CHAPTER FIVE: Whispers Beneath the Skin
"Ọ̀nà tí a máa gbà lò, ló ń wọlé ṣáájú aláyé."
The path one must take enters the house before the living are aware.
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Zainab was unraveling.
Not with violence—but with silence. Her dreams had become longer than her sleep. She could no longer tell if the whispers came before or after she closed her eyes. She had stopped writing. Her mirror reflected something she couldn't name. She forgot what day it was twice last week. And her voice? It felt like an echo of someone else's memory.
But she still showed up to class.
She still bathed. Ate. Prayed—though her words now stumbled like strangers in her mouth.
She found herself whispering the name over and over again in the dark:
> "Ayéròyá (one whose life brings trembling awe)."
It had been the name spoken in the wind, the name her shadow remembered.
And though it wasn't hers—not officially, not legally—it hummed inside her bones like ancestral thunder.
One afternoon, half-sane and hungry for answers, Zainab began asking questions.
She started at the Department of Linguistics. An older professor chuckled when she asked the meaning of Ajogun.
> "Ajogun are not demons," the woman said, adjusting her glasses. "They are... inconveniences. Forces. They come when your Orí is weak or unaligned. They are said to be fear, sickness, death, loss, confusion. They are not evil—but they feed on disconnection."
"Disconnection from what?" Zainab asked.
> "From your Orí. Your divine head. The self you were before birth."
Zainab's chest felt tight.
The woman leaned in. "We all come with a path. When you forget yours, the Ajogun feast."
Zainab left the building with her thoughts ringing louder than the traffic. Ajogun. Orí. Ayéròyá.
That night, she sat at the back of her room, knees pulled to her chest. She Googled the spiral-circle symbol. No results. She sketched it and showed a classmate who studied anthropology.
They squinted. "Looks familiar. Like an old Ifá mark. I've seen it on some divination trays. But I'm not sure."
She was unraveling.
She stood in front of her mirror and asked out loud:
> "Am I losing my mind?"
The mirror didn't answer. But the dust on its surface slowly, inexplicably, shifted again—forming the spiral drawn into a circle.
This time, it pulsed.
Not like light. But like memory.
Her phone buzzed. Again, no number.
> "Àwọn Bàbá ń jó ní orúkọ rẹ, Ayéròyá. Ṣé o ti pé àkókò?"
The Ancestors dance in your name, Ayéròyá. Is it time yet?
She dropped the phone.
The wind stirred again. Her window creaked open just slightly.
And from the silence, a question clawed its way into her bones:
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Chapter Five Ends.
If the path walks into the house before you, are you still the one walking?