The Hollow did not sleep.
Not anymore.
It blinked—slowly, as if waking from a dream it had no part in dreaming. Its breath ran through the roots of the Remembering Place, curling up through the stones of the Spiral of Salt, and into the marrow of the living. It had watched. It had waited. Now it stirred.
And in its stirring, the Trial began.
Not with fire. Not with heralds. With presence.
Heavy. Inescapable.
Ola felt it first. Again.
He stood before the mirror they had set in the center of the third ring—Ring of the Feared, the Shamed, the Twisted—and he could not see himself in it. Not properly. The glass showed fragments: the curve of his jaw, the softness of his eyes, the shadow behind his shoulder that never quite matched his posture.
The mirror had become a gate.
Behind it: reckoning.
Before it: choice.
Echo approached from the far edge of the circle, her hands wrapped in cloth dyed with charcoal and ochre—the colors of unfinished memory. Her eyes shimmered in the half-light like obsidian cracked by heat. She had not slept. None of them had. Not truly.
"The Trial has begun," she said.
Ola nodded, not taking his eyes from the glass.
"Not for them," Echo added. "For us."
That's when he understood.
This Trial wasn't to prove the worth of the forgotten. It wasn't to lift the names of the feared into redemption. It was to force the living to look at what they'd become in the silence.
The Hollow wasn't here to judge the dead.
It was here to judge those who kept their mouths shut when it mattered most.
⟡
The first to be called was Iyagbẹ́kọ́.
She did not flinch.
The elders gathered at the edge of the salt-ring, but they did not approach the mirror. That was not allowed. Not in this Trial.
A child stepped forward.
Not Tajudeen.
Not Ìmísí's ghost.
This child had no name that the village remembered.
She had arrived days before—dripping river water, eyes dark as volcanic glass, teeth too sharp to be born of a human mother. But she walked like she belonged.
She stood beside the mirror and raised a shard of bone.
"This is your gate," she said to Iyagbẹ́kọ́. "Will you pass through it or break it?"
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ walked into the circle.
She did not speak.
She removed the rings from her fingers, the beads from her neck, the cloth that marked her station as keeper of rites. She stripped herself of everything that named her authority.
Then she stood before the mirror.
It shimmered.
And from it came not her reflection—
—but the boy she once struck.
The one who wept during his naming rite.
The one they said was "soft in the heart," too fragile to carry ancestral strength.
The one she banished from the lineage until he hardened.
She had thought he died.
But the mirror showed him grown, far away, a stranger to the land he once bled for.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ knelt.
Tears fell.
"I thought I was shaping you," she whispered. "But I was hollowing you out."
The mirror did not respond.
It simply darkened.
And then, behind her, a stone rose from the salt.
Uncarved. Heavy.
A weight.
She did not resist it.
She lifted it and carried it to the fourth ring—the one no one had named yet.
She laid it there.
A marker.
A burden owned.
⟡
The Trial was not about punishment.
It was about weight.
Responsibility.
Inheritance.
What do you do when the mirror shows you who you hurt? What do you do when it does not flinch from the truth?
The next was a weaver.
She had crafted funeral cloths for generations.
But in the time of forgetting, she'd woven silence into every hem. She had left out the names of those the council told her to.
Her hands shook as the child offered her the bone shard.
"This is your gate."
In the mirror: her mother.
Tongueless. Burned.
A woman who had once whispered to the forest spirits and was silenced for it. The council said it was for safety. That her words were dangerous.
The weaver saw the cords of her own loom wound tight around her mother's throat.
She fell to her knees.
"I stitched obedience into every thread," she said. "And called it devotion."
The mirror darkened.
A stone rose.
⟡
One by one, they came.
And one by one, the mirror revealed not demons—
—but truths.
Sometimes quiet. Sometimes cruel.
A boy who mocked his sister's voice until she stopped speaking forever.
A mother who lied to protect her son and in doing so, condemned another's.
A priest who reworded old chants so they would not awaken the stories that frightened him.
Each bore a stone to the fourth ring.
By sunset, it began to spiral.
It did not gleam.
It did not shine.
It groaned.
A ring of reckoning.
The weight of the living.
The salt in the wound.
⟡
Ola watched it grow and knew his turn would come.
Echo watched him, but did not speak.
They had long since stopped offering comfort during the Trial.
It was not a place for soft hands.
It was a place for sharp memory.
And in the silence between breath and confession, a question waited:
What happens when the community becomes the wound?
⟡
By midnight, the river rose.
Not in flood.
In song.
Low. Dissonant. The voice of the Hollow curling through reed and root.
And then, from the water, a figure stepped.
Ìmísí.
But not the dream version.
Not the cracked spirit with fire-glass skin.
This Ìmísí was whole.
Wearing river-woven cloth.
Hair wild with grief and joy intertwined.
She walked barefoot through the salt spiral, and the ground did not reject her.
Every face turned.
Ola could not breathe.
She was not spirit.
She was not ghost.
She was memory made flesh.
Not to be worshipped.
To be heard.
She did not weep.
She did not accuse.
She simply looked at Echo.
And said:
"Now that you've named them, will you hold them?"
Echo stepped forward.
Then dropped to her knees.
She placed her palm flat on the earth of the fourth ring.
And whispered:
"We will hold what we buried."
The stones around them shook.
And the Hollow exhaled.
For the first time, in relief.