There were lands where the sun fell sideways where dusk stretched for hours, and twilight painted everything in violet and gold.
Ayọ̀kúnlé had reached such a place.
They called it Ilẹ̀ Alẹ́mọ̀, the Land of Unending Evenings. A quiet realm between mountains, cut off by rivers too wild to cross except at dawn or under moonlight. The people here lived with time differently, as if the world itself had slowed for them. Days passed in the hush of long silences, nights in stories that circled campfires like smoke.
When Ayọ̀kúnlé and his party arrived, there was no grand reception. The villagers met them with still eyes and palms up not in greeting, but in peace.
There was no need to announce who he was.
They had already dreamed of him.
An elder woman, hair woven with thin silver threads and skin marked with curling tattoos of starlight, approached and took his hand.
"You carry a name that once wept," she said. "But now it sings."
Ayọ̀kúnlé bowed his head. "I come not to command, but to learn your song."
And so he stayed.
For seven nights, he sat beneath the sky that never fully darkened. He learned how these people counted the passage of seasons not by time, but by growth how many trees had flowered, how many children had asked questions, how many stories had been added to their sacred stone.
It was on the fourth evening that a boy approached him barefoot, with eyes like the moon caught in a well.
"Is it true you were cursed?" the child asked.
"Yes," Ayọ̀kúnlé answered. "But I was also loved."
The boy tilted his head. "Which saved you?"
Ayọ̀kúnlé smiled softly. "Both."
The boy nodded, satisfied. "Then I will remember that. For when I am sad."
Each night, as the fire crackled, the villagers asked him questions not about politics or war, but about dreams.
"What did you want to be before the world told you who you were?"
"What memory do you still carry that makes you cry when you're alone?"
"What do you fear will be forgotten when your story is done?"
He answered not as a king, but as a man still becoming. And the people listened not because he had power, but because he had presence.
On the seventh night, they took him to a hidden glade deep in the stone hills—a place only visited during the Rite of Returning.
There, carved into the wall of a cave, was a mural so old the colors had faded into earth tones. It depicted a figure holding both a staff and a sword, standing between two worlds one veiled in mist, the other blooming with light.
Beneath it, in the old tongue, was a single phrase:
"Ẹni tí o bá mọ irora, ni yó mọ àlàáfíà."He who has known sorrow shall know peace.
Ayọ̀kúnlé stood before the mural for a long time.
It felt like standing before a mirror made not of glass, but of memory.
He thought of his mother's lullabies.
Of the battlefield soaked in dusk where he first realized he didn't want to kill again.
Of the cursed reflection that once glared back at him, a prince in chains he had not forged himself.
He reached out and traced the outline of the mural's staff not to claim it, but to honor it.
"I am not here to save the world," he whispered. "I am here to remember it."
As they left the glade, the elder woman walked beside him.
"This land has waited for you," she said. "But not as a savior. As a bridge."
He turned to her. "A bridge to what?"
"To those who still fear light. To the ones who still kneel beneath shadows, thinking them gods."
That night, as he lay beneath the trees and listened to the stars hum in their quiet rhythm, Ayọ̀kúnlé realized something:
The curse had not only been a trial.
It had been a key.
To silence.
To truth.
To compassion.
And now, as the world slowly opened to him, so too did the deeper echoes of what it meant to lead not just as king of a nation, but as a keeper of wounds and a student of healing.
At dawn, they packed their things.
The people of Ilẹ̀ Alẹ́mọ̀ gifted him a compass made from the bone of a skyfish, said to only point toward what your heart most needed.
He did not ask where it pointed.
He would let the road show him.
And as they crossed the mist-wrapped river by moon's fading edge, Ayọ̀kúnlé looked once more at the glowing horizon behind him.
Not to regret.
But to give thanks.
For every step forward was not just a march toward destiny.
It was a dance with the past, gently reimagined.
As the mist parted behind them, silence settled like a second skin soft, watchful, and ancient. The world ahead stretched wide, with no roads etched into its surface, no towers piercing its horizon, only open space and the promise of becoming.
Ayọ̀kúnlé rode at the center of his party now not at the front to command, nor at the rear to observe but within, among his people. He was a king who did not rise above his followers but walked beside them, listening, watching, remembering.
