The morning after the blood rite broke differently over Obade. The light did not rise gently but fractured the horizon with red-gold heat, like it too had endured a night of remembering. Mist clung to the undergrowth, thick with ancestral breath, swirling low around the villagers' feet as they gathered in the central square. No drums beat. No voices called.
Only silence. But not the old kind.
This silence was awake. Listening.
Echo had not yet stirred from where she lay beneath the sacred tree. Her breath was steady, but her spirit walked elsewhere—deep within the Rivermind, far beyond the veil. Ola sat beside her, never letting go of her hand. Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stood nearby, staff balanced across her shoulders, her salt-white eyes narrowed toward the west.
They were waiting.
The childlike figure of the Witherbound stood just at the edge of the circle. It no longer seemed threatening. No longer foreign. Its voice was quieter now, wrapped in mourning more than rage.
"You called us kin," it whispered to Ola, not as accusation but as invitation. "Will you still claim us now that the wound is open?"
Ola rose slowly. He looked over the villagers, his people—those who had shouted for banishment and buried truth, those who now wept openly with mouths unstopped. The ground beneath their feet was marked with the new cloth Echo had woven from threadlight and memory. A sacred map. A new archive.
"I will," he answered. "And we will learn to walk with you. Not as shadows. But as truth made flesh."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stepped forward, planting her staff into the soil. A low hum rippled outward.
"This vow must be sealed. Not with offerings of pain, but with a promise of presence."
The Witherbound turned, its many forms shifting behind the childlike figure. "Then walk with us. Where silence led us. Let Obade know where the buried stories rest."
A pathway opened in the mist. It shimmered like a wound slowly stitching itself closed—raw but healing. Ola hesitated, glancing back at Echo, whose breath was shallower now, her eyes fluttering beneath closed lids.
"She walks with you already," Iyagbẹ́kọ́ said softly. "But you must carry the covenant into flesh."
So he did.
They walked past the boundaries of Obade, into the places once sealed off by superstition and dread. Through groves choked with vines that sang of abandonment. Across dry riverbeds where water once carried whispered names. The Witherbound led them, and behind them, the villagers followed—not all, but enough.
Among them walked widows who had burned their stillborns' names into memory and never dared to say them aloud. Walked the midwives who had buried secrets with trembling hands. Walked the old men who once beat their sons for dreaming in tongues older than Obade's conquest.
Now, they followed the wound.
And it brought them to a place none of them remembered ever seeing—a hollow in the earth where stones sat in a spiral, charred and ancient. At the center was a pit of ash. Not cold. Never cold. It pulsed like a low, beating heart.
The Witherbound stopped.
"This is where the silence began."
A woman cried out, clutching her face. "This is the place of the burning. I know it. My grandmother never spoke of it, but her nightmares always began here."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ knelt beside the stones and pressed her palm into the ash. "This was a cradle once. And then it became a pyre."
Ola stepped forward, trembling.
"Why would we forget this place?"
The childlike Witherbound answered, voice hollow but clear. "Because you were taught that forgetting was survival."
A hush swept through the gathered crowd. Someone fell to their knees. Another began to wail softly. Names were spoken into the air—names buried for generations.
But this time, no one shushed them.
Back in Obade, Echo's breath began to change.
She was no longer alone in her dreaming. The River Queen herself, Ẹ̀nítàn, had returned. Not as a ghost, but as presence—her voice rising inside Echo like an ancient tide. Echo stood now within the Dreaming Below, beneath the earth's skin, surrounded by ancestral bones not as relics, but as listeners.
The First Memory shimmered before her.
"You carry the wound," it said. "But wounds can be watersheds."
Echo nodded. "They must be. Or else we drown."
The First Memory reached toward her, and in its hands was the same cloth that had once unraveled in the waking world. But here, it was whole. A tapestry not of pain alone, but of interwoven memory—joy and sorrow, birth and loss.
"Take it," it said. "Lead them out of the silence."
When Echo woke, it was twilight again.
Ola was beside her. His eyes glistened with salt and soot.
"We found the place," he whispered. "The place where the silence began."
Echo smiled weakly. "Then you're ready for the rest."
She sat up slowly, bones aching with the weight of all she now carried. Her voice cracked.
"We must build something new there."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stepped forward. "A shrine?"
"No," Echo said. "A home. A place where all stories are safe. Where children born and unborn are named. Where songs can begin again, even if they were once silenced."
Ola nodded. "The Archive of the Wound."
Echo looked at him with something deeper than approval.
"Not archive," she said. "That word is too cold. Too distant. Let it be called the Remembering Place."
And so they began.
The work was slow, sacred, communal.
Stones were carried not just with hands, but with names—each laid into the foundation with story. Wood was shaped into curves that mimicked the old spirals. Threadlight, now woven by young dreamers and old weavers together, lit the interior walls with shifting memory patterns.
Children who had never been named were given names in ceremony.
Unmarked graves were tended.
Songs once forbidden were now sung at dusk.
And in the center of the Remembering Place, they hung the cloth Echo had seen in her dream. The tapestry of all the pain, all the joy. The wound—and the healing.
The Witherbound did not vanish. They became something else.
Custodians. Watchers. Teachers of what should not be forgotten.
They took on new forms—sometimes as children, sometimes as elders, sometimes as wind or flame. But they were no longer feared. They were greeted.
On the eve of the first full moon after the building was complete, a gathering was called.
The whole village came.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ spoke first.
"We are no longer Obade the Silenced. We are Obade the Remembering."
Ola followed.
"This is not the end of the curse. This is its transfiguration."
And Echo, walking slowly to the center, spoke last.
"There is no curse that memory cannot shift. No wound that cannot become a river."
She looked up. The stars above pulsed.
And then the singing began.
A new song.
Not taught, not rehearsed.
Remembered.