The courtyard of the Ifatedo compound had never held so much light.
Lamps burned in every corner, their flames hissing softly in the damp air. Rings of white chalk circled three low altars: one for the river spirits, one for the ancestors, one for the wandering powers who sometimes answered when others would not. Bundles of herbs smoldered, sending up blue‑gray smoke that twisted into the night like questioning fingers.
Baba Adégbáyí stood at the center, staff planted, beads glinting against his plain wrapper. Around him, senior witches and priests formed a wide circle, with older apprentices just behind. Fẹ́mi knelt closest to his father, a calabash of clean river water at his side, the chain of brass‑rimmed shells laid neatly before him.
Rain tapped on the roofs. Distant thunder rolled, softer now but still watchful.
Baba lifted his staff.
"Spirits who walk in light," he called, voice resonant, "and spirits who walk in shadow but owe this house no harm, hear us. A king has died with a stranger's name on his chest. The people tremble. We call not to greedy ghosts but to those who guard the line between worlds. Come and speak truth."
He touched the staff's end to the first altar. The herbs there flared briefly green, then settled. At the second altar, smoke thickened and took the vague shape of a seated figure before dissolving. At the third, the flame flickered blue, then red, then steadied.
Around the circle, the witches began to chant.
Their voices were low at first, just a hum that barely rose above the rain. Slowly the sound grew, threads of different melodies weaving together: praise‑songs to river and sky, invocations of ancestors long buried, old formulas for calling and binding.
Fẹ́mi felt the hairs on his arms lift. The air in the courtyard grew heavier, as if invisible guests were arriving, filling the empty spaces.
Behind them, the door to the inner rooms stood shut, sealed by chalk and palm fronds.
Inside one of those rooms, Ifabola curled on her mat, sleep far from her eyes.
Auntie Dupe stirred at the door, grumbling in her throat.
"You again," she muttered, as the strange drumbeat—slow, hollow—echoed faintly through the house. Not as loud as before. More like a memory than a sound. "Whoever is playing with calabashes at this hour, ehn, let his hands swell."
Ifabola almost smiled, but the warmth did not reach her chest.
Her wrist still ached where the invisible fingers had gripped her in that other place. Her palm still burned with its half‑formed sign. She kept it clenched under her chin, as if hiding it from the dark.
The chants from the courtyard rose, clearer now.
She recognized some of the words—phrases Baba used in smaller rituals—but tonight they sounded different. Sharper. More desperate. As if each syllable wore a spearpoint.
"Lie down," Dupe said without turning. "If you listen too hard, the spirits will think you are eavesdropping."
"I'm not afraid of listening," Ifabola whispered.
"Good," Dupe replied. "But it is not about fear. Sometimes when elders talk, children must cover their ears for their own sake. It is not every tale that fits inside a small head."
Ifabola made a face in the dark, unseen. Her head did not feel small. It felt too full.
Debts spread, the hungry voice had said. When a father reaches too deep, his child is pulled with him.
What had Baba reached for?
The question scratched at her like a trapped lizard.
In the courtyard, Baba knew the moment something larger than the usual trickle of spirits arrived.
The smoke from the altars stopped wandering and suddenly rose straight up, drawn by an invisible thread. The flames bent inward, as if some unseen mouth were inhaling. The air tasted metallic, like rain just before it falls.
"Ọ̀runmìlà, owner of wisdom, if it is you, welcome," Baba said, heart pounding. "If it is another who comes in peace, show your face. If you do not come in peace, be bound by this circle and by the righteousness of our question."
He scattered powdered chalk in a slow circle around where he stood.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the chain of shells before Fẹ́mi rattled.
He jumped.
The shells did not move as they usually did, tumbling from his father's hand. They moved on their own, shivering, then sliding together into a tight cluster—as if some small, invisible creature had decided to curl up inside them.
A voice spoke.
It did not come from any single direction. It came from the humming in the witches' throats, from the hiss of the rain, from the tiny crackle of each lamp flame. Old, layered, as if many tongues were speaking through one small opening.
