The Hollow breathed again.
Not gently. Not like a newborn breath, sweet with potential. No. This breath was jagged—ripped from the ribs of the world like something exiled too long from its body. It roared low and then exhaled slow, damp, and ancient, like the whisper of a god that had been sleeping too long beneath stone.
Ola felt it first.
A tightness behind his ears. A ringing in his teeth. The weight of names shifting in his marrow like trapped birds remembering how to flutter. He was walking the path between the Remembering Place and the new ring when it struck—his knees buckled mid-step. He caught himself on the stone altar meant for the erased, his palm stinging where it met the raw edges of unpolished rock.
"Ola," Echo's voice came low and sharp, steadying. She was behind him already, as if drawn to the same frequency. Her shadow stretched long beside his, trembling like a flame in sudden wind.
"I felt her," he said, breath thin. "Again."
Echo didn't ask who.
They both knew.
The girl from his dream—the one drowned not by spirits or sickness, but by shame. The one Obade had deemed too unnatural to mourn. She had cracked the crust of forgetting open like a seed casing. And now something else was rising through that split.
"What did she say this time?" Echo asked, her voice like stone on water.
Ola lifted his gaze slowly.
"She didn't speak," he murmured. "She sang."
Echo's face did not change. But her fingers curled slightly, as if bracing for something. "Then the Hollow has chosen to answer."
They stood in silence as a gust rose from the direction of the shrine—not wind, not weather. Breath. Presence. A pulse from beneath.
And with it came the return of the childlike spirit.
The one the villagers had once feared. The Witherbound.
But it had changed.
Before, it had moved like a memory half-remembered—jerky, unstable, flickering between rage and lament. Now it stepped from the mist with purpose, its feet stirring nothing, its eyes like small, steady moons. It carried no threat in its form. But the air around it crackled. A deeper current had stirred behind its gaze.
"You gave them names," the spirit said, its voice softer now, no longer childlike in the way of innocence, but in the way of fury stilled by wisdom. "But not all."
Echo stepped forward. "We built them a ring. For the silenced. For those the old rites erased."
"And what of the ones your people feared even in silence?" the spirit asked. "The broken ones. The violent. The shamed. The ones who tore but were never healed. The ones made into monsters to keep your own innocence intact."
Ola blinked slowly. "We weren't ready."
"No," said the spirit. "But they are."
It turned without waiting for reply, vanishing back into mist that now pulsed not with forgetting, but with the ache of unfinished story.
⟡
That night, the dreams returned.
Ola lay in the courtyard of the Remembering Place, where threadlight wove itself into constellations on the ceiling. Sleep came sharp, sudden, like falling off a ridge into open memory.
And there she was.
Not the spirit child—but the girl again. Ìmísí.
She walked barefoot over cracked earth that bled light. Her hair floated around her like black fire. Her mouth did not move, but the lullaby poured from her ribs like a storm caught in a clay drum.
Ẹ̀jẹ̀ wa kọrin… Ẹ̀jẹ̀ wa gba… Ẹ̀jẹ̀ wa jẹ ẹ̀mí pé a wà…
Let us sing…
Let us take…
Let us be the breath that remains…
Behind her trailed others.
A man with blood on his hands but not in his eyes. A woman with burned arms, holding a child that flickered like fire. A chorus of broken-mouthed figures, eyes stitched shut by the thread of other people's righteousness.
The Erased had names.
But these—their names were wounds.
Wounds never stitched.
Ola sat upright in the dream. Ìmísí turned to him.
"You can't unmake what was done," she said. "But you can give it shape."
"I don't know how," Ola replied.
She smiled—a terrible, beautiful thing. "Then listen harder."
She reached for him.
The moment her fingers brushed his chest, he felt it: heat, salt, a chasm. Not absence.
Shame.
Carved into stone.
⟡
Ola woke choking on his breath.
It wasn't just a dream. Not anymore. Something had shifted in the Hollow. The river's murmurs now curved upward at the end—like a question begging to be answered. The village air smelled of salt and ash, like a beach after a funeral pyre.
He rose, barefoot, and made his way to the shrine. The earth was damp with dew, but it wasn't dew he felt.
It was sweat. The ground was sweating.
And when he reached the edge of the second ring—the one they'd made for the unspoken—he saw it.
A third spiral was beginning.
Not built by hand.
Grown.
From the earth itself, stones had begun to rise—small, sharp, half-formed. Not smooth like the ones laid in love, but jagged, resisting the sky. The land was remembering what the people still refused to name.
Echo stood nearby. She'd seen it too.
"They're coming back," she whispered.
"Who?" Ola asked.
Echo didn't answer immediately. Then she turned to him, eyes gleaming with the light of something older than lineage.
"The ones who were made monsters so the rest of us could sleep."
Ola stepped toward the new spiral. He knelt before the rough stone at its center.
It was stained.
Not with blood, but with salt.
He licked his finger and touched it.
Salt.
From sweat. From tears.
From bodies never grieved.
"They're not asking for forgiveness," Echo said behind him. "They're asking for form. For space."
"They want a name," Ola murmured.
"No," she said. "They want reckoning."
⟡
By morning, the villagers had gathered once more.
Some came in reverence. Some in resistance.
The first two rings—The Remembering Place and the Ring of the Erased—had been sanctified, embraced. But this? This third ring?
It felt different.
Heavy.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stood at the edge with her staff planted deep. Her face betrayed nothing, but her breath did. She exhaled like one who knew what was coming and had hoped it would never arrive in her lifetime.
"They called this place sacred," she said, voice ringing clear. "But true sanctity does not exclude."
Murmurs rippled. Unease bloomed like mold.
Ola stepped into the center. "We are not here to absolve. We are here to remember. All of it. Even the wounds we inflicted. Even the people we made into parables. Even the stories we exiled because they disrupted the version of Obade we wanted to believe in."
He turned slowly, letting his gaze fall on each face.
"This ring is for those who became salt in our mouths. The shamed. The punished. The feared. The wronged—and yes, even the wrongdoers."
Gasps. One woman clutched her chest. Another turned away, muttering.
But Ola continued. "This does not make their actions holy. But refusing to name them does not erase what they meant."
Echo stepped beside him.
"In every lineage," she said, "there is a name no one speaks. A wound we hand down like inheritance. This ring is not about blame. It is about weight."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stepped forward.
"And if we do not bear it?" someone called.
"Then it will bear us," Iyagbẹ́kọ́ replied simply.
No one spoke after that.
⟡
The rite began at twilight.
Not with songs. With silence.
Each villager was asked—not commanded—to bring the name they had buried in shame. The one they refused to speak, not out of fear, but because it made their story too complicated.
The spiral grew.
One stone. Then another. Then ten.
The spiral was not clean. Not perfect. It snaked unevenly, as though uncertain it deserved to form.
But it did.
And in the center, Ola laid a single carved figure.
Not a statue.
A mirror.
Because some wounds didn't belong to the dead.
They belonged to the living.
⟡
Later, as darkness fell and the last ember faded from the night fire, Echo sat with Ola beneath the altar of salt. Her fingers were stained with earth. His throat was hoarse from naming.
He turned to her, voice soft.
"What comes next?"
She looked up, eyes shadowed by tired starlight.
"The trial," she said.
Ola frowned. "I thought we already passed it."
Echo's voice was steady.
"No. The Trial of Names was about memory. The next is about responsibility."
Ola leaned back against the stone, breath slow.
"Do you think we're ready?"
She gave a small, sad smile.
"No. But we're not alone anymore."
And beneath them, the Hollow pulsed again.
Not with ache.
But with readiness.