The wind was a restless spirit, threading its way through the sun-split ruins of Akòdé. It carried voices that should have been lost — fractured murmurs woven with sorrow, defiance, and fragments of forgotten songs. These voices slipped in and out of the broken shells of collapsed stonework, dancing like water sifting through bone, haunting the hollowed remains of a city scorched by fire and silence.
Echo crouched beside the shattered frame of what had once been a schoolhouse. Her breath was shallow, uneven, fingers trembling as they pressed against the cracked earth. The ground beneath her was brittle, a fractured mirror to the past — splintered memories hiding just beneath the surface, waiting for her to listen.
Again, she heard it — a song without words, a rhythm born not of sound but of grief. It pulsed beneath the ruins like a heartbeat, a lament that did not belong to the living, nor the dead. It belonged to memory itself, and it was calling her name.
Behind her, Iyagbẹ́kọ́ stood tall and still, arms folded tightly across her chest. The elder's face was carved from silence, eyes distant, reflecting the shadows of a thousand forgotten years. "The echoes here are thick," she murmured, voice like dry leaves scratching across stone. "This place remembers everything. Even the things no one wanted remembered."
Echo nodded slowly, eyes fixed on the shattered chalk markings smeared faintly across the scorched walls of the ruined schoolhouse. "They're showing me pieces," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "Fragments of a story… but not enough to form the full shape. Just wounds. Names. A scream that never ended."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́'s gaze flickered toward the remains of a half-collapsed wall. The faint outlines of old chalk drawings lingered like ghosts beneath layers of dust and ash. "Then we dig deeper," the elder said with quiet resolve. "You have to carry what they left buried, Echo. Carry it for those who can no longer carry themselves."
They moved forward in silence, the ruins stretching out around them like a scarred body. Echo paused suddenly, kneeling to touch the scorched bench of the long-forgotten courtyard. Her fingers traced the blackened wood, and suddenly her mind was flooded with flashes: children laughing and chasing each other beneath the sun, a man shouting orders in a panic, soldiers marching through the streets with rifles raised and fire licking the edges of buildings.
She staggered back, fists clenched so tightly her nails bit into her palms.
Ola came from the eastern wing, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, face pale in the fading light. "There were records here once," she said, voice tight. "Books. Ledgers. Accounts. All burned."
Echo's eyes flared, a flicker of fierce hope lighting their depths. "Not all," she said. "They left something. Something small. But I can hear it — a trace, a thread."
Ola's voice dropped to a whisper. "I heard it again… the hollow. Just now. Nearby. Watching."
The three women stood amidst the rubble of a story no one dared to tell, the dying light of the sun casting long shadows that stretched and twisted like the fingers of the past reaching toward them.
Then a figure emerged from the broken archway of a crumbling church. His steps were quiet but sure, and the strange shimmering warping the air around him flickered like a ghost's breath. Ọmọ́jolá.
"There's more than one voice in the silence," he said softly. "And not all want to be remembered."
Echo's head snapped toward him, eyes narrowing. "You knew this place?"
"I was born here," Ọmọ́jolá said, voice thick with something like sorrow. "Or at least, in what it was before they hollowed it out. My mother was taken from here. The songs stopped that night. They made sure of it."
He stepped past them, kneeling beside a cracked stone slab half-hidden beneath moss and bloodstained vines. With careful hands, he pulled the overgrowth away to reveal a carved crest: three flowing river lines converging beneath a broken eye.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́'s breath caught, sharp as a blade in the cold night air. "The Sign of the Oath Keepers," she whispered, voice trembling. "The last guardians of the ancestral covenants."
"They were betrayed," Ọmọ́jolá said, eyes dark with grief. "By those who traded memory for power. The Hollowed were born from their silence."
A sudden gust of wind surged through the ruins, raising dust and ash in a swirling dance. The broken city seemed to breathe, alive again after years of suffocating stillness.
