The river had quieted, but not stilled.
Its surface gleamed with an ethereal glow, as though the moon itself had been pulled beneath the current and made to dream there. Beneath that calm shimmer, deeper currents churned—ancient, unseen, and alive. The river no longer belonged to Obade alone; it had become something else, something liminal. A threshold. A passage. A hinge between truths where memory, myth, and the unspoken bled freely into one another.
Obade was changing. It breathed with a rhythm that had never belonged to earth alone. Time had grown soft around its edges—warped, uncertain. The sun rose crooked and slow some days, like an old man forgetting his steps. The moon blinked in and out, flickering in half-formed crescents. No hour obeyed the last. The villagers had stopped counting days altogether.
At the center of it all stood Ola.
He hadn't left the river's edge since Echo crossed into the dreaming. He barely slept, and when he did, it was only to chase the echoes of her voice across slippery dream terrain. Her body lay preserved within the salt vessel, glowing faintly beneath layers of enchanted silk and whisper-runes. The villagers kept a silent vigil, circling in shifts, as though guarding a flame too sacred for wind.
Echo's soul was elsewhere. But Ola knew she wasn't lost.
Not yet.
Each night, her voice reached him. At first it came as fragments—a name without a mouth, syllables brushed onto his dreams like dew on old leaves. Then, slowly, the fragments formed phrases. Then full thoughts. Full sentences. Her voice rode the currents of the dreaming, but it was no longer hers alone. It carried something deeper now, something ancient. Sometimes she spoke in his tongue. Sometimes in the river's. Sometimes in silence that still filled his head like thunder.
On the seventh dawn, just as the horizon cracked with a brittle orange light, Ola stepped into the sacred hut.
"Iyagbẹ́kọ́," he said, breathless, "She's showing me something. She's trying to anchor the silence with song. But something's pulling against her."
The old woman turned slowly from her loom of ash-strands and salt runes. Her fingers still glistened with memory-thread. Her face looked impossibly ancient—creased not just by time, but by truths so heavy they had bent her very soul to carry them.
"She's nearing the core of the dreaming," she murmured, voice distant. "Where the forgotten sleep."
Ola stepped closer. "The forgotten?"
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ gestured toward the glowing woven circle at the hut's center. "The parts of us we refused to pass on. The songs we buried beneath silence. The stories the elders whispered into the ground so our children wouldn't hear. They became the sediment beneath all dreaming. If she wakes them too quickly, they may unmake her. Or the realm may collapse under her breath."
Ola's fists clenched. "Then I'll go in after her."
"You cannot," Iyagbẹ́kọ́ snapped. Her voice cracked like a reed beneath fire. "Two souls of breath cannot anchor the dreaming. It would unravel the tether and tear you both apart."
He stared at her. "Then give me another way."
She hesitated. The silence between them stretched like thread soaked in oil. Then, slowly, she turned and drew a curved blade from beneath her robes. It shimmered—not like steel, but like bone dipped in starlight. The hilt was wrapped in rivergrass. The edge pulsed faintly.
"Dreambone," she said. "The fossil of an ancestral seer—one who walked between story and death. This can cut a memory loose from your soul."
Ola met her gaze. "Then do it."
"This is not bravery," she warned. "If the memory finds her, you may never reclaim it. You will forget it forever—even in waking."
Ola's voice was steady. "Let it go. If it brings her back."
That night, the village gathered at the riverbank. Salt fires burned in a circle. Dreamwalkers—cloaked in river-silk and moon-thread—stood at the perimeter, each cradling vessels of light: the condensed flame of memories offered in previous rites. Their faces bore streaks of ochre and midnight.
Ola lay in the center, just beside the salt vessel that cradled Echo's still form.
He could feel her. Even now, she pulsed with warmth. Her body hadn't faded—it had deepened, thickened with layered silences. Something was coming alive within her.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ knelt beside him and pressed the dreambone blade to his chest. "What memory will you offer?" she asked.
Ola inhaled slowly. The river whispered just inches from his skin.