You call loudly, children of Ifa, it murmured. The world shakes with your noise. Why?
Baba drew breath slowly.
"A king has died," he said. "Not by spear, not by sickness. By a name written in his own blood. We seek the hand behind that writing."
There was a soft, pulsing silence.
Names are heavy things, the voice answered. Yours carry them like ornaments. Why does this one trouble you more than the others?
"Because it will not wash away," Baba replied. "Because when we ask who wrote it, the shells and bones twist like worms on dry earth. Because the people's fear is a flame, and we must know where to point it before it burns everything."
The shells shivered.
You ask for truth. But your hands are not empty, priest.
Baba's stomach clenched. "What do you mean?"
Your house has touched this name before.
The words fell like stones into a pond.
Around the circle, some of the witches stiffened. Fẹ́mi felt as if the ground had dropped away under him. He stared at his father's back, waiting.
Baba's fingers tightened on his staff. "We have fought many dark things," he said carefully. "We have spoken many names, binding them. Perhaps your sight touches some old battle—"
Do not dance around me, child, the voice snapped, suddenly sharp. Long ago, when famine walked with pestilence and bodies filled the river's mouth, you sought a shortcut. You asked to borrow power that was not yours to hold.
A low exclamation rippled through the circle.
Fẹ́mi blinked, stunned.
You did not say the word fully, the voice went on. Fear pulled you back. But you opened a crack. Enough for it to smell you, to know your flavor. Enough for it to remember.
Baba's breath left him.
Faces swam before his inner eye—gaunt villagers, sunken‑eyed children, the stench of rot. Years ago, before Fẹ́mi was born. The year the river had turned strange colors and the yams had grown black in the ground. He had walked from shrine to shrine until his feet bled, calling every ally he knew.
None had answered.
In the lonely hours before dawn, with wailing all around him, he had sat before an altar and stared at an old, forbidden sigil carved in the stone—half‑hidden by soot, never traced in fresh chalk.
Some powers answer quickly, an old teacher's warning had drifted through his mind. Too quickly. They do not come to help, but to eat.
Desperation had been stronger than caution.
He had whispered the first part of a word into the dark.
A pressure like a giant hand had pressed on his chest. Something had turned its attention fully upon him, vast and amused. Its presence had felt like standing on the edge of a very high cliff and realizing the ground behind you was also falling.
He had fled then—smashed the altar pottery, scattered the dangerous symbols, spent the rest of the night chanting counter‑spells until his throat bled. By morning he had sworn never to acknowledge that almost‑invocation again.
The famine had eased slowly afterward, through ordinary means—grain from allies, rain that finally fell. He had told himself the thing he had almost called had failed to enter.
He had never spoken of that night to anyone.
Now the voice in the courtyard spoke the truth he had buried.
Debts spread, it echoed the hungry presence's words with bitter humor. You broke nothing completely. You tugged at a door and then ran. Doors remember hands, priest. So do the things behind them.
Baba swallowed against the dryness in his throat.
"So the king's death is my fault?" he asked, the words tasting like ash.
You are not that important, the voice said flatly. The king's line made its own bargains, long before you were born. But your touch marked your house as a good road. When the old debt came hunting again, it found you first.
Fẹ́mi felt as if a fist had closed around his chest.
His father. The man everyone in Ayetoro trusted. The one he had idolized since he could crawl.
"You never told us," one of the older witches whispered.
Baba did not turn. "There is much I have not told you," he said hoarsely. "Not out of malice, but because some stories taste of poison on every ear they enter."
Poison does not become water by being hidden, the voice replied. Listen now, children of Ifa. The thing that writes in blood is not a god, though some kings have prayed to it. It is a hunger given shape. It fattens on broken promises and the fear of those who know a price is coming. It is not loyal. It will eat the children of those who call it as easily as their enemies.
"Can it be killed?" Ogunremi's question under the baobab seemed to echo in the night, though he was not here.
Killed? The voice gave something like a laugh, rusty and cold. You cannot stab a debt. You can only pay it, or outlive it. This one has been fed too many times to starve quickly.
