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Chapter 136 - The Blood That Remembers

The wind did not stir as it once did. Obade held its breath.

Where Echo had collapsed, her body lay limp but luminous, faintly glowing as if starlight clung to her skin. Ola knelt beside her, hand pressed gently against her temple, seeking the pulse beneath her silence. Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stood behind them both, her salt staff now no more than a dry branch in her trembling grip. The Witherbound were still kneeling, though some had begun to flicker, like candle flames wrestling with memory and wind.

A hush settled across the gathered dreamwalkers, villagers, mothers, and fathers who had confessed. Not a silence of fear—but of witnessing. A sacred pause.

Then the ground began to hum.

At first, it was subtle. The way distant thunder plays tricks on the soles of one's feet. But it deepened. Beneath the map of threadlight woven by Echo's voice, a pulse awakened. It was neither from above nor below but within. Within the land, within the blood, within the dreaming of Obade itself.

"It is responding," Iyagbẹ́kọ́ murmured. "The land is remembering her own bones."

Ola turned sharply. "What does that mean? Is Echo in danger?"

But Iyagbẹ́kọ́ shook her head. "Not Echo. All of us. The river is no longer just a place. It is an inheritance. It is rising in our veins."

The map on the ground—stitched of grief, confession, and names—shuddered and lifted, lifting into the air in streams of glowing thread. They floated upward, weaving themselves into a spiral canopy above Obade's central square.

And then it began.

From that tapestry of threadlight, droplets fell.

Not water. Not rain. Not tears.

Memory.

Each droplet struck a person and shimmered, rippling through their bodies with visions and sensations. A mother felt the warmth of her unborn daughter's breath. A man wept as he recalled the lullabies he never sang. A child saw the face of her twin lost in the birthing.

They did not scream. They did not flee.

They remembered.

Ola stood slowly, hand still resting over Echo's chest. Her breathing had returned to something steady, though faint. He whispered, "Can you feel it? Can you see what you did?"

Echo stirred. Her eyes fluttered open, and when they met Ola's, they were no longer only hers. They held constellations. Deep seas. Ancestral shadows.

"It is working," she whispered. "But it is not yet whole."

Iyagbẹ́kọ́ turned sharply. "Not whole? What more is required?"

Echo sat up slowly. The villagers backed away instinctively, reverent of her motion.

"There is one last wound," she said. "One last silence. Deeper than all the others. Hidden beneath the soil of truth, buried by generations who could not face it."

The childlike Witherbound stepped forward. "The silence of blood."

Ola frowned. "I don't understand. We've remembered. We've confessed. Isn't that enough?"

But Iyagbẹ́kọ́ answered instead. "There is more than remembering names. There is remembering why we forgot."

The sky darkened slightly as clouds—threadlike and amber—formed above them. Echo rose to her feet, arms outstretched.

"Come with me," she said.

She led them away from the circle, through the narrow paths of Obade, past shrines long unattended and alleyways holding the scent of palmwine and ash. Toward the river. Not the one newly revived—but the ancient fork. The one the village had abandoned.

It was overgrown now. Trees gnarled with secrets. Stones sunken beneath shame.

When they arrived, Echo paused before an enormous root half-buried in the soil.

"Dig," she said.

No one moved.

Until Ola stepped forward. He dropped to his knees and began pulling away soil. It was not hard—almost as if the earth wanted to give it up. Others joined. Women, elders, even the Witherbound, scraping and scooping with bare hands.

What emerged was not a body.

It was a mask.

Wooden, cracked, and stained. Not with age, but with blood.

Iyagbẹ́kọ́ gasped. "The Mask of Silence. The one worn by the Priest of Erasure. We thought it destroyed."

Echo lifted it gently. Her fingers did not tremble.

"This is the reason the unborn were forgotten," she said. "This is the voice that named grief as rebellion. That taught the village to offer silence in exchange for survival."

The mask began to speak.

Not aloud.

In their minds.

It whispered of ancient betrayals. Of children taken not by storms, but by decree. Of ancestors who bartered blood for power, who demanded silence as sacrifice. Of a pact made not with gods, but with fear itself.

Many fell to their knees. Some turned away. But Echo did not waver.

She pressed the mask to her face.

And screamed.

It was not a scream of pain. It was a scream of undoing. Of unraveling every lie woven into Obade's soil. The sound shattered the stillness. It tore through branches, cracked stones, sent birds fleeing skyward.

But in its wake came light.

From the roots of the forgotten river, a wellspring erupted—not water, but a dark, shimmering ichor.

Blood.

Ancient blood.

Ola recoiled. "What is that?"

Iyagbẹ́kọ́ answered, voice shaking. "That is the debt. The one left unpaid."

Echo turned, the mask gone, her face streaked with salt and starlight.

"It must be answered."

The Witherbound stepped forward as one. "We will drink it."

Echo shook her head. "No. You are not sacrifice. You are memory. This time, it must be shared."

And then she did what no one expected.

She knelt.

She dipped her hands into the blood.

And she painted.

Onto each person, she placed a mark. A spiral over the heart. A river across the palms. A star beneath the eye. Symbols of bearing—not as punishment, but as remembrance. Of the wound. Of the silence. Of the blood that had spoken.

One by one, they accepted it.

And the moment the last was marked, the ichor stilled. The wellspring closed. And the sky cleared.

Obade breathed.

The dreaming shifted.

Echo staggered.

Ola caught her once again.

"Did we do it?" he asked.

Echo nodded weakly. "Now the blood remembers. And because it remembers, it can forgive."

Iyagbẹ́kọ́ turned to the villagers. "Go. Mark your homes. Mark your shrines. Mark the graves you were too afraid to build. Let no more names be buried in silence."

And so they did.

Through the night, Obade moved as one body. A people reborn in truth. Threadlight danced through the streets. Laughter returned, tempered with tears. Songs arose—not of triumph, but of reckoning. The kind of music only those who have grieved deeply can create.

By dawn, Echo rested beneath the old iroko tree, head on Ola's lap. The Witherbound circled quietly, their forms flickering gently in the morning light.

Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stood at the river's edge. She lifted her staff, renewed and glowing, and whispered:

"The river knows our names. And now, we know hers."

Behind her, etched into the stone, glowed a new name:

Ẹ̀nítàn.

The River That Remembers.

To be continued.

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