The night in Obade pressed down like a second skin.
It wasn't just darkness — it was weight. A thick hush that blanketed the village, heavier than silence and colder than wind. The air pushed into lungs with invisible fingers. It curled beneath doorways, clung to the eaves, and slipped into the dreams of the sleeping with whispers that made their faces twist in unrest.
Even the crickets had gone quiet.
And beneath the river, Ola was no longer swimming.
He was sinking.
The water, once familiar, now resisted him like a living thing. It coiled around his limbs, not pulling him under in violence, but smothering him gently — like an old friend tucking him in for a sleep he would not wake from.
The Watcher was waiting.
Its shape was a lie — or too many truths at once. Ola's eyes kept trying to make sense of it, but every time his gaze focused, the vision shifted.
One breath, it looked like something ancient and skeletal, made of coral and eel-skin, a mask of rippling water hiding its face. The next, it was no taller than a man, crowned in reeds and hooks, speaking in the voice of drowned prayers. And then, it would blur again — towering, grotesque, faceless — a godless deity with hands that could wrap around the whole village like cupped water.
Its voice came from everywhere.
"You took your name back."
It wasn't a question. It was a statement made by something that had always known it would happen.
Ola's breath fogged in the water, though it wasn't cold in any way that made sense. "It was mine."
"You took it from me."
He shook his head, jaw tightening. "No. I took it from the thief."
The Watcher tilted its head in a slow, fluid motion. Like it was sniffing out weakness.
"And who do you think sent the thief?"
Ola froze.
The truth hit him like the chill of deep water — not painful, but emptying. His stomach hollowed. His lungs felt like they had forgotten how to work.
"I owe you nothing," he managed.
"You owe me everything."
The river around them shimmered, and the world twisted.
Ola stumbled, suddenly no longer submerged. He was standing on the cracked edge of a blood-red riverbank. The soil beneath his feet was dry and split like a dying tongue. A black sun hung overhead — not casting light, but bleeding it. Everything it touched felt wrong. Twisted. Unnamed.
In the distance, rows of bodies hung from poles.
But they didn't dangle by rope. They were suspended by strands of glistening water — holding them still like insects caught in amber. Some had no eyes. Others had mouths sealed shut with threads of reeds.
Ola couldn't look away.
The Watcher's voice echoed beside him.
"Every name you carry now... is one I kept from vanishing. Every voice you think you saved — I held them in my mouth when the silence came for them. They live only because I remembered them."
Ola's throat closed. "Why?"
The Watcher drifted closer, slow and vast. Its limbs blurred and shifted, one moment a hand, the next a tide.
"Because everything remembered belongs to me."
Ola staggered. His mind spun.
The nights he had prayed by the river and heard whispers. The times he had spoken a name into the current and felt a response — soft, warm, intimate. He had thought them blessings. Help from the river. Echoes of the past aiding the present.
They weren't gifts.
They were claims.
"What do you want?" he asked, his voice dry and cracking.
"You already know."
The Watcher leaned forward, head nearly touching his. There was no breath. No heat. But the space between them buzzed with pressure, like a storm about to break.
Ola looked away. "No."
"Say it."
"I won't."
A hand — if it was a hand — rose and pressed against his chest.
No warmth. No weight.
Just the sudden, unbearable feeling that his ribs were being folded inward, as if the entire river had decided to crush him at once.
He gasped.
And the visions came.
The girl in the reed fields — the one he'd seen crying and said nothing. The boy turned away from the shrine gates because of his mother's reputation. The Hollowed man who bled out on the edge of the village because the healers refused to touch him.
Their eyes stared at Ola now.
But it didn't stop there.
Flashes of other lives. Other selves. A hundred versions of him, stretching through time like water in flood channels. Lives he didn't remember living — but that all felt like him. Holding dying children. Failing to speak when it mattered. Praying too late.
The Watcher whispered.
"You will bring me the rest of my due. Or I will take it myself."
Above the River
Echo startled awake, heart pounding.
She didn't know when she'd fallen asleep, only that the moment she did, something had shifted in the air.
The river was silver beneath the moonlight, but that wasn't what caught her breath.
