Ọmọjolá had learned to tell when the earth was whispering. Not in the way children fancied the wind calling their names, nor the way dreamers grasped for voices slipping just beyond reach in sleep. No. Hers was a knowing older than fear, older than memory itself. It was a truth buried in the marrow of the world—one that stirred not in sudden shouts, but in the slow, deliberate tremors beneath cracked stones and forgotten graves.
When the tremors returned beneath Obade's fractured roads, beneath the places renamed and repainted by hands too young and ignorant to sense the silence buried there, Ọmọjolá did not run.
She crouched low beside the fractured stones that made up the half-forgotten shrine behind the market ruins, fingers brushing the soil like a lover seeking warmth in cold fingers. The earth pulsed beneath her touch—not the coolness of water or the gentle thrum of life, but a deep, hungry pulse, like a breath long held beneath drowning waves.
This was not the River calling. This was something older, drier—hungrier.
A memory made of bone.
Behind her, the shadows shifted, stretching with the slow inevitability of dusk.
"Dreamwatcher," came a voice, rough as gravel but low, almost reverent.
Ọmọjolá did not flinch.
A man stepped from the heat mirage, cloaked in dust and silence. His skin was cracked like parched earth, pale and ash-toned, the ochre pigment circling his eyes not for beauty but for remembrance—a mark of his belonging. One of the Hollowed. Not the violent kind, not like those who carved sigils into living flesh or left their marks in blood. This one wore his scars like worn armor, a testament to endurance.
"I heard the song last night," he said, squatting down beside her, careful not to disturb the soil beneath their feet. "It broke through. Even down there."
"Then you know," Ọmọjolá murmured, voice barely above the rising wind.
The man nodded slowly. "The bones are waking. They remember the lies."
She lifted a stone fragment, a piece of an ancient mask, smooth and weathered by time and water. A relic of those who had been buried beneath histories written by others.
"They're not just remembering," she said softly, "They're angry."
Far below the city, beneath ancestral grounds unmarked on any map and unlit by flame, Echo sat in the Dreaming Chamber.
This was not the kind of silence that filled empty rooms or blank spaces. For Echo, silence was a hallway crowded with echoes—fragments of memories no one else could hear or see. Here, memories swam like living things, clinging to walls, pooling like water waiting to be stirred. They begged to be rewritten, begged to be heard.
She had brought the Swallowed Songs here days ago, letting them leak slowly into the chamber like ink dropped into still water. At first, they whispered: fragmented, choral, broken voices carrying long-forgotten names.
But today was different.
Today, they screamed.
Echo woke to the sound of three names — names she did not recognize — but the voice shouting them bore the same cadence as her own. Or at least, the voice she might have had, before the River rewrote everything.
"She's here," Ola said softly, stepping into the chamber. Her voice barely disturbed the thick silence.
Echo looked up. "The Hollowed girl. The one from the surface."
"She calls herself Ọmọjolá now," Echo said, rising with the weight of that truth. "She's remembered too much."
"Is that a problem?" Ola's eyes were dark, heavy with what she had seen and heard in the dreaming.
Echo's gaze shifted toward the hidden altar, where ancient glyphs—etched into stone in a tongue older than even the Dreambinders—glowed faintly in the half-light.
"There's a message carved into the walls," Ola said. "It wasn't there yesterday. It says: The bones do not forgive the mouths that silenced them."
"That's not a warning," Echo said coldly. "It's a verdict."
Later, in the chamber of salt, Ọmọjolá stood before the circle of elders.
The room was sacred, a vault so pure that not even the wind dared to enter. Salt lined the floor and walls, crystallizing ancient protective wards. The air was thick with the scent of resin and old dust.
Her voice carried fire beneath the surface, burning slow and fierce.
"You buried them," she accused, eyes locked on the High Mother whose face was carved by time and bitter wisdom. "The first memory-bearers. The mothers who swallowed songs so the children could survive. You called it mercy. But it was erasure."
