The waters outside Obade no longer shimmered with the gentle hush of forgetfulness. Where the river once carried names into silence, it now stirred with unrest—like something beneath the surface had remembered its own name and begun to rise.
Echo stood alone at the edge of a forgotten stream, far from the Remembering Place. Mist slithered through the reeds like shy spirits. Her boots sank slightly into wet earth as she adjusted the woven satchel slung across her chest—inside it, a handful of charms, fragments of the Hollow's old tongue, and a slender shard of cracked obsidian taken from Ìlàró's cradle.
She was not here to bury anything.
She was here to unearth what the river tried to hide.
Earlier that morning, before the fog had lifted, Iyagbẹ́kọ́ had handed her an old bone pendant strung on faded indigo. A relic. "This stream once drowned girls for hearing too much," the elder had said. "If you listen, Echo, listen well, one of them may speak to you."
So Echo had followed the river's haunted veins beyond Obade. Past the ring of the erased. Past even the burnt groves where no birds sang. The air here felt thick—not dangerous, but bruised.
Still, she sang.
Not loudly. Not in any full-bodied hymn.
But with breath. Low syllables carried from her diaphragm, the way Iyagbẹ́kọ́ once taught her: with intention. With awareness. The kind of song that was not offered to the ears of men, but to the bones of the land.
She hummed a verse once sung in dream:"When the water turned inward / and the names turned to silt / she held her breath / and sang beneath the tide."
The stream responded.
Not with song.
With silence.
But it was a silence that echoed.
A hush that pulsed in time with her heartbeat.
Echo knelt and pressed her palm into the surface. It should have been cold. But it was warm—disturbingly so. Like the breath of a fevered sleeper.
She closed her eyes.
Waited.
And then, something pulled.
Not physically—but inside. A memory not hers tried to rise.
She gasped.
The air changed.
She was no longer kneeling.
She stood on a shoreline that shimmered with moonlit rot. The trees were wrong—twisted sideways as if they'd grown under sorrow. The water was deeper here. Hungrier. At the edge, children knelt, mouths open, their songs never finishing before they dissolved into the current.
Echo walked among them.
They didn't notice her.
They were echoes too.
Until one looked up.
A girl—no older than nine. Hair bound in charred beads. Skin the color of midnight oil. Eyes too wise. Too knowing.
"You brought the song back," the girl said.
Echo swallowed hard. "I only remembered it."
The child nodded. "Then remember me."
The river behind her hissed.
A voice rose—not the girl's. Not Echo's.
A layered moan, like dozens of voices stacked atop each other, shuddered out of the water.
"She wasn't the only one."
Echo turned.
Figures rose—women and girls, mothers and twins, elders and daughters.
All of them water-bled. All of them cracked like clay dolls. They shimmered with a bruised beauty. Their songs were not coherent. Not yet.
"You drowned," Echo whispered.
"No," the girl replied. "We were drowned. For singing what the elders feared. For dreaming what the shrine forbade. For calling names that hadn't been purified."
Echo's hands trembled.
"You're the ones who weren't even buried."
The child nodded. "We are the ones memory tried to disown."
"But we remember you now," Echo said. "The Hollow breathes your names."
The girl stepped closer.
"No," she said. "You breathe our names. And that's why you're here."
The others watched silently.
Echo knelt. She touched the water again—and this time, it did not resist. Her fingertips met something solid. Bone. Shaped like a pendant.
She drew it from the river.
It bore a name etched in old sigils—scratched and shallow, but unmistakable.
Ìmísí.
She gasped.
The girl smiled.
"You came all this way to find what had already begun in your hands."
Echo clutched the pendant to her chest. "You are not lost."
The girl looked toward the others. "Not anymore. But we're not home yet."
The river groaned. A ripple passed through the spectral figures.
"You must build us a gate," the girl said. "Where we can return. Not as ghosts. As presence."
Echo stood. "A second cradle?"
"No. A threshold," the girl said. "Not for mourning. For reckoning."
Behind them, the water split—not into waves, but into threads. Threads of memory. Threads of silence torn open.
And then, she woke.
—
When Echo returned to Obade, her hands were shaking.
Ola met her near the edge of the shrine. He'd been waiting. His eyes were shadowed—not from exhaustion, but from carrying too many dreams he had no words for yet.
"You saw her," he said. It was not a question.
Echo nodded.
"And more."
She held out the pendant.
Ola stared at the name.
"Ìmísí," he breathed.
Echo's voice was tight. "She wasn't alone."
He looked at her.
"There's another ring," she said. "Not of the erased. Of the unspoken. The drowned. The denied."
Ola closed his eyes.
"They still wait."
"We'll build it," Echo said. "But not with stone."
Ola opened his eyes again.
"With what, then?"
She turned toward the basin.
"With songs. The ones that never had verses. With stories that end in questions. With lullabies no mother was allowed to sing."
Ola was silent.
Then he stepped forward.
He placed his hand over Echo's, covering the pendant between them.
