next walked the priests of iron and earth, their small portable shrines borne on the shoulders of strong men.
Then the thunder warriors of Koleoso.
Ogunremi strode at their front, bare‑chested, red and white beads flashing. Behind him, a masked Sango dancer towered, wearing a long, layered costume of red cloth with a fierce wooden mask. Lightning‑shape marks had been painted down the dancer's arms and the sides of the mask's face.
The crowd murmured as the thunder shrine passed.
Children pointed, half delighted, half afraid.
After thunder came river.
Ifatedo's priests walked in two lines, white cloth fluttering. They carried a small carved boat on poles, its inside lined with mirrors that caught the sun. At its center sat a bowl of still water, surface unbroken despite the movement.
Baba walked beside the boat, staff in hand.
Farther back, the rest of the apprentices clustered, Ifabola among them.
The line stretched further—hunters' guild, market elders, even a few small household shrines that had begged to join for fear of being left outside whatever protection this display might bring.
On a low hill overlooking the main road, Ajani watched.
He had drifted there almost without thinking, feet pulled by the sound of drums and the hum in his skull.
The shadow that had visited his dreams flickered just at the edge of his sight.
See how they cling to their symbols, it murmured. As if walking statues through the dust can shut my mouth.
Ajani's jaw tightened.
"What can you do then?" he muttered, fingers digging into the scrubby grass. "Show me, if you are so strong."
The presence coiled tighter.
Reach down, it whispered. The ground holds more than roots.
He did.
His fingers brushed against something hard and smooth half‑buried in the dirt. He dug, heart thumping.
A stone emerged.
Not a natural river stone, worn round by water, but a carved piece—half of a circle, its edges jagged as if broken from a larger whole. Faint grooves crisscrossed its surface, forming curves that made his eyes ache to follow.
It pulsed faintly against his palm.
Your priest threw many such scraps into water years ago, the voice said lazily. But rivers are generous. They spit some things back.
Ajani swallowed.
Heat travelled up from the stone, into his wrist.
"No price?" he whispered.
The presence chuckled.
Every price is already being paid, it said. You merely choose on whose neck the yoke sits. Go. Join their dance. Let us see how well their unity holds.
The procession moved through Ayetoro's streets like a slow, many‑headed serpent.
People lined the way, pressing close but not quite close enough to be touched by the more dangerous shrines. Some dropped to their knees as the queen‑mother passed. Others muttered behind their hands when Baba walked by.
Ifabola kept Fẹ́mi's cloth clutched tightly.
The drums beat, a heavy, hypnotic rhythm. Songs rose—praise for the late king, pleas for protection from whatever had taken him. The Sango dancer leaped and spun, lightning‑marks blurring. Children squealed in delight.
For a brief stretch, Ifabola let herself hope.
Maybe, just for this one day, nothing would go wrong.
That hope died as they approached the market square.
Her palm flared.
It was not the sudden, searing burn of the shadow's first assault, but a deep, insistent ache, like a bruise pressed by unseen fingers.
She stumbled.
Fẹ́mi glanced back immediately. "What?"
"Something is…thick," she whispered, scanning the crowd. The air over the square looked the same as any other day—sunlight, dust motes, the faint shimmer of heat. Yet beneath it, she sensed a different current, slow and oily.
Her gaze snagged on a masked figure near the edge of the procession.
At first she thought it was just another dancer—this one wearing a long raffia skirt and a simple cloth mask painted with broad, smiling features.
But the mask's eyes were wrong.
They were too still.
No glint of human sweat, no flutter of lashes behind the slits.
The space behind that painted smile felt like the mouth of the not‑door.
"Fẹ́mi," she hissed. "That mask—"
Before she could finish, the drums hit a sharp, unified beat.
All the dancers leaped.
The Sango masquerade spun, flaring his red cloth. The others stamped in practiced patterns.
The smiling mask did not follow.
It jerked.
Once. Twice.
Then its head snapped toward the river shrine—not with a dancer's deliberate grace, but like something being yanked by a hook.
Ifabola's mark flared white‑hot.
"Baba!" she screamed.
He turned just as the smiling mask broke from the line.
The dancer—if it was still a dancer—charged.
Not toward the queen‑mother, not toward the gathered crowd.
Toward the small carved boat bearing the bowl of still water.
Baba thrust out his staff.
"Back!" he bellowed, power lacing his voice.
The air shuddered.
