The silence after the First Memory's arrival was not serenity—it was tension, breath caught at the edge of the world. Obade stood still, as if the land itself awaited a verdict. The air pressed inward, heavy with histories reawakened.
Echo hovered at the edge of the salt-ringed grove, no longer quite bound by gravity or time. Each of her steps left a shimmer of resonance on the earth, a quiet note etched into the river of memory. Her body bore her familiar silhouette, but her presence had deepened into something multi-layered, spectral, as if she were a window into something beyond. In her eyes flickered constellations too ancient for language.
Ola stood frozen, breath shallow. He had come to find Echo, or to vanish trying. And now he faced her—not only as the woman he had searched for, but as something more: an echo of the ancient dreaming itself. His legs wobbled, the edges of his courage fraying.
She smiled at him. And in that smile lived a thousand lifetimes—the girl he'd known, the weaver of courage she'd become, and the divine vessel she now was. She remembered. Him, them, the dreaming.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ approached with reverence, her salt staff vibrating low like a subterranean drum. "The First Memory has chosen," she said, voice thick with awe. "But choice always bears cost."
Echo turned slowly, her movement fluid as riverwater. Her voice layered, tinged with something unearthly. "I carry the wound now. But I am not the only one."
From her side, a silver threadlight slipped outward, coiling like a serpent through the gathered villagers. But it pulsed not with brilliance, but with names. Names long buried. Names only the river dared remember.
The villagers gasped.
Names of children swallowed by floods and disease.
Names of elders whose tales had burned in colonial fires.
Names of warriors, healers, midwives, and dreambinders erased from lineage.
Then, a stillness. A trembling.
The ribbon's glow deepened.
And the names of the unborn rose like a wail.
Expectant mothers clutched their wombs. Women who had wept alone for miscarriages thought forgotten wept openly. Men fell to their knees beside unmarked graves they had dared not speak of. The threadlight circled them all—living and dead, grieving and shamed. It whispered through the air:
All is remembered. Even pain. Especially pain.
Ola stepped forward, his voice hoarse. "What do we do with this remembering?"
Echo faced him, eyes glowing softly. She extended her hand to his chest. She didn't touch skin—she touched what lived beneath. The glowing imprint of his dreambone, the wound he had offered, flared beneath her palm.
"You carry the seed of the new covenant," she said gently. "But to plant it, we must walk into the silence together."
Before the breath could settle, a jagged voice boomed across the field.
"You woke the wound. Now feed it."
A shadow descended from the western horizon. Dozens of figures stepped forth, cloaked in writhing tendrils of darkness. They wore no faces—only the fractured remnants of stories too long buried.
Gasps scattered through the dreamwalkers. Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stumbled back, her staff clattering to the stones.
"The Witherbound," she breathed. "We thought they were sealed forever..."
"Not sealed," Echo said. "Forgotten. And in forgetting, they festered."
The Witherbound moved like parchment scorched by lightning. Every step they took echoed with the shrieks of erased histories. They were the shape of every story too painful to tell, too shameful to speak. They were what memory abandoned.
One figure stepped forward, child-sized. Its voice was high and hollow:
"Where do discarded stories go? They become us. We are the remnants you feared to name."
Ola stepped forward, shaking. "We didn't know—"
"Intent is not innocence," the child-shade hissed. "You built comfort on bones you never buried."
Echo's voice, calm and sorrowful, filled the air. She extended the ribbon between her and the Witherbound. "Then let us name them now—not as ghosts, but as kin."
A silence deeper than night fell.
Then a scream.
A woman collapsed, her hands clawing at nothing. "I left her in the flood," she sobbed. "She called for me—and I ran."
A man crumpled beside her. "My son. I never even told his mother. I let him disappear."
One by one, confessions spilled from the people of Obade. Grief unburied itself like corpses in rising water. Wailing, trembling, they fell to their knees.
The Witherbound watched.
The childlike figure tilted its head. "Truth," it said, "is the beginning."
Echo nodded. She stepped into the center of the salt-ring and dropped to her knees. Her voice rose—not in song, but in a deep, undulating chant. A psalm of memory. Of pain. Of the unborn. Of the unsaid.
The ribbon exploded outward, scattering into threads that wove themselves into the ground. A new cloth emerged beneath their feet—a sacred tapestry of remembrance.
The Witherbound knelt.
Echo's body faltered. Ola rushed to catch her, cradling her as though she were the only star left in a dark sky. Her gaze, fading but serene, met his.
"You must finish it," she whispered. "Teach them to carry the wound without hiding it."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stepped forward, tears streaming. She placed her hand on Ola's shoulder.
"This is the new dreaming," she murmured. "The age of bearing pain in daylight. Of memory unburied."
The child-figure Witherbound, its eyes ancient with recognition, smiled.
Obade exhaled. The river stirred. The stars blinked in time.
And somewhere beyond the veil of flesh and death, the First Memory prepared to speak again.
To be continued.