"The first time I met her," he said. "When I heard her name and knew it meant more than just a sound."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ nodded.
The blade sang as it pierced his chest—not with pain, but with revelation. A shimmer burst forth, not red but golden, flickering with soundless laughter, breath caught in a glance, and the scent of wet leaves on a thunder-warmed night. The memory lifted from his chest and shaped itself into a faceless being—pure light, pure love—then drifted up, dissolving into the current of wind and myth.
It was no longer his.
Inside the dreaming, Echo was drowning.
Not in water—but in voices.
Countless figures surrounded her, whispering conflicting truths. Some wept. Some accused. Some merely repeated forgotten songs like broken records.
"You are the silence."
"You are the end."
"You are not enough."
"You are all we buried."
"You must not return."
Their words crawled into her, like roots cracking open stone.
She clutched the threadlight—her last tether—but it frayed in her hands, slipping strand by strand through her grasp. The river here was not liquid. It was thick, black, and viscous—formed from secrets long withheld. It sucked at her legs, pulled at her chest. She screamed, but her voice turned into bone and scattered.
And then—warmth.
A single touch on her shoulder.
She turned.
It wasn't Ola. Not exactly. But it was how she remembered him. The tilt of his smile when he first heard her speak. The curve of his hand as he reached for her during that storm-soaked festival night. The way his eyes softened when she sang to the river for the first time.
He was a memory shaped by her own longing. A reflection of the love she had thought she'd never deserve.
"You don't have to carry it all alone," he said, his voice wrapped in sunlight.
She fell into his arms.
The black river hissed and retreated, slinking backward like shame denied its hiding place. Around them, the sky cracked open—thread by thread—until light poured through.
And then it rose from the depths.
Not the River Queen.
Not the drowned gods.
But something older.
The First Memory.
It stood tall and endless, faceless and infinite. A figure cloaked in wind, dripping with ash and stardust. Around its neck hung talismans of forgotten songs. Its feet were rooted in both sky and soil.
Echo could not speak. But her soul knew this was the source.
The source of all remembering.
Back in Obade, lightning slashed across a clear sky. No clouds. No thunder. Just bolts of white fire lashing the heavens into open wounds.
The salt vessel trembled.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stepped forward, worry wrinkling her mouth. But the dreamwalkers raised their hands.
"Do not interfere," one said. "Something is coming through."
And then—
From the heart of the vessel, Echo sat up.
Gasps rippled through the crowd. Her eyes were open—but they did not belong solely to her. They shimmered with constellations no sky had claimed. Her skin radiated with threadlight and something deeper—origin.
When she spoke, her voice carried the cadence of the first drumbeat ever made.
"I have seen the beginning," she said. "And I have held the silence in my hands."
Ola rushed forward, heart in his throat. "Echo?"
She turned her gaze toward him—and in that look was everything.
"Yes," she said softly. "And more."
Behind her, the salt vessel dissolved into light. The threadlight unraveled, rising like mist before reshaping into glowing ribbons. They encircled the villagers, brushing each person's chest.
And where each strand touched, it whispered.
Names. Songs. Faces.
Forgotten truths reawakened like seeds breaking their shells in rain.
People fell to their knees—not from pain, but from the weight of memory.
They remembered.
Who they were before fear.
What the river had taken—and returned.
The vows their ancestors once made in darkness.
The silence they had inherited.
Echo stepped forward, bare feet pressing into the trembling earth.
"It's not over," she said, eyes wide with the storm of knowing. "The First Memory wants to speak. And what it reveals will shake more than this village."
The dreamwalkers bowed as one.
"The dreaming has chosen its voice," one whispered.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ knelt. Tears fell freely down her cheeks.
Echo—no longer merely a girl, no longer merely a seer—began to speak.
And as her voice rose, it braided the four elements: river, flame, wind, and sky. Her words wove bridges between past and future, between pain and possibility. The threadlight pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat.
And in the silence between her sentences, the world leaned closer to listen.