Before there were sponges.
Before there were soaps.
Before there were boys with hunger in their eyes and rivers that remembered names—there was only a spark.
And a witness.
The villagers of Ayepegba had long spoken of Eni Ọba—the voice of kings, the spirit with riddles on his tongue and ash in his footprints. Their voices were hushed when telling the tales, as if the stories themselves were fragile things, easily broken if spoken too loudly. But few truly knew where Eni Ọba had come from. Fewer still knew that he had once been flesh—and not fire.
This is the story of the one who saw him first.
The first witness.
The witness was a girl.
Her name was Ifádáyọ̀, but most simply called her Dayọ̀—joy.
She was not born in Ayepegba. She wandered into its dusty embrace after a long, merciless famine had scorched her home village to ruin. The earth had cracked open, and hunger had seeped into every corner of her childhood.
Her mother had died giving birth to her. Her father had vanished during the salt raids that tore through the lands like fire on dry grass. She had been raised by silence, and taught by the wind that whipped through broken huts and burned fields.
Her first memory was the sound of emptiness.
She was seven when she arrived at the edge of Ayepegba, barefoot and wild-eyed. A river stone—smooth and worn—was tied tightly to her wrist with a strip of faded leather. And on the back of her neck, a strange mark shaped like a crescent moon glowed faintly under the sun's dying light.
The elders nearly turned her away.
"She carries no name we remember," murmured one, his face shadowed by age and suspicion.
"She brings no kin," another muttered, crossing his arms over a chest that had known too many losses.
But an old woman, bent like a fishing hook and known only as Ẹ̀yá, raised a trembling finger and silenced them all.
"Let her stay," she said. "The spirits will tell us why."
So Dayọ̀ stayed.
For a whole year, she spoke not a word.
Not one.
She listened.
She watched.
She absorbed the village's rhythm—the slow rise and fall of seasons, the drumbeats that echoed on market days, the whispered prayers offered at dusk.
She sat beneath the great stone drum of Ayepegba where elders gathered and spirits were said to whisper between the cracks of the granite. She fetched water from the stream with the children, but always scooped hers from the far end—where the current slowed, where the water was still, and sometimes cold even in the hottest months.
The village children avoided her at first, afraid of her silence, her distant stare. But over time, they grew curious. They whispered her name when she passed, half in awe, half in question.
On the third year of her silence, on the night of the Fire Moon—the night when the sky burned bright with stars and the land seemed to hold its breath—Dayọ̀ followed a whisper.
It was faint, almost imperceptible—a drumming sound so delicate it barely stirred the dust beneath her feet. The sound pulled her away from the marketplace, away from the lantern-lit homes, into the hollow behind the village.
The earth smelled of iron and smoke here. The trees were sparse and blackened, and the ground was cracked and dry.
And there, seated on a flat stone like a throne carved by the wind itself, was a boy made of ash.
He was no older than twelve, but his eyes held centuries.
His skin flickered like smoke in candlelight.
His hands were scarred with spirals that seemed to pulse with a rhythm all their own.
His mouth did not open when he spoke.
And yet, he did.
"You've come," the boy said without moving his lips. His voice was a sound made from silence itself—a vibration beneath the bones.
Dayọ̀ did not nod. She simply knelt, the dust rising like ghosts beneath her knees.
The boy reached into the ground beside him and pulled forth a sponge—not new, but ancient. Blackened. Threadbare. Soft, as if it had soaked up centuries of rain and sorrow.
"This is not a gift," he said.
"It is a burden.
And you must carry the first memory."
Dayọ̀ reached out with trembling hands and touched it.
In that moment, a torrent of visions rushed into her mind:
Flames danced in clay bowls—flickering shadows casting shapes of forgotten gods.
Men wept as cowries spilled from their mouths like tears, their voices lost to the winds.
A giant mirror shattered in a dark corridor, its fragments reflecting every face Dayọ̀ had ever feared to meet.
A name whispered by thousands in a language she had never heard—Eni Ọba.
The voice came again, deeper now, echoing through her very soul.
"When the child of silence asks for fire, you will show them this path.
When the river turns against its own reflection, you must remember.
When they forget me, you must become memory."
Dayọ̀ collapsed.
The villagers found her at dawn, lying unconscious in the hollow, clutching the black sponge tightly to her chest.
When she awoke, she whispered a single sentence:
"He was here."
From that day forward, her voice returned.
And with it, a storm of stories.
She spoke of the ash-boy—of his eyes like ancient skies, of the sponge that bore the weight of forgotten worlds.
She told of fire that did not burn but cleansed; of a path not yet walked by feet but by spirits.
She drew spirals in the sand, tracing invisible lines that connected earth to sky, past to present.
She whispered truths into the ears of the dying, soft words that brought peace to restless souls.
Children began dreaming of her stories before they even heard them.
The elders, once skeptical, now sought her counsel beneath the great stone drum. Her words carried a weight that no age or title could match.
The villagers feared her at first.
Then they revered her.
But no one doubted she had seen something beyond.
Dayọ̀ became the keeper of the first sponge—the one never used in any ritual, the one meant only to remind.
Years passed.
Dayọ̀ aged, but her voice never faltered.
Each evening, she sat beneath her hut's palm roof, surrounded by children wide-eyed with wonder.
She would tell them:
"He is not a man.
He is a becoming."
When they asked who, she would tap her chest and say:
"You must witness him yourself."
In her last days, she wrapped the sponge in red cloth—the color of blood and renewal—and placed it in a clay jar sealed with earth and spirit.
On the jar, she inscribed with a steady hand:
"For the one who walks in silence but dreams in fire."
It was said that generations later, when Iyi entered Ayepegba—his footsteps light but certain—the clay jar broke open on its own.
And the sponge inside, though untouched for decades, was still soft. Still warm.
Some believe Dayọ̀ became wind after she died.
Others say she is the river's voice, echoing before the flood.
But in the market, where the carved spiral sits above the herbalist stall, there is a small wooden plaque that reads:
"Before the healer, before the gold, before the throne…
There was Dayọ̀.
The First Witness.
The fire knew her name."
The flame that sparked the journey. The silence that held the memory.
And in that silence, the river still sings.