The High Mother's eyes remained steady, unmoving like stone. "We did what was necessary," she replied, voice measured. "To keep the River's dream intact."
"No," Ọmọjolá said, stepping closer. "You kept the myth intact. You kept the surface pure. But underneath, the silenced rage festered. Now the earth peels back its skin and demands truth."
One of the younger seers shivered, voice trembling. "If the Hollowed return through her—"
"They never left," Ọmọjolá snapped, teeth bared. "You just forgot what they were."
A silence fell. Not of guilt, but of fear.
"They are gathering," she said, pacing the salt lines worn smooth by countless bare feet. "The ones with no graves. The memories bound in bone and song and ash. They are not waiting for our permission anymore."
From the entrance, Ola's voice echoed: "Then we must descend."
All eyes turned to her.
"I've seen it," Ola said, stepping forward. "In the dreaming. There's a door in the black rock beneath the city — one that only opens to voices who remember. Ọmọjolá's voice is the key."
Ọmọjolá's breath caught.
"I don't know what I am anymore," she whispered.
Echo stepped beside her, calm but unshakable. "You are the echo of every woman they tried to bury and failed. You are what they could not kill in silence."
The descent was not a ritual.
There were no blessings, no protective chants or lanterns lit against the dark.
Just footsteps on crumbling stone.
And the heat of the dead pressing against them with every breath they dared take.
Echo led, her steps certain though the darkness clawed at their edges.
Ola followed close, quiet but resolute.
Ọmọjolá held the center, the weight of her name heavy on her tongue.
When they reached the cavern, it was a wound in the earth so old it smelled of salt, blood, and time itself.
And there—stacked and fused, woven into an impossible architecture—was a wall of bone.
Hundreds. Thousands. Remains pressed tight together, bleached white and grim.
At the center of this macabre edifice was a hollowed imprint: a human-shaped void, as if someone had pressed their back against the wall and vanished.
"The Door of Forgotten Names," Echo whispered, voice a fragile thread in the oppressive dark.
Ola stared at it, eyes wide and swimming with unspoken memories.
"It's not a door," she said, voice barely a breath. "It's a memory. A last breath, frozen."
Ọmọjolá stepped forward without hesitation.
"Then let it remember me," she said.
She pressed her back against the hollowed space.
A deep vibration thundered through her spine, echoing in her marrow.
Her mouth opened—not of choice, but compulsion.
And she sang.
The song came not from her lips, but from her ribs.
From the marrow within.
It was a song of betrayal and burial.
A song that named names no one had dared speak in generations.
A song that hurt to hear but healed to release.
The wall trembled beneath them.
The bones groaned, shifting, as if waking from a centuries-long slumber.
And then—they parted.
Behind the wall, a tunnel stretched into the belly of the world, endless and black.
"They're waiting," Echo said, voice steady despite the weight of the moment. "And they're not alone."
They stepped forward, into the darkness.
Not knowing if they would return.
Not caring.
For to remember was already an act of war.
And this war would not be fought with swords or sermons.
Only memory.
And the names that bones could no longer forget.
The Weight of What Was ForgottenDeep beneath the earth, the air was thick and heavy, saturated with silence older than language.
But as they moved deeper into the tunnel, something shifted.
The silence fractured.
Fragments of song, shards of memory, rose around them—whispers and cries, laughter and sorrow layered like sediment in the dark.
Ola's fingers brushed against the cold stone wall, tracing the faint outlines of glyphs that pulsed faintly with light.
"I can feel them," she whispered. "The memories… they're alive."
Ọmọjolá's voice was a low hum beneath the rising chorus. "They are hungry for voice. For justice. For reckoning."
Echo's eyes gleamed in the dark. "Then we will give it to them."
Together, they pressed onward into the deep heart of Obade.
Where the bones remembered.
And the past refused to die.