Tùndé, ever the steady presence, matched his pace, his eyes scanning the treeline while his voice hummed a song from their boyhood—a song of rivers and fig trees, of hidden paths and gods that whispered in dreams.
Adérónké rode just behind them, head high, braids woven with copper beads that shimmered like morning sun. She carried a ledger now instead of a sword, documenting tales and treaties, charting what had been lost and what must now be preserved.
Behind them, wagons rolled with supplies seeds from Odanjo's sacred groves, scrolls of old songs unearthed from ruined temples, and medicines crafted by the women of the marshes who once lived in exile. This was not an army of conquest.
It was a caravan of memory.
Each night, they stopped by rivers or ancient trees, building fires not just for warmth, but for gathering. The people who joined them came from scattered villages, from forgotten isles and broken tribes, drawn not by summons, but by story.
Ayọ̀kúnlé noticed something quietly profound: none of them came asking for wealth. They came with questions. With wounds. With fragments of dreams they had buried long ago.
And so he sat with them.
He let an old woman place his hand over her chest as she told him how her sons had died in the border wars, and how the only thing she feared more than death was silence.
He listened to a boy barely of age whisper that he had magic in his bones wild, strange magic and had hidden it for fear of being called cursed.
He knelt beside a man who had once served the Shadow King, his hands still trembling from the ghosts that clung to them.
"Forgiveness," Ayọ̀kúnlé said to him gently, "is a language we are all still learning."
The days grew warmer, the nights softer. Sometimes rain fell like silk, washing the dust from their feet. Sometimes wind howled through the trees like spirits reminding them that peace, like war, must be protected.
It was in one such storm that Ayọ̀kúnlé woke suddenly, stirred not by fear, but by something else an old rhythm pulsing through the ground. A tremor that felt like a heartbeat not his own.
He stepped from his tent, letting the rain soak him, and stood barefoot in the mud.
There, etched faintly in the lightning-lit horizon, stood a monolith. Tall. Worn. Covered in glyphs lost to time.
No one else seemed to see it.
He walked to it slowly, each step feeling heavier, as if the earth remembered his name.
When he reached it, he pressed his palm to the stone.
A voice, ancient and neither male nor female, echoed within him not as sound, but as memory.
"You are the echo and the seed. Speak wisely."
Ayọ̀kúnlé did not speak. Not yet. He simply bowed and whispered a prayer in the language of trees, one his mother had taught him before the world fell apart.
When he returned to camp, soaked and shivering, Tùndé simply looked at him and nodded. "You heard it too."
They said nothing more. Some truths did not need retelling.
By the fifteenth day, the caravan reached the city of Ìfẹ́láyọ̀ a citadel carved into stone cliffs, long abandoned during the wars. It was once a seat of scholars, but had since become a sanctuary for those with no homes left.
They found murals still intact on the walls. Libraries hidden in caverns. Bones buried with care.
Ayọ̀kúnlé stood at the highest terrace and looked out upon the world he had only read about in sacred scrolls fields blooming where ash once fell, birds returning to skies once blackened.
He spoke only once that evening, standing before the gathering of villagers, former warriors, and wandering sages.
"I do not come with answers," he said. "Only with questions worth asking."
And then he opened his hand and showed them the compass from Ilẹ̀ Alẹ́mọ̀.
Its needle had begun to turn not to gold or north or any star known to man but toward the edge of the map.
Toward what had not yet been named.
And so he vowed: not to rule with fear, but to lead with vision.
Not to rebuild what was, but to plant something new.
A kingdom not just of land, but of spirit.
Where names were earned through kindness.
Where voices once silenced became the architects of peace.
Where kings walked among the wounded and called them kin.
That night, as the fires burned and new songs were born, Ayọ̀kúnlé sat once more with ink and parchment not to record battles or bloodlines, but to write a new charter.
One that began not with conquest.
But with "We remember."
And as the stars spun overhead, as drums began to beat in rhythm with hope rather than war, he knew
The curse was not what had shaped him.
It was what had awakened him.
And now, at the edge of all he had known, he was not afraid of the unknown.
He was ready to meet it.