Chapter: 10
The journey began before sunrise.
Amira, Elias, Obinna, and a small party of six left the village while mist still hugged the earth and the drums of farewell pulsed softly behind them.
"Every step we take now," Elias said, "is a step into someone else's forgetting."
The path was not marked by roads, but by echoes—sacred symbols carved into tree bark, old chants the elders had taught them to sing in rhythm with the forest wind, and Amira's own dreams that had begun to shape themselves into prophecy.
The Weight of Silence
As they neared the border to Iduoma, the land changed.
The trees grew denser, quieter. Birdsong vanished. Even the wind seemed hushed.
Obinna stopped them at the foot of a withered fig tree.
"From here," he said, "we speak only in whispers."
"Why?" someone asked.
Obinna's voice lowered.
"In Iduoma, truth is illegal."
It was not a metaphor.
The elders there had long ago outlawed the speaking of names tied to rebellion, spirituality, or ancestors. Too many had been punished. Too many graves dug.
To survive, the people forgot on purpose.
The Girl with No Name
On the third night, they found her.
A girl no older than sixteen, wrapped in plantain leaves, half-conscious from exhaustion. She had escaped from Iduoma.
Her eyes opened slowly when Amira offered her water. She recoiled at first, then reached with trembling hands.
"Do you have… a name?" Amira asked softly.
The girl flinched.
Then slowly shook her head.
"We are not allowed to carry them," she said. "But I remember one. I heard it once. In a dream."
She leaned closer, as if the trees might overhear.
"Amira."
The group froze.
Elias looked at Amira.
She whispered, "The names are traveling faster than we are."
The Punishment of Memory
Obinna explained what had happened in Iduoma over the decades.
After the civil wars, famine, and a plague that stole a third of the population, the surviving elders blamed "cursed memory." They forbade ritual, burial chants, ancestral offerings.
If someone was caught naming the dead, they were publicly shamed, sometimes banished.
Entire families erased their lineages to survive.
"They taught forgetting like religion," Obinna said. "It's not that they don't remember. It's that they fear being remembered."
A Night of Visions
That night, Amira sat by the fire alone. The others slept.
She heard soft footsteps—then saw a woman cloaked in blue, with braids threaded in silver.
The woman did not speak. She knelt and drew a circle in the dirt. Inside it, she placed five small stones. Each stone pulsed softly with light.
Then she looked at Amira and mouthed:
"Bring them to the river."
Amira blinked—and the woman vanished.
In her hand were the five stones.
Crossing the Border
They reached the outskirts of Iduoma at dawn.
The guards at the gate were stern, dressed in ceremonial robes, spears at their sides.
Obinna stepped forward.
"We are pilgrims. We come with ritual flint and memory stones."
One guard narrowed his eyes.
"There are no such things in Iduoma."
Elias offered a small smile.
"Then perhaps it's time there were."
A tense silence followed.
Then—surprisingly—one of the older guards stepped aside.
"Let them pass. But no songs. No drums. No names."
As they entered, the air shifted again.
The village of Iduoma was clean, orderly, lifeless.
The Echo Begins
Though forbidden, word spread.
A woman named Amira had arrived.
Some whispered it at wells. Others muttered it in cracked kitchens or under woven mats.
Children began to hum odd melodies they claimed came from dreams.
A young boy carved the name Nnena into a calabash.
And that night, for the first time in twenty years, a single drumbeat echoed from the mango grove just outside Iduoma.