"Then what do we do?" Baba demanded, control cracking in his voice. "Sit and wait as it eats?"
You bind it where it stands, the voice said. You close its paths. You refuse to feed it more fear. And you stop tearing one another apart, because division is its sweetest meat.
It paused.
But know this, priest who tugged at forbidden doors: your house will feel the first teeth. That is how balances work.
The words had barely left the air when every lamp flame in the courtyard guttered.
Wind whipped through the space.
The smell of sour smoke thickened, drowning out the herbs. The shells on the mat rattled wildly, scattering. Somewhere in the circle, someone cried out as if struck.
"Hold the lines!" Baba shouted. "Do not let anything cross the chalk!"
But something already had.
A spear of darkness, thin as a shadow, shot upward from the center altar. It twisted like a snake, then burst outward in a ripple that was not wind—but every person there felt it slam into their chests.
At the edge of the circle, one of the younger apprentices staggered.
Blood trickled suddenly from his nose. His eyes rolled white. Before anyone could reach him, he crumpled like a cloth sack and lay very still.
"Kò ní ṣẹlẹ̀!" a witch gasped, dropping to her knees beside him.
Baba's heart lurched.
The boy's spirit had already gone. No shell‑reading was needed to know that.
The darkness did not linger in the courtyard.
It flowed along the chalk lines like spilled oil finding cracks.
Toward the inner rooms.
Toward the children.
Auntie Dupe woke fully the instant the lamps in the courtyard went out.
The change in light came through the cracks in the door like a breath sucked in. She pushed herself upright, every old scar in her body screaming that something was wrong.
"Stay on your mats," she snapped, voice suddenly sharp. "Do not move."
Ifabola was already sitting, eyes wide in the dim. "Auntie…"
"Quiet."
The door's chalk lines glowed faintly like bones under skin. The strip she had drawn across the wood's center years ago—when Ifabola was born and the house had gained a child of great priest and river—pulsed with uncertain light.
Something pressed against the other side.
Not like a hand. Like fog.
The wood creaked.
Dupe seized the short staff she used for beating stubborn goats and, with her other hand, grabbed the leather charm hanging by the door—a small pouch stuffed with river sand, hair, and old prayers.
"Who knocks?" she demanded, voice shaking only a little. "This door is closed to wandering things."
Cold seeped under the threshold, numbing her bare feet.
A whisper slid through the crack, not as sound but as pressure behind the eyes.
Open, and it will be quick.
Dupe gritted her teeth.
"I have buried too many children to fall for that," she said. "Go and knock at the palace if you must eat. This room is not for you."
The pressure grew.
The chalk glowing on the door flared, then dimmed, as if struggling. Thin, black tendrils like smoke began to seep through the gap between wood and floor, curling toward her ankles.
Dupe slammed the butt of her staff down on the threshold.
"No," she hissed. "By this stick that has beaten sense into fools, by the milk I no longer give but once did, by the tears I have already shed—I say no."
She thrust the charm pouch against the crack.
For a heartbeat, the darkness recoiled, hissing like water on hot iron.
Then it changed tactics.
Ifabola felt it before Dupe did.
A familiar tug inside her chest, like the downward pull that had tried to drag her into the not‑door earlier. Her palm flared with heat. The half‑formed sign there shone through her closed fist, pressing against her skin from the inside.
The force at the door sniffed, in its own way.
Ah, it purred. There you are.
Ifabola bit down on a cry.
Dupe spun. "What is it, child?"
"N‑nothing," Ifabola stammered.
The lie tasted like ash.
Her little sister stirred on the mat, whimpering in her sleep.
The dark tendrils at the floor split.
Half continued to batter the door, testing every crack. The other half thinned to threads, seeping sideways along the wall, along the floor, seeking another way in.
One found the small gap where the wall did not meet the ground perfectly—no more than the width of a finger.
It slipped through.
Dupe saw it too late.
"Back!" she barked, but the thread of shadow had already drifted across the room like slow ink in water.