Echo placed her hand reverently on the carved stone. A pulse raced up her arm—not pain, but recognition, as if the stone itself remembered her touch.
Then the visions came crashing over her, overwhelming and vivid:
She was there in a midnight ritual. Drums thundered in her chest. Flames surged through riverwater, hissing and crackling as they licked the edges of sacred stones.
A child screamed, raw and broken.
Men in uniforms burst through the night, tearing children from their mothers' arms, dragging them into the dark.
She saw a woman — a priestess — clutching a bloodstained scroll. Her voice cracked as she screamed a name into the void: Ẹ̀nítàn.
Echo gasped and collapsed to her knees. Her body shook with the force of the memory.
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ was beside her in an instant, whispering grounding chants beneath her breath. She pressed a kola nut into Echo's mouth. The bitter taste shocked her back into the present, anchoring her trembling mind.
"It's a memory lock," Iyagbẹ́kọ́ said quietly. "Someone left it behind as a key. A song to unlock what they forced into silence."
Ọmọ́jolá reached into his satchel and withdrew a jagged obsidian shard, its surface etched with intricate veves — sigils that seemed to pulse faintly with a light of their own.
"This belonged to my father," he said. "I didn't understand it then. But now… I think it's meant to respond to her voice. To Echo's."
Ola shivered, eyes wide in the gathering twilight. "Are we ready? To hear what was buried here? To let it rise again?"
No one answered.
The sun slipped behind the hills, bleeding out gold and crimson light. The ruins breathed around them, shadows stretching long and thin like fingers reaching for the past.
Echo took a deep breath, voice trembling but steady. "We don't have a choice. If we don't listen, the Hollowed will speak for us. And they will twist the story again."
She lifted the obsidian shard and pressed it against the carved crest.
A low hum began to vibrate through the ground beneath them.
The stone beneath the crest trembled and cracked, a groan like old bones splitting open.
Slowly, the earth parted along ancient seams, revealing a spiral staircase descending into the cold black below.
Ọmọ́jolá's eyes widened, voice trembling with awe. "The Hall of the Buried Songs. My mother told me about it. Where the truth was kept when the world refused to see."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ handed Echo a small oil lamp, its flame flickering in the growing darkness. "Then go," she said, voice firm but gentle. "Speak the truth they killed to silence. And remember, child—your voice is more than sound. It is remembrance."
One by one, they descended the spiral steps — into dust and silence, into the heart of a forgotten covenant.
Behind them, just beyond the edge of their lamplight, something watched.
A shadow without form, breathing in memory like poison smoke.
It waited.
And it remembered.
The DescentThe air grew colder as they descended deeper, the narrow spiral staircase carved from stone smooth with centuries of forgotten footsteps. The walls pressed in close, damp and heavy with the smell of earth and decay.
Echo's heartbeat thrummed in her ears louder than the quiet murmurs of the others around her. She held the lamp higher, watching the flickering shadows leap across carved runes and faded paintings.
Ola's footsteps echoed softly behind her, steady but cautious.
Ọmọ́jolá's voice broke the silence. "The Oath Keepers believed that truth was a river. It flows beneath lies and time, but it always finds a way to surface."
Iyagbẹ́kọ́ added, "And the Hall of the Buried Songs is where the river runs deepest. Where the memories too dangerous for the world above were sealed away."
They came to the bottom of the stairs and entered a vast cavern, wide as a sky. The walls glistened with mineral veins that caught the lamp's glow, turning it into a kaleidoscope of fractured light.
Around the cavern floor, stone slabs bore names — hundreds, thousands — etched in careful script.
A choir of whispers rose from the darkness, voices rising and falling like waves, each name a note in an ancient song.
Echo stepped forward and laid her palm on one slab.
The song surged.
Memories flooded her mind.
Names, faces, stolen lives — the pain of a history erased and the stubbornness of memory refusing to die.
Here, beneath dust and stone, lay the first breath of a reckoning.