The harmattan blew strong the morning Adamma turned twelve. The dust painted every surface with red—the rooftops, the goat pens, even the bodies of the children who chased one another barefoot through the village square.
But Adamma did not run with them.
She sat under the ogbono tree, where the shadows were longest and the air carried the smell of ancient sap. She had drawn three circles in the dirt with her finger, the same way her mother taught her when the spirits were restless.
"Always draw a path for the ancestors to follow," Mama had said. "So they don't enter through your shadow."
Adamma believed it. She had to. Because shadows whispered to her.
She never told the other girls. They already avoided her like a ghost in mourning cloth. They said her eyes were too still. That animals never looked at her directly. That she walked without making sound.
They were not wrong.
Goats birthed stillborn kids when she passed. Fires died without reason. And her mother, *MmaOluchi*, a revered herbalist, aged faster each season—her once-black braids now silver like river stones.
Yet Mma Oluchi never wept. She watched her daughter with eyes filled not with fear, but with resignation.
"She is not cursed," the mother told the elders once, when the palm trees bent too far in a storm that had no thunder. "She is remembered."
Remembered.
Adamma didn't understand. But she felt it. In the roots of her teeth when the drums beat. In the base of her skull when the wind carried voices only she could hear.
This morning, those voices came again. Faint. Distant.
*Comehome…*
She closed her eyes and saw red earth stretching wide. Cowrie shells falling like rain. A river, dark as oil, swallowing faces that sang.
She gasped and opened her eyes.
Standing before her was *DibiaOfo*, the village diviner.
His white chalk robes fluttered in the breeze, though the air was still. His staff, carved with ancient Nsibidi symbols, tapped once against the ground. The air changed.
"Child," he said, voice like gravel soaked in time, "you are being called."
"By who?" she asked.
He smiled, sad and knowing.
"Not who. *What.*"
Behind him, the sky darkened. A red thread unfurled across the sun.
—
That night, the council gathered.
The drummers did not play.
Adamma sat alone in the center of the square. A ring of salt circled her. The elders watched from behind their cowhide masks. Mma Oluchi stood in silence, gripping the amulet her own mother passed down.
Dibia Ofo spoke.
"The ancestors stir. Something buried is waking. The girl must be tested. The veil between the living and the unborn thins."
One elder spat. "This child will bring death."
Another whispered, "She will bring truth."
Ofo raised his hand.
"She will bring *remembrance*."
And so, on the night of the new moon, Adamma was led to the *Hill of Bones*.
The place where the first daughters were buried.
The wind howled.
And the dust… began to sing.
—