The night air was thick enough to drink.
It clung to Ola's skin, cold and heavy, pressing down like a weight as she leaned back against the cracked, splintered wood of the old granary wall. Her heart hammered in her chest, every beat a thunderclap in the quiet symphony of the Obade night. Above her, the moon was swallowed by a slow-moving veil of clouds, snuffing out the pale silver light and plunging the world into a deeper shade of darkness.
The sounds around her sharpened in the absence of moonlight — the whispering wind threading through brittle millet stalks, the faint creak of rotting shutters across the lane, the wet, deliberate breath of something waiting just beyond the reach of sight.
And then there was the absence.
Èkóyé was no longer beside her.
It had happened so suddenly she barely registered the moment she was alone. One second, the steady presence of Èkóyé was a slow heartbeat in the storm, anchoring her in a world that was swiftly unraveling. The next, a cold void yawned where warmth should have been. Ola dared not call out — the night here was older than any word, and calling a name was like tossing a stone into deep, still water. You never knew what might rise from the depths to answer.
Her eyes squeezed shut. She counted her breath, steadying herself with the rhythms Iyagbẹ́kọ had taught her when she was a child and the spirits pressed too close. Four in. Four out. Four in. Four out.
But the calm did not hold.
The breath she drew next caught painfully in her throat, a sudden chill sliding down her spine like a blade.
A shadow moved.
Tall. Angular. Wrong.
The creature stepped forward from the grain of darkness — a Hollowed.
Ola's blood ran cold. The hollowed had been driven from the riverbanks weeks ago, but this one was unlike the others. Its face was a cracked mask, pale skin stretched tight over bone as though the earth itself had tried to split it open. Deep fissures carved into the smooth flesh formed unnatural patterns, like scars mapped by some ancient and terrible hand. The eyes were bottomless pits, black and void of moonlight.
And when it tilted its head, there was a flicker of recognition in the unnatural stillness.
It knew her.
A jolt of fear surged through her, quickening her pulse and making her fingers tremble against the hilt of the dagger tucked beneath her wrapper — a small blade forged in the river's cold depths, gifted by Èkóyé before their journey into the Hollowed's burial ground.
Her foot slid backward, but the granary wall cut off her retreat. Somewhere to her right, along the path that led to Iyagbẹ́kọ's compound, she heard the unmistakable shuffle of footsteps — dry, deliberate, sandal-soled. One. Two. Three.
Her breath caught. Her hand tightened on the dagger.
"Ola."
The voice wasn't a voice at all. It was water poured slowly into the hollow of her skull. Cold hands pressing against her temples from the inside. She bit down hard on her lip, tasting copper, and shook her head fiercely.
Not yours. Not tonight.
The Hollowed took a step closer, the dust stirring in its wake like a ripple on still water. The air warped around it, bending as if the night itself were cracking open to reveal something else, something ancient.
Then — a sudden sharp burst, like rain pelting on tin, quick and rhythmic. A signal.
Èkóyé.
The Hollowed's head snapped toward the sound with an unnatural stillness. Without hesitation, Ola slid sideways along the wall and slipped into the narrow alley behind the granary, her feet moving as if by muscle memory even while her mind spun wild.
The alley spat her out into a courtyard she knew well — an abandoned weaving yard, its looms long since surrendered to termites, the mats decayed into dust. At the far end, a flicker of light. Èkóyé stood there, the glow of a small river stone cradled in her hand casting soft light on the sharp planes of her face. Her eyes locked on Ola's with urgent intensity.
"Two more behind it," Èkóyé said, voice low and tight. "One carrying something… wrong."
Ola's breath hitched. "What kind of wrong?"
"The kind that hums in the bone," Èkóyé replied, stepping closer. "We can't stay here. If they have a binding, they'll cut us off from the river's call."
A binding.
Ola's mind raced. She'd only ever heard the word in Iyagbẹ́kọ's deepest warnings — ancient tools stolen from the oldest tombs, capable of severing the spirit-thread that tied a dreamwalker to the water. A death without a body, a drowning that no flesh could explain.
The air in the yard shifted. They both felt it — a tremor underfoot, a cold pulse in the blood.
"Ola," Èkóyé said, sharp and low. "Now."
They moved as one, silent and sure, slipping through the weaving yard's back gate and into the winding lanes beyond. Ola's ears caught the faint hum Èkóyé had warned of — a low, vibration that settled deep in her ribs. It grew louder with every step, weaving into a rhythm that twisted the edges of her thoughts.
By the time they reached the abandoned cattle pens at the edge of the village, the hum had form — a slow chant, ancient and alien, thrumming in the dark.
The pens lay open before them, moonlight spilling free from behind the clouds to silver the empty troughs and fallen fences. In the center stood three Hollowed, arranged in a loose triangle. The first was the fissured one that had confronted Ola. The second was smaller, its long fingers trailing coils of black mist that writhed like serpents.
And the third…
Ola's breath caught in her throat.
It was not carrying the binding.
It was the binding.
The figure stood taller than any human, wrapped in layers of rivercloth stiffened like armor. Where a head should have been, there was a hollow drum — its taut surface etched with writhing sigils that seemed to shift and dance in the silver light. The hum pulsed from the drum, each syllable vibrating through the air and into Ola's teeth until they ached.
"Oshùn help us," Èkóyé whispered, voice trembling.
But Ola knew the river's goddess was far away tonight.