It hovered over the youngest child—tiny Kike, whose only contribution to the world so far had been laughter and two missing teeth. Her small chest rose and fell peacefully.
The darkness trembled.
Then dropped.
"No!" Ifabola screamed.
She lunged without thinking, slapping her burning palm down on her sister's chest just as the thread sank.
For an instant, she was back in that tight, ugly place between worlds. The not‑door loomed. The hungry presence reared.
Greedy, the messenger's voice snapped from somewhere unseen. Too greedy.
Power slammed through Ifabola's arm.
Light—not bright white, but river‑green and storm‑blue at once—flared under her hand. It seared through flesh that was not flesh, through hunger that had never expected resistance from something so small.
The shadow screamed.
No sound reached ears, but the air shook.
Dupe staggered as the pressure at the main door vanished. The chalk lines blazed, then steadied.
On the mat, Kike jerked.
For one horrible heartbeat, her body went completely rigid. Her eyes flew open, showing whites streaked with black veins like tiny rivers of ink.
Then whatever had tried to enter her was flung back.
The thread of darkness tore free and shot upward, ripping through the thatch roof. A round hole gaped there, letting rain pour straight in.
Kike collapsed, limp.
Ifabola snatched her hand away, panting.
The burning on her palm dulled to a deep ache.
Dupe stumbled over, heart pounding.
"Kike?" she whispered, dropping to her knees.
The little girl's chest rose—shallowly.
Breath. Thin, but there.
She did not wake.
"Kike!" Ifabola shook her gently. "Kike, open your eyes. Please."
Nothing.
Auntie Dupe's hands trembled as she pressed her ear to the child's chest. After a long moment, she exhaled shakily.
"She lives," Dupe said. "For now."
Her own face, usually lined with humor even in annoyance, looked carved from stone.
She grabbed Ifabola's wrist suddenly.
The girl yelped.
Dupe flipped her hand over.
The faint chalk arc on Ifabola's palm was now a full, twisted mark—two lines crossing and curving down, so close to the burned symbol on the iroko tree that, had they seen both, no one could have missed the echo.
"What is this?" Dupe whispered.
Ifabola's throat closed.
"I—I don't know," she lied.
Dupe's eyes filled with a fury that was not aimed at the child, but at the unseen thing that had dared mark her.
"This is your father's work," she muttered—then shook her head at herself. "No. His enemies' work. Or his foolish youth's shadow."
Before she could say more, a crash sounded from the courtyard—the sound of something heavy hitting the earth.
"Stay here," she snapped, getting to her feet. "Do not open this door for anyone until I return. Not even for me, unless you hear me call your name three times."
She snatched up the stick and charm pouch, then slid the bar aside and slipped out, resecuring it behind her.
Ifabola sat frozen.
Her heart still hammered with leftover power and fear. Her palm throbbed in rhythm with it. Rain dripped through the ragged hole in the roof onto Kike's still face.
"Hold on," Ifabola whispered, wiping the drops away. "Please, Kike. Please."
No answer.
Outside, the chants had stopped.
Silence pressed against the walls, broken only by hurried footfalls and low cries.
In the courtyard, Baba knelt beside the fallen apprentice.
The boy's eyes stared at nothing. Rain spattered his open mouth, turning the tiny trickle of blood at his nose into pink streaks.
"Bring a cloth," Baba said, voice wooden.
Someone did.
He closed the boy's eyes with careful fingers, then covered his face.
The cost. The first cost.
It had barely begun.
He felt the echo of what had just slammed against the inner rooms—a blast of malice, redirected at the last moment. Something had tried to grab a life within his walls, had been burned and forced to retreat.
"Are the children—" he began.
"Auntie Dupe went in," one of the women panted. "The door holds. But the roof—"
"Baba!"
Ifabola's mother burst into the courtyard, wrapper soaked, hair half‑loose.
"Kike—" she choked, then cut herself off, trying to breathe.
Cold clamped around Baba's heart.
He rose and strode toward the sleeping room, staff forgotten in his hand.
