đź“– Chapter:5
The village had grown quiet, but it was not peace.
It was cautious watching—like the sky before a storm, or a mother who knew her child was lying. The sea had stilled, but the ground beneath Amira's feet had begun to shift in subtler, more dangerous ways.
Because the spirits had been confronted.
But now, it was the living she had to face.
The Unwelcome Murmurs
Word of Amira's confrontation with the spirits had spread faster than wildfire.
Some called her blessed—a bridge between the forgotten and the living.
Others called her dangerous—a woman meddling in old things best left buried.
And there were those who remembered her grandmother, Nnena, and spat in the dirt when they heard Amira's name.
"She's stirred the sleeping dead," hissed Elder Barika at the morning market. "This is how curses return. This is how ancestors grow angry."
"They were already angry," murmured a woman with a basket of okra. "We just didn't listen."
Amira walked through the market with Elias beside her, hearing every word but not breaking her stride. Her eyes stayed ahead. But her fists clenched slightly tighter with each step.
She didn't need everyone to love her.
But she needed the truth to breathe again.
The Journal Opens
Back at the lighthouse, Amira began the true work.
She opened her mother's journal fully for the first time—not as a daughter mourning, but as a seeker unraveling an inheritance. And it was not just poetry or scattered thoughts. It was a record. A history. A hidden archive written in ink and blood and dried tears.
Names.
Dates.
Confessions whispered in secret.
Stories that had been passed from one mouth to another—never written down for fear of punishment.
Her mother had documented them all.
A woman who bled every full moon and lost her child when she dared speak.
A girl drowned at the lagoon because she refused the chief's touch.
A matriarch blamed for a famine she never caused.
Each story began to stitch itself into Amira's soul.
"These are not curses," she said to Elias. "They are wounds that never healed."
The Elders' Council
Summoned without formal invitation, Amira entered the elders' compound late in the afternoon.
Twelve pairs of eyes stared at her beneath the thick branches of the iroko tree. The same tree where decisions had been made for generations—decisions that shaped lives and silenced dissent.
"We respect what you did," said Elder Ndudi, the one with eyes like cracked charcoal. "But respect does not mean agreement."
"You have awakened things we spent years quieting," said another.
Amira looked them in the eye, all of them. Her voice did not tremble.
"You didn't quiet them. You buried them. And you thought the earth would never speak."
"Is that not what earth is for?" snapped Barika. "To cover. To end."
Amira stepped forward, lifting the journal like a talisman.
"My mother believed in memory. And I do too. I'm not asking your permission. I'm offering a chance to be part of what comes next."
Barika sneered. "And if we refuse?"
"Then the sea won't be the one to drown you. Truth will."
Elias's Shadow
Later that night, Elias sat alone outside the lighthouse.
Amira joined him, her fingers ink-stained from writing, eyes distant.
"There's something I didn't tell you," Elias said.
She turned.
"My father was taken by the sea too. But he wanted it. He'd grown tired. Guilty. Said he heard voices calling him. I thought he was mad."
Amira leaned her head on his shoulder.
"Maybe he just couldn't carry what others buried in him."
Elias nodded. "That's what I fear too. That one day, I'll be too full of ghosts to hold you."
Amira didn't answer with words.
She reached into her pocket and placed a small stone in his palm—a smooth piece of coral she'd found the day she confronted the spirits.
"For the weight," she whispered. "So I'll always have something holding you here."
Final Scene – The Wall of the Remembered
The next morning, Amira gathered the village's women again.
Not all came. But many did.
Together, they began building a wall—not to keep things out, but to hold memory.
Each woman painted or etched the name of a forgotten one: a mother, a sister, a lover, a friend.
Amira added the name Nnena.
Then her mother's name: Chinwe.
And beneath it, in bold:
"We do not die in silence anymore."