The morning sun spilled gold across Obade's rooftops, soft and deliberate in its touch, as if even the sky had learned gentleness in the wake of the night's awakening. Its light slipped over the clay walls of homes, brushed the marketplace canopies, kissed the folds of fabric drying on lines, and shimmered over the surface of the river like molten silver. The river no longer bled or screamed; it exhaled. It gleamed as though baptized anew—no longer a wound but a living, breathing artery in the body of the village.
Obade moved differently that morning.
Not faster, not louder—just… deeper. There was a gravity to the people's steps, a stillness beneath the bustle, as if each villager now carried something ancient and sacred. There were fewer shouts, fewer quarrels, fewer hurried hands. Instead, there were shared glances that lingered. Unspoken understandings. Touches exchanged like prayers.
Ola stood at the edge of the riverbank, bare feet buried in soft earth. The current moved before him in glittering folds. In his hands, he held a small calabash—hand-carved, smoothed with oil and care. Inside it: water drawn from the river just before dawn. Water that now held more than moisture. It held memory. It held promise. It held the song of what had been, and the aching silence of what must never be forgotten again.
He wasn't alone for long.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ approached from behind, her robes whispering against the grass. The elder priestess moved with deliberate grace, though her eyes were shadowed with exhaustion. The ritual the night before had taken its toll, as all true acts of remembering did.
"The river has spoken," she said quietly, her voice textured like papyrus—thin, but sturdy with age. "But its voice is fragile. Like a child learning to speak again after long silence."
Ola nodded, eyes still on the water. "The songs we carry now are heavier. Not just for Obade, but for the ones still lost to silence. For the villages that never made it back."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ looked at him then, and there was something unguarded in her expression—respect, yes, but also sadness.
"That is why the dreaming chose Echo," she said, "and called you to her path. Not just to remember—but to carry. To awaken courage. The kind that endures after the song ends. The kind that holds truth without breaking."
A rustle came from behind the shrine hut, and Echo emerged, shawl loose around her shoulders, threadlight still woven in her braids. She looked different—not just older or wearier, but anchored. Something in her had settled, like a river finally finding its true course.
Her eyes met Ola's, then drifted down to the calabash.
"The river is a mirror," she said softly. "It reflects what we carry—and what we choose to become."
The three of them stood in silence, the sound of the river moving gently between them like a breath.
There were no more screams in the water. No visions. No curses. But also no illusions.
"What happens now?" Ola asked, his voice barely above a murmur.
"Tomorrow," Iyagbẹ́kọ́ said, "the journey begins again. Not in feet, but in spirit. The threadlight has awakened across the boundaries. There are others—other places, other hearts—where songs sleep, waiting for their day to rise."
Ola closed his eyes. The weight of those words folded over him like a cloak. "I am ready," he said, though his voice trembled with the strain of the vow.
"We all must be," Echo added, stepping closer. "Because the river's story is not finished. It flows through every wound, every healing, every silence waiting to be broken."
As the sun climbed higher, the village stirred further to life. Smoke curled from breakfast fires. Mothers called their children in for pap and roasted yam. Palm wine sellers shouted over the hum of morning, and goats trotted noisily through narrow alleyways.
But Ola wasn't drawn to the noise. He felt pulled—magnetized—toward the market square.
The river had spoken. The ritual had ended. But stories did not only live in sacred sanctuaries or beneath full moons. They lived in people. In the mess and motion of daily life.
He walked the worn path to the square, passing familiar faces—each now marked in his eyes by memory. There was Ajoke, whose daughter had been taken by the flood ten seasons ago. There was Baba Gbade, who once denied the old stories, but now wore threadlight charms around his wrist. And there was Tola, Echo's younger cousin, who used to mock the sacred, but had been seen placing kola nuts at the river's edge that very morning.
The market was alive. Rich colors spread across cloth stalls. The scent of dried crayfish and fresh pepper filled the air. Children darted between booths with laughter still damp from last night's tears.
And yet, beneath all of it—beneath the bargaining and banter—there was another presence: longing. Quiet. Lingering. Waiting.
Ola walked slowly, nodding to those he passed, not saying much but listening. Listening not with ears, but with something deeper. The way the river had taught him.
A voice called out to him.
"Brother."
He turned.
An old woman sat beneath the shade of a flame tree, her back curved but her gaze unflinching. Her hands—callused, veined, scarred—held something small and wooden.
"You carry the river's fire now," she said.
He stepped forward, lowering his head respectfully. "I only carry what we all lost."
She smiled—a soft, pained smile.
"In my youth," she began, "my mother sang the river's songs before the silence came. Before the fear. Before the forgetting. Her voice could call birds down from sky and laughter from the throat of grief."
She held out the object.
It was a pendant—small, delicate, carved in the shape of a fish coiled around a spiral of water. The symbol of remembrance and flow.
"This was hers," the old woman said. "She told me once that the river remembers more than we dare to. I did not believe her. Not until last night."
Ola reached out and took the pendant in both hands, bowing over it like a sacred scroll.
"Thank you," he whispered.
The woman nodded. "Sing her song one day. Let it rise again."
Word spread.
As if some silent permission had been granted, others began approaching. One by one. Two by two. A man offered a tattered drum-skin, recovered from his brother's shrine after he drowned. A girl no older than ten sang a verse her grandmother used to hum in her sleep. A woman brought a carved spoon—"for the stories stirred into every soup."
Each fragment—a relic, a rhythm, a memory.
And Ola listened.
Not as a priest. Not as a leader.
But as a vessel.
By the time the sun began to lean westward, he had gathered more than tokens—he had gathered songs. Pieces of a larger truth that Obade alone could not hold.
He returned to the sanctuary at dusk.
Echo and Iyagbẹ́kọ́ waited by the circle of stones. They had prepared the ground again—not with incense or chants, but with silence. A place for memory to settle.
Ola knelt in the center. One by one, he laid the offerings down: the pendant, the spoon, the worn cloth, the fragments of story still echoing in his heart.
When he finished, Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stepped forward and traced a circle of salt and threadlight around them.
"We are no longer alone," she said. "The songs we carry are many—but they flow together. Each voice is a thread. Each story a current. We must be the vessels that keep them alive."
Echo raised her arms, face to the stars. Her voice began low—just a hum. Then it rose. A melody both new and ancient.
A river-song.
"Carry the wound, carry the flame,In ash and water, call the name.The lost are not gone, they wait in the tide,Sing them forward, let truth be our guide."
Ola felt it enter him—not just the sound, but the shape of it. The rhythm. The memory.
His chest rose and fell with a deeper breath than he'd known in years.
"This is our covenant," he said, voice low, eyes closed. "To carry the songs. To face the wounds. And to flow forward."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ pressed her staff into the ground. The threadlight flared.
And all around them, the village breathed in time with the river.
Not in fear.
But in memory.
In reverence.
In readiness.
The next journey had already begun.