The earth moaned before anyone dared to listen.
It was not the tremble of plate and fault, not the groan of tectonics or the shiver of wind-shifted roots. It was something older, deeper—a grief drawn from stone and silence. In the weeks after the river's rebirth, Obade had grown quiet again, but not still. The peace that followed the cleansing of the curse had not lasted. It could not. For memory, once stirred, did not return to sleep.
Ola heard it first.
He stood barefoot in the courtyard of the house Iyagbẹ́kọ́ had once called the Place of Listening. The morning dew had already dried off the cracked clay tiles. A faint vibration pulsed through the soles of his feet—not sound, not touch, but something in between. As if the soil itself was humming. As if below it, someone wept.
Ola bent and touched the earth. The vibration deepened.
"You hear it too," came a voice behind him.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ emerged from the house with her staff. Her frame was slower now, age and spirit-work catching up with her bones, but her presence was no less commanding. She wore a wrapper of faded indigo and a gele knotted with precision. Her eyes—clouded by the dreaming and the weight of what she had seen—still missed nothing.
Ola nodded. "It began last night."
"Longer," she said. "But now it's ready for ears."
They both crouched. Ola pressed one ear to the ground. Beneath the murmurs of worm and beetle, beyond the shuffle of roots and soilshift, he heard it: a rhythm. Faint. Mournful. Like a drum buried far below, played by someone who had forgotten their name.
The earth was singing.
By the third day, the sinkhole opened.
It was small at first—a crack behind the old shrine. Then a collapse, sudden and silent. No dust rose. No scream came. Just a deep opening, perfectly round, as if the ground had swallowed a breath and never let it go.
Children gathered, eyes wide. Mothers pulled them away.
Ola arrived with Iyagbẹ́kọ́ and found that no animals dared draw near. Even the dogs had gone still. The air around the pit felt heavy, like the space before rain.
From below came a scent—not rot, not mold, but memory. The rich musk of old wood and forgotten iron. A smell like pages crumbled by time and walls that had once held stories.
"Ìlàrò," Iyagbẹ́kọ́ whispered.
Ola blinked. "The lost city?"
She nodded, fingers gripping her staff. "The cradle of dreamwalkers. Buried before we were born. Before even the line of kings forgot how to dream true."
"I thought it was myth."
She looked at him. "So did the River Queen. Until you remembered her into being."
The descent was not chosen lightly.
They gathered the next day. Ola, Iyagbẹ́kọ́, and a few others who had once tasted the river's curse and lived. Among them was Adunni, who had lost a sister to the drowned spirits; Taye, a boy with vision-clouded eyes who saw faces in firelight; and Ọmọjolá, the gravedigger's daughter, whose hands never bled, even when they broke soil.
Ọmọjolá was the first to approach the hole.
Her voice was quiet, but certain. "It calls to the buried. It does not fear me."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ studied her. "Your father trained you in rites of release?"
"And of remembering," Ọmọjolá said. "He said the dead never forget. We just forget to ask."
By dusk, they had prepared. Charms against breathless spirits. Rope for the descent. Calabashes filled with oil and ash, to mark the way back. Ola wore Echo's broken pendant around his neck, though it held no more light.
He still dreamed of her—sometimes as a girl of riverwater and fire, sometimes as a song half-sung. Always leaving. Always watching.
They descended in silence.
Ola went first, the rope biting his palms. The walls were lined with stone older than brick, carved in sigils he didn't know but somehow understood. Spirals. Open mouths. Eyes with no pupils.
"These are dreammarks," Iyagbẹ́kọ́ called down. "Memory seals. This place is protected. Or was."
They reached the bottom. A narrow tunnel stretched forward, lit by faint phosphorescence in the stone. The air was not stale, but rich. It tasted like history.
And then, ahead, they saw it: a gate.
Not iron or wood. But bone. Twisted into an archway, covered in moss and spider-silk. Beneath it, a door of obsidian with handprints burned into the surface.
Ọmọjolá stepped forward. Her fingers found one of the prints.
A pulse.
The door sighed. Then opened.
Inside was not ruin.
It was a city.
Carved from stone but alive with light. Not electric—something older. Luminous moss on walls. Veins of crystal glowing in hues of dusk. Walkways wound like memory paths, spiraling inward toward a great amphitheater of silence.
Statues lined the street. Tall, robed figures with no faces. Each bore a different object—a mask, a drum, a book, a bowl.
"The Dreaming Orders," Iyagbẹ́kọ́ whispered. Her voice trembled.
They passed beneath a high arch. The sigil above it flickered as they moved.
Ola turned to Ọmọjolá. "What do you see?"
She stared forward. "A place waiting to be mourned."
And then they saw it.
At the center of the city, a great basin. Dry. Cracked. Once a pool of vision, now silent.
In its center knelt a figure.
Still. Hooded. Humming.
Not alive. Not dead.
It raised its head.
No face—only a mask carved of ashwood and bone.
"Welcome, rememberers," it said. Its voice was many—child, elder, river, wind.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stepped forward, her staff trembling. "Are you guardian or prisoner?"
The masked figure tilted its head.
"I am Memory. Forgotten. Waiting. Hollowed not by time—but by silence."
Ola's breath caught.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ lowered her staff. "Then we have much to remember."
But above them, far above, others had begun to gather.
Not villagers.
Not spirits.
They wore clothes of faded uniform and eyes like glass. Their mouths were dry. Their fingers too still.
The Hollowed had arrived.
Their purpose was simple: erase. Erase what the earth had sung. Erase what the people would remember. Erase the dream.
But they were already too late.
Because the city had spoken.
And the dead had begun to hum.