The night air clung to Obade like a heavy cloak, saturated with mist and thick with expectation. The season had shifted—subtly but unmistakably. Not in weather alone, but in spirit. The wind no longer carried just the scent of rain or river moss; it carried memory. It carried the weight of stories long buried in silence.
Above, the moon gleamed full and heavy-bellied, swollen with light as though she too had witnessed the reckoning of the days before and could no longer hold her silence. Silver spilled over the rooftops, over the fields, over the Remembering Place—an open-roofed sanctuary carved into the earth at the edge of the river, built from the wood of trees that had witnessed lifetimes, from the stones whispered over by ancestral tongues.
The flamelights lit earlier in the day still flickered along the beams, not wavering against the wind, but dancing—spiraling in synchronized rhythm like they had heard the drumbeats before they even began. Shadows bent beneath them, long and solemn, weaving around the feet of the gathered villagers like smoke tracing the past.
Ola stood at the edge of the gathering, shoulders squared but eyes distant. Though his stance was steady, his pulse betrayed him—each beat louder than the last. He could feel the river beneath him, not in a metaphorical sense but in a real, pulsing way—like the water beneath the soil throbbed with life, sentience, anticipation.
He looked across the circle.
Echo sat wrapped in a shawl threaded with the luminous threadlight of the cloth they'd lifted from the Sacred Chamber weeks before. The fabric shimmered softly even in stillness. Her face—calm, regal, and lit by inner knowing—was like a mirror to the past and future at once. Her eyes reflected starlight and memory, the countless stories she'd touched, lived, and learned.
Children sat around her like petals around a bloom, their faces upturned, sensing without words that something holy was about to take root.
Then came the quiet tap of wood against soil.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stepped forward, her long white hair falling like salt over her shoulders, her ceremonial robes rustling with embroidered glyphs of protection and calling. Her staff—crowned with feathers from the skyward owls and the bones of fish pulled from dream-waters—pressed against the ground with gentle finality.
The villagers fell silent. Even the night seemed to lean in.
"This is the night of awakening," she said. Her voice, though softened by age, rang clear and crystalline. "Not only for the river. Not only for Obade. But for all who have been silenced—by fear, by forgetting, by the erosion of truth across generations."
Somewhere behind her, an elder man gasped. A younger woman clutched his arm gently, grounding him. The memory of what had happened at the Drowned Altar was still raw—bodies broken, histories unearthed, and the truth about Ẹ̀nítàn laid bare.
From among the crowd, a young woman stepped forward. She bore in her arms a drum—hand-carved from ancient iroko wood, its hide stained with years of sun and sacred oil. The surface of the drum was etched with spirals, waves, birds, and eyes—symbols of protection, calling, and return.
She glanced at Ola. He met her eyes and gave a small nod.
She sat at the center of the circle, crossed her legs, and placed the drum on her lap.
Then the beat began.
Soft at first. Subtle. Like a distant heart struggling to wake. But soon, it grew. With each slow, steady thrum, the sound rippled out, folding into the night like rain falling into a still pond. The beat wasn't just music—it was language. An invocation. A reckoning.
The villagers swayed, some closing their eyes, others whispering incantations in dialects older than any written page. The drum called to something beyond them. Within them.
Echo's voice rose gently, threading through the rhythm. She didn't shout. She didn't need to.
Her voice was water. Was wind. Was earth remembering.
"We are the river.
We are the blood of the earth.
We carry the wounds and the healing.
We remember."
A trembling passed through the circle.
A man who had not spoken in years wept openly. A mother who had buried two sons in the years of the Curse lifted her face and sang a forgotten lullaby. Young girls traced the threadlight patterns in the air with their fingers, eyes wide as spirits shimmered like fireflies.
Then came the rising of the threadlight.
The cloth that had lain dormant in the center—woven with symbols from before the old kingdoms fell—suddenly stirred. Slowly, reverently, the light within it lifted, rising in tendrils like smoke from incense. Ribbons of blue, silver, and ember gold unfurled, curling upward into the sky. They twisted and danced around the villagers, illuminating tear-streaked faces and clenched hands.
The Witherbound emerged.
No longer the ghastly remnants of the cursed—they had shifted. Their forms, though still liminal, no longer flickered with decay. They were radiant now—woven of light, flame, and river-water. Each of them carried a memory. Each of them had once been lost.
One stepped forward—an old woman who had been swallowed by the river decades ago, her bones never recovered. She approached another elder—her brother—who reached out with trembling hands.
When their fingers touched, a burst of warm light enveloped them. Not fire. Not pain.
Reunion.
Another Witherbound danced with a child. A boy born deaf, but whose laughter rang loud as the spirit twirled him in midair. The villagers gasped. Then they clapped. Then they cried.
In the heart of the circle, Iyagbẹ́kọ́ lifted her staff once more.
"This is the river that holds us all," she said. Her voice did not falter. "It carries the burden and the blessing, the silence and the song. It remembers what we've lost—and waits to see who we will become."
Ola opened his eyes to the sky. The stars had gathered into constellations he'd never seen before—spirals and bridges, eyes and drums.
And then, deep beneath the soil, a current stirred.
Ẹ̀nítàn.
He felt her—not as the wrathful Drowned One, but as the silent, steady pulse of the river's truth. She no longer screamed in his ears. She did not demand vengeance. She simply… flowed.
Then came the tug.
A small boy, no more than seven, had slipped through the crowd and reached up, gently pulling Ola's sleeve.
"Will the river forgive us now?" the boy asked, eyes wide, full of earnest sorrow and impossible wisdom.
Ola knelt. Time slowed. The world quieted.
"The river never forgets," he said, softly. "But forgiveness comes when we dare to remember—and to change."
The boy blinked, then nodded solemnly, as if the weight of that truth settled into his bones for life.
And then, as naturally as breath, the circle began to shift. People moved—not away, but inward, to each other. Elders embraced. Children lit small lanterns and sent them down the tributaries as offerings. The Witherbound, one by one, bowed to the villagers before dissolving into the glowing mist.
The drumbeat slowed now. No less powerful, but gentler. Like a heartbeat at rest.
The threadlight remained—not as a spectacle, but as a presence. A knowing. Invisible strands now wove between the villagers, between past and present, spirit and flesh.
Echo rose to her feet. She looked changed—older and younger all at once. The kind of change that came not with age, but with truth.
She turned to Ola. "This is only the beginning," she said.
Her voice wasn't trembling. It was steady. Anchored.
Ola's smile was soft, but filled with something deep and permanent.
"Yes," he replied, watching as the sky began to shift. The horizon was blooming pink, the earliest hues of morning stretching across the fields.
"The river flows on," he said. "And so must we."
They stood there together, not as saviors, not as saints. But as survivors. As witnesses. As weavers of a new story.
And far downstream, beneath water that no longer wailed but sang, the spirit of Ẹ̀nítàn watched.
She did not rise.
She did not speak.
She simply flowed onward—with them, through them, into the morning