The threadlight — the shimmering tether between her and Ola — was fraying. Not snapped. Not severed. But unwinding, as though some patient hand were undoing it strand by strand.
She bolted upright.
"Iyagbẹ́kọ!" she hissed.
The older woman stepped out of the reeds behind her like she'd been waiting. Her staff tapped softly against the ground.
"You felt it too."
Echo nodded. "He's in trouble."
Iyagbẹ́kọ's expression didn't change. Her eyes remained on the river. "He's in debt."
Echo turned sharply. "Debt to what?"
Iyagbẹ́kọ's voice was quiet, but it left no space for misunderstanding.
"Not to what. To who."
Echo's breath caught. "You know."
"I know enough to fear it."
Echo moved closer. "Then tell me. Now."
Iyagbẹ́kọ finally met her gaze. The weight behind her eyes was more than age. It was burden. Secrets she'd held alone for decades.
"Before Obade. Before the shrines. Before we carved prayer songs into the stones... there was something else. Something older than gods. It lived beneath the water. A keeper of the drowned. Not the River Queen. Not any spirit we honor."
She paused. Then:
"It does not choose who to save. It chooses who to remember. And those it remembers... belong to it."
Echo's mouth went dry. A metallic tang drifted on the wind.
She looked to the river.
"Ola," she whispered.
Beneath Again
Ola could still feel the threadlight — but barely. The Watcher was wrapped around it, fingers tightening. Tasting it. Testing it.
"What happens if I refuse?" he asked.
The Watcher's head tilted again. Too many joints. Too fluid. Like a puppet cut loose from strings.
"Then your name returns to me. And you will wander here, nameless, until the river forgets you completely. If it ever does."
Ola clenched his fists. "I've carried too much to give it back."
"Then carry what I demand."
The images returned — but not like before.
This time, they were instructions.
He saw places in the village. Old homes, abandoned shrines, prayer stones long untouched. Graves with no markers. Under floorboards. Beneath roots. Inside the walls of the oldest shrine.
He saw faces. People still alive. Unknowing. Names not yet stolen, but already owed.
"You want me to dig them up," he whispered.
"I want you to deliver them."
Understanding dawned.
The Watcher didn't want the dead remembered.
It wanted the living marked.
"No," he said.
The water stilled around them.
Utterly.
The Watcher's voice turned soft. Not tender — but worse. Pitying.
"Child… there is no no."
The pressure returned. A crushing weight on his chest. His vision blurred. The red riverbank pulsed. The black sun throbbed in time with his heartbeat.
He was slipping—
Yanked.
Not by the Watcher.
Something above. Something real.
The threadlight went taut, and then burned — white-hot, searing through the water like a lightning strike.
Ola screamed as he was torn backwards, ripped from the Watcher's grasp, flung through layers of dream and memory and water until—
He broke the surface.
Air. Cold. Moonlight.
His lungs seized, and he gasped as if breathing for the first time.
Echo and Iyagbẹ́kọ stood on the riverbank, both holding the threadlight in their hands like a lifeline. Their faces were pale, their eyes wide — but they had not let go.
The Watcher did not rise.
But its voice drifted up from the ripples.
"You still carry my mark. And you will pay."
On the Bank
Ola collapsed onto the mud, soaked and shivering.
Echo knelt beside him, pressing a hand to his chest — not in comfort, but to feel the flame of his name still burning beneath his skin.
"What did it do to you?" she asked.
He shook his head slowly. "It didn't take my name. But it wants more than that now."
Iyagbẹ́kọ's face was grave. "It will follow you."
"I know."
Echo glanced at the river. Its surface had calmed again. But it didn't look like water anymore.
It looked like an eye. Half-lidded. Waiting.
"What does it want?" she whispered.
Ola met her gaze. There was no anger there. Only a terrible, steady clarity.
"It wants the rest of the names."
Iyagbẹ́kọ's grip tightened on her staff.
"Then we guard them."
"No," Ola said softly.
"We'll have to carry them. All of them. Before it does."
The silence that followed was heavier than the night itself.
And far off in the reeds, something moved.
Not with wind.
But with laughter.