They called him Ẹ̀rùmọ́lẹ̀, the Hollow King. But that was never his true name.
He was not born of soil or love, not of whispered prayers or the steady pulse of ancestral drums. He was born from refusal—an ancient refusal layered over centuries of atrocity, so deep and dark that even the Archive had forgotten to speak his crimes aloud.
But now, the silence he wielded was breaking.
They were speaking. They were singing. They were burning through the kingdom of forgetting he had built, brick by shadowed brick.
And so, the Hollow King released his last silence.
It was not absence. Not emptiness.
It was a devouring hush—an abyss so deep, it threatened to swallow memory itself.
It began quietly, almost imperceptibly, at the edges of Obade.
A child, trying to sing the naming song, faltered, forgetting the first line as if the words had slipped through cracks in the air.
An elder lifted her hands to pour libation, but her tongue thickened and her prayers crumbled into ash before they could pass her lips.
Then the silence spread like disease, creeping insidiously.
Names vanished from carved stones. Faces blurred and faded in family portraits left untouched for generations. Drums that once echoed with steady beats began to pulse erratically, fractured rhythms struggling to find form.
The river trembled beneath the weight of it all.
And deep in its depths, Ẹ̀nítàn stirred, restless and fearful.
"He has released the Devouring," she murmured, voice barely above the hush of water. "If they do not hold onto their truth… it will consume them all."
Iyagbẹ́kọ sat alone in her hut, eyes closed, breathing shallow and slow as she felt her lineage slipping—threads of memory fraying like smoke dissolving into night.
"He means to erase the beat entirely," she whispered to the shadows, voice heavy with grief and defiance.
Slowly, she rose, each movement measured and deliberate, rooted in breath and song passed down through generations of mothers who refused to forget even when memory meant pain.
At her altar, she opened her last sacred bundle.
Inside, nestled in cloth dark as midnight, lay a shard of obsidian—still pulsing faintly with the scream she had swallowed during the massacre of her kin.
"One silence," she said softly, "against another."
She placed the sharp fragment beneath her tongue, a bitter offering, and stepped out into the night.
Far away, Echo convulsed in restless sleep.
She was back within the Spiral Flame, but this time, alone.
The fire no longer listened to her song.
Her voice was mute.
She reached desperately for rhythm in the swirling heat—and it cracked between her hands.
Then came the whisper, cold and cruel, threading through the smoke.
"Even your fire can be extinguished."
With a scream, Echo jolted upright.
Beside her, Ola stirred, sweat gleaming on his chest, breath shallow and uneven.
"I dreamed I was a child again," he murmured, voice rough. "But no one remembered my name…"
Echo rose, her eyes fierce in the dim morning light.
"It's happening everywhere," she said.
"What do we do?" Ola asked, searching her face.
Echo turned toward the horizon, where the darkness pulsed like a living wound.
"We don't sing louder," she replied. "We listen deeper."
Guided by fractured dreams and fading threads of memory, Echo and Ola followed the rhythm underground—into the Naming Cavern, the sacred place where the ancestors first gave language to breath and the river first sang names into being.
It was said that no silence could survive there.
But when they arrived, the cavern lay empty and hollow.
The stones that once glowed with the power of names now wept steady trails of water.
No echoes bounced from the walls.
No rhythm thrummed beneath their feet.
Only unbeing.
And in the cavern's shadowed heart stood a figure cloaked in ink and grief.
The Hollow King.
His face shifted like smoke—unfinished, broken, terrifying.
"You think rhythm saves you," he hissed, voice dry and cracked.
"But rhythm is pain. I took it from you so you wouldn't feel."
Ola stepped forward, his voice steady.
"No," he said. "You took it because you were afraid of what it revealed."
The Hollow King's eyes burned with sorrow and rage.
"I was made from their refusal," he whispered. "Their shame. Their broken promises."
Echo met his gaze, calm and fierce.
"Then burn," she said softly, "but not alone."
With that, she opened her chest—literally.
From within her rose the fire she had earned in the Spiral Flame.
It did not lash out.
It reached toward him, a gentle, relentless light.
The Hollow King screamed as the flame entered him.
Not to destroy.
But to illuminate.
Memories erupted inside him, too many to hold:
A lover he abandoned in a forest grove, waiting for his voice.
A brother who died while waiting for him to speak truth.
A mother who danced herself to death to save his name from being forgotten.
He fell to his knees, trembling as tears of ink bled into blood.
He looked up, voice raw but clear:
"I remember…"
And then—
He vanished.
Not destroyed.
But dissolved.
Melted into the pure light of truth.
The Naming Cavern pulsed again with sound.
Stone glowed warmly.
Rhythm returned to its sacred home.
Echo turned to Ola, a new hope kindling in her eyes.
"There are more silences waiting," she said.
"But now, we know what to do."
Ola reached for her hand.
And together, their voices rose—
Not to preserve the past.
But to become the future.