The chalk on the doorway still shone, rain washing white streaks down the wood. A circular hole gaped in the roof above it, letting water pour inside.
Auntie Dupe lay just outside the door.
For a heartbeat, Baba did not understand what he was seeing. She was on her side, as if she had simply sat down to rest. Her stick lay a little distance away, her hand stretched toward it.
Her eyes were open.
Rain pooled in them, unblinking.
"Dupe?" he said softly.
She did not answer.
He knelt, fingers searching for the pulse in her throat.
Nothing.
His vision blurred.
"Ah," he whispered. "Sister…"
He closed her eyes with a thumb, as gently as he had closed the apprentice's.
Something dark stained her palm.
He lifted her hand.
There, in faint, bruised lines—as if pressed from inside her skin rather than drawn on it—lay the same hateful letters that had been on the king.
E J E H
His breath left him.
Behind him, Ifabola's mother made a broken sound.
"Not Dupe," she wept. "She has carried this house on her back for years. Why her?"
Because she stood in front of the door, Baba thought dully. Because the thing looked for a road into his house and found her body guarding the narrowest point.
Guilt twisted in his gut.
He had warned the council that his house would feel the first teeth, but some foolish, hopeful part of him had imagined he might somehow step into their path alone. As if the hunger would politely eat only the priest who had once brushed its door.
Instead, it had taken someone who had never spoken its name at all.
"Baba?" a small voice quavered from inside the room.
He looked up.
Ifabola stood just within the doorway, eyes enormous, lips trembling. Behind her, Kike lay limp on the mat, breathing in shallow, uneven pulls. The other sister huddled beside her, crying silently.
Baba's heart broke again, in a different place.
He rose slowly and stepped over Dupe's body into the room.
Rain fell through the hole in the roof in thin, steady streams, dampening the mats. The chalk on the walls glowed weakly.
He knelt by Kike, laying a hand lightly on her forehead.
Her skin was cold. Not the chill of death, but the cold of someone standing too long in a river's current. Her pulse fluttered faintly under his fingers, quick and fragile.
"What happened?" he asked, though he already knew the shape of it.
Ifabola stared at the floor. Her hands were clenched so hard her knuckles had gone white.
"A shadow came," she whispered. "It tried to go into Kike. I—I stopped it."
"How?" His voice was gentle, but there was iron under it.
She swallowed.
"I don't know. My hand…" She opened her right palm, almost defiantly.
The twisted mark there burned like a brand.
Baba's breath caught.
Behind him, he heard his wife suck in a sharp breath.
"What is that?" she demanded. "Adégbáyí, what is on our child?"
He forced himself to look away from Ifabola's palm and meet his wife's eyes.
"Something that should not be," he said. "But that is here, whether we wish it or not."
He turned back to his daughter.
"Why did you not tell me earlier?" The hurt leaked into his voice despite his efforts.
Tears spilled over Ifabola's lashes.
"I was afraid," she choked. "And the…messenger said your ears were already full and—"
She clapped a hand over her mouth, realizing too late what she had revealed.
Baba's blood ran cold.
"Messenger?" he repeated quietly. "What messenger?"
Silence stretched.
Rain pattered.
At the threshold, Dupe's still body lay as a warning.
Ifabola shook her head, sobbing now. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't want anyone to die."
Baba gathered her into his arms, staff digging into his back as he pulled her close.
"I know," he said, voice rough. "I know, ọmọ mi. This is not your doing."
Even as he spoke, another voice whispered in the hollow behind his ribs:
You tugged the door first.
He held his daughter tighter, as if his arms alone could shield her from ancient hungers and his own past mistakes.
Behind them, Kike's breath hitched, then steadied—not strong, but no longer slipping.
For tonight, at least, the little girl's life clung stubbornly to her body.
Outside, in the courtyard of the Ifatedo compound, rain washed the blood from the altar stone. The body of the dead apprentice was borne away by shaking hands. Women began to wail for Auntie Dupe, their voices rising and falling like waves.
High above, thunder rolled faintly, a distant witness to the first lives taken in a war most of Ayetoro still did not know had begun.