"We'll name them all," he said.
Not a promise.
A covenant.
—
That night, a new fire was lit beside the Remembering Place. But it wasn't for warmth. Or spectacle.
It was for calling.
The elders gathered.
Children clutched charms woven from riverweed and charcoal.
And Echo sang.
Not alone.
This time, the drowned sang with her.
Their songs were broken.
Fragmented.
But they rose.
From breath.
From bone.
From the ash beneath the shrine.
And a new ring began—not of stone or soil.
But of sound.
The Threshold of the Unspoken.
And from its center, the river answered.
The fire crackled low, fed not with wood, but with woven offerings—scraps of cloth embroidered with names never spoken aloud, broken beads, the final verses of forgotten lullabies inked onto dried palm leaves. The flames did not consume these things. They transformed them. Turned them into smoke that rose like incense toward the darkened sky.
And through that smoke, something descended.
Not visibly. Not in form. But in pressure, in weight. The way the atmosphere shifts just before the first thunder speaks. It settled on the gathering like the memory of a wound reopening—not to bleed, but to breathe.
Ola stood with Echo, facing the fire. The pendant bearing Ìmísí's name hung between them from a thin thread of river-harvested flax. Behind them, the shrine of the Remembering Place stood silent. Watching. Bearing witness.
But the real shrine now was the space in between. The ring of song. The ring of brokenness. The ring where no name was too tainted to return home.
The people were quiet.
Not from fear, but reverence.
And then, Echo did what no one had ever dared in the sacred grounds of Obade.
She broke the silence with a story not her own.
"She was nine," Echo said. Her voice was low, raw. "She could hear the names of the unborn. She spoke to shadows that smelled of kin. They called her cursed. Possessed. A danger to the purity of the shrine."
Her voice cracked. Ola reached out, not to silence, but to steady her.
"They tied her hands. Sank her in the river with a charm bound to her chest—so the water would forget her faster."
A murmur passed through the crowd. A shiver. No one interrupted.
Echo stepped forward and knelt beside the flame. She placed a bowl beside it, filled with riverwater, crushed chalk, and a few strands of her own hair. "This is her return. This is our shame."
Mámi Teni stepped forward, slow but fierce.
"She was not the only one," the elder said.
She placed a small, cracked mirror into the bowl. "My sister was born during the famine. They said she brought death with her birthmark. My mother buried her name with her body."
The bowl trembled.
Then another voice. A man. "My uncle wept every time he held a knife. They said he was too soft to hunt. He ran to the forest one night. Never came back."
More offerings.
More stories.
A flood.
The bowl could not hold it all. The earth beneath it began to pulse. A dull rhythm. Not drumming. Breathing.
Echo looked to Ola.
"It's beginning," she whispered.
He nodded.
"Then we do what we came here to do."
And together, they stepped inside the ring.
And they named them.
Not with ceremony.
But with grief.
With clarity.
With refusal.
Refusal to forget. Refusal to edit. Refusal to let the community bury what had never been exorcised—only avoided.
They named the ones who saw too much.
The ones who loved wrongly.
The ones who were too loud, too strange, too shattered to survive the rites.
They named the midwives who bled out without burial.
The sons who disappeared after speaking dreams the elders disapproved of.
The girls who heard spirits, and the boys who wore their mother's beads.
No rhythm guided them.
No choir.
Only memory.
Only truth.
And the fire did not go out.
It changed.
It burned blue.
And then, it bent.
Curved inward.
As if bowing.
And from the center of the flames, a low sound emerged.
It was not a voice.
It was a collective exhale.
And in that breath, the Hollow answered.
Not with hunger.
But with grace.
A wind moved through Obade that night.
It did not chill.
It cleansed.
It rolled through the woven homes and sacred groves. It bent reeds and parted smoke. And those who stood within the Threshold of the Unspoken felt it enter them—not as possession, but as remembrance.
As reunion.
Ola knelt beside the fire and whispered: "You are not lost. We remember you."
And something shifted in his chest.
A warmth.
A weight.
But not warning.
Acceptance.
The pendant he carried—Ìmísí's name—crumbled into ash in his palm.
Not vanished.
Fulfilled.
Returned.
Echo smiled faintly.
"It's beginning," she said again.
"No," Ola whispered. "It's becoming."
They stood there, surrounded by names the world had tried to drown. And they knew—this was not the end of the rite.
It was the beginning of a harder one.
One without script.
One where the community would have to choose, again and again, to hold what was difficult.
To honor what was uncomfortable.
To name not only the beloved, but the feared. The inconvenient. The haunting.
And the Hollow?
It no longer pulled them downward.
It breathed with them now.
From beneath.
From within.
From every corner where silence once reigned.
The volume closed that night with no thunder. No divine proclamation.
Only a single stone, set beside the Remembering Place.
Inscribed not with a name.
But with a truth.
"We remember those we buried without prayer."
And beneath that: a line of song.
Not to cleanse.
Not to heal.
But to make space.
For what refused to drown.