They called him Ẹ̀rùmọ́lẹ̀—the Hollow King.
But that was never his true name.
No child had ever known it, no elder spoken it aloud. Not because it was lost—but because it was born from refusal, from shadows too dark for light to touch.
He was not fashioned from earth or love, not cradled in the arms of ancestors who whispered songs into the night.
He was carved from centuries of silence layered over atrocity—woven from broken promises, erased histories, and the heavy weight of forgetting. So deep was this silence that even the Archive, keeper of memory itself, had long ceased to speak his crimes aloud.
Yet now—
The silence was cracking.
Voices—names—songs—were rising again, burning through the kingdom of forgetting he had built, stone by shadowed stone.
And so, the Hollow King released his last silence.
It was no mere absence.
No emptiness.
It was a devouring hush—a void so deep and vast, it threatened to swallow memory itself.
The first tremors came from the edges of Obade.
A child tried to sing the naming song, the sacred rhythm passed down since time's first breath.
But the words slipped away.
The first line—lost to the shadows.
His small voice cracked, stifled by the sudden void.
An elder, hands raised in prayer, lifted a cup of libation to the ancestors.
But her tongue thickened, the ancient words crumbling to ash in her mouth.
The river itself seemed to recoil.
No breeze stirred the leaves; no bird sang its morning call.
And then the silence spread—slowly, insidiously—like a sickness crawling beneath skin.
Carved names began to vanish from stone monuments.
Faces blurred in ancient family portraits, their details dissolving like smoke.
Drums that once called the village to rhythm began to pulse erratically, fractured beats struggling to hold form.
The heartbeat of Obade faltered.
Deep in the river's dark depths, Ẹ̀nítàn stirred restlessly.
Her voice, barely more than a breath, echoed beneath the waves.
"He has released the Devouring," she murmured.
"If they do not hold fast to their truth… it will consume them all."
Iyagbẹ́kọ sat in her hut, eyes closed, heart heavy.
Around her, shadows lengthened as the sun fell behind the hills.
She felt her lineage unraveling—threads of memory loosening and fraying in the smoky air, intangible but real.
"He means to erase the beat entirely," she whispered.
Her voice trembled but held steady, like a drum's slow toll.
Slowly, she rose, every movement deliberate, ancient—a ritual in itself.
Her breath was steady, grounded in the stories and strength passed down through generations of mothers who had refused to forget, even when memory had been a wound.
At her altar, she opened her last sacred bundle.
Inside, nestled in dark cloth like a secret kept too long, lay a shard of obsidian.
It pulsed faintly—the echo of the scream she had swallowed during the massacre of her kin, a cry that refused to die.
"One silence," she said to the darkness around her.
"Against another."
She placed the sharp fragment beneath her tongue, a bitter, burning offering.
The moment it touched her, a wave of ancient pain coursed through her veins, but she steadied herself and stepped into the night.
Far away, Echo convulsed in restless sleep.
She was back in the Spiral Flame, the ring of fire where she had once sung herself into power.
But this time, she was alone.
The flames no longer listened to her song.
Her voice was silenced—mute.
She reached desperately for rhythm in the swirling heat, but it shattered, splintering in her hands like fragile glass.
And then came the whisper.
Cold.
Relentless.
"Even your fire can be extinguished."
With a sudden, raw scream, Echo jolted upright.
Beside her, Ola stirred, sweat gleaming on his bare chest, breath shallow and uneven.
"I dreamed I was a child again," he murmured, voice hoarse.
"But no one remembered my name…"
Echo rose, eyes fierce in the dim morning light.
"It's happening everywhere," she said.
"What do we do?" Ola asked, his voice tinged with fear.
Echo turned toward the horizon, where a thick darkness pulsed like a wound in the earth.
"We don't sing louder," she said.
"We listen deeper."
Guided by fractured dreams and fragile threads of memory, Echo and Ola ventured underground.
They moved through forgotten paths and shadowed tunnels, following the faint pulse of rhythm, the heartbeat of the Naming Cavern—the sacred place where the ancestors first gave breath to language, where names were first spoken.
It was said that no silence could survive there.
But when they arrived, the cavern lay empty.
The stones that had once glowed softly with the power of names now wept steady, cold tears of water.
The walls held no echoes.
No rhythm vibrated beneath their feet.
Only unbeing—an endless void where song had been swallowed whole.
And in the cavern's shadowed heart, standing tall and ominous, was a figure cloaked in ink and grief.
The Hollow King.
His face shifted like smoke and shadow—unfinished, fractured, terrifying.
"You think rhythm saves you," he hissed, voice cracked and dry as dust.
"But rhythm is pain.
I took it from you so you wouldn't feel."
Ola stepped forward, voice steady despite the weight of the moment.
"No," he said quietly.
"You took it because you were afraid of what it revealed."
The Hollow King's eyes burned with sorrow and rage, flickering like dying embers.
"I was made from their refusal," he whispered.
"Their shame.
Their broken promises."
Echo met his gaze, calm and fierce.
"Then burn," she said softly.
"But not alone."
With deliberate strength, she opened her chest—literally.
From within her rose the fire she had earned in the Spiral Flame.
It did not lash out.
It reached toward him—gentle, relentless, unyielding.
The Hollow King screamed as her flame entered him.
Not to destroy.
But to illuminate.
Inside him, memories erupted—too many to hold.
A lover abandoned in a forest grove, waiting in silence for his voice.
A brother who died while waiting for truth to be spoken.
A mother who danced herself to death, willing to sacrifice all to save a name.
He fell to his knees, trembling as tears of ink bled into blood.
He looked up, voice raw but clear.
"I remember…"
And then—
He vanished.
Not destroyed.
But dissolved.
Melted into the pure light of truth.
The Naming Cavern pulsed again with sound.
Stone glowed warmly.
Rhythm returned to its sacred home.
Echo turned to Ola, a new hope kindling in her eyes.
"There are more silences waiting," she said.
"But now, we know what to do."
Ola reached for her hand.
And together, their voices rose—
Not to preserve the past.
But to become the future.