For a second, an invisible barrier seemed to form between the barreling figure and the shrine. The masked body hit it and stumbled, as if colliding with a wall.
The smile on the mask twitched.
Then the painted mouth split.
Literally.
The wood cracked with a sound like snapping bone, the grin widening far beyond where human jaws should go. Darkness spilled from the gap—thick, smoky, shot through with faint red threads.
The barrier sizzled.
Cracks flashed across it like lightning over thin ice.
Ogunremi saw it too.
He barked an order.
Thunder warriors surged forward, forming a rough half‑circle around the front of the procession. Spears lowered, beads clacking.
Lightning rumbled overhead, summoned by their god's offense.
For a heartbeat, everything hung.
Then the not‑smoke from the mask lashed outward.
It struck the invisible wall, punched through, and streaked toward the boat.
Ifabola didn't think.
She tore free of the apprentices and leaped forward, hand outstretched.
Her palm caught the edge of the darkness a breath before it hit the water.
Pain exploded up her arm.
It was like grabbing hot coals with bare flesh—but worse, because the fire ran both ways. She felt something vast on the other end of that thread, surprised and pleased and annoyed all at once.
Again you meddle, it hissed through her bones. Little door.
She screamed.
The two forces met—EJEH's hunger pushing in, the strange blue‑green flare from her mark pushing back.
For a terrifying instant, she felt herself being pulled toward the mask, as if her bones were iron and it a magnet.
"Hold!" Baba shouted, voice ragged.
Hands grabbed her shoulders from behind, dragging her body backward even as her arm seemed determined to remain where it was.
The world narrowed to her burning hand, the howling dark, and a thread of something else—cool and insistent—trickling from her chest into her arm.
River.
Thunder.
Her own small, stubborn will.
Then a third force slammed between them.
Mama Ireti's staff struck the ground so hard the packed earth cracked.
The old woman had appeared as if from nowhere, white headscarf trailing, eyes blazing.
"Enough!" she roared.
Lines of chalk burned around her feet, flaring up in a circle that enclosed the shrine, Baba, Ifabola, and the mask.
The darkness shrieked.
The mask jerked violently.
For an instant, its painted eyes cleared, revealing the terrified gaze of a young man trapped inside.
"Help me!" he gasped.
Then the dark inside him surged again.
Without hesitation, Mama Ireti stepped into the chalk circle, directly between the mask and Ifabola.
"Old mother!" Baba shouted. "No!"
"Be quiet," she snapped. "You opened this crack. Let me sew at least one stitch."
She thrust her gnarled hands toward the darkness.
"Go back to your corner!" she snarled. "No more easy meat here!"
Light lanced from her fingers—not bright, but dense, like packed clay. It met the darkness in a grinding clash.
Ifabola's hand tore free.
She collapsed backward into Fẹ́mi, gasping, fingers locked in a claw she could not unclench.
The dark recoiled from Mama Ireti's light, then surged again, trying to wrap around it, to eat it.
The old woman's face contorted.
Her body shook as if a powerful wind were roaring through her brittle bones.
"Let it go!" Baba cried. "Ireti, let it go—"
"Always telling others to let go," she rasped. "You hold too much, Adégbáyí. Let me hold this, just once."
For a heartbeat, the two forces hung in balance.
Then something broke.
A sound like stone splitting apart cracked the air.
The painted mask shattered, fragments flying.
The young man inside sagged, lifeless, to the ground.
The darkness that had held him together convulsed, then tore free in a spray of black threads, seeking any path away from the circle.
Mama Ireti caught as many as she could, pulling them into herself with a guttural shout.
Her body arched.
For a horrible instant, her eyes went entirely black.
Then she slammed her staff down one last time.
The darkness flattened, then vanished—not upward, not outward, but down, into the earth, like water forced into dry sand.
Silence crashed over the square.
Mama Ireti swayed.
Baba lunged toward her.
She smiled at him, a crooked little twist of lips that looked more like apology than triumph.
"Teach the girl better than we taught you," she whispered.
Then she crumpled.
Baba caught her before she hit the ground.
Her head lolled against his shoulder.
No breath stirred her chest.
The chalk circle around them faded.
A low moan rose from the crowd, building into frightened wailing.
Ifabola lay where she had fallen, chest heaving, palm smoking faintly.
She watched through a haze as Baba cradled the old woman's body, rocking once.
Another death.
Another price.
The procession of peace dissolved into chaos.