The moon had risen full and silver, casting its solemn gaze over the kingdom of Odanjo. Its pale light filtered through the high towers of the rebuilt palace and spilled across the riverbanks where fishermen hummed old songs, their nets heavy with the blessings of return. Peace, once a whisper, now had a voice.
Ayọ̀kúnlé stood at the highest terrace, his cloak billowing like a shadow behind him. He looked not outward, but inward into the still, quiet spaces of his soul. Since the curse had been broken, he had found it harder to rage, to doubt, to flee from memory. And without the curse, he found something else blooming in its place: presence.
The halls below echoed with the voices of scholars and architects, of emissaries and children. The sounds of rebuilding were no longer harsh or frantic they carried the cadence of purpose. Still, amidst it all, a quiet summons pulled him one he had ignored for days.
It was time to return to the Temple of Dust.
He had avoided the place since the battle's end, unwilling to disturb the ashes of what had burned, unsure of what he might find among the ruins. But the winds had shifted again, and the dreams had returned visions of a boy standing barefoot in the smoke, reaching toward a sun that refused to rise.
Ayọ̀kúnlé descended in silence, armor left behind, sword replaced by a staff carved with glyphs of renewal. Adérónké met him at the southern gate.
"You're going, then?"
He nodded. "I need to see what remains."
She didn't ask if he needed company. "Tùndé's already there," she said instead. "He's been clearing the path for days."
Ayọ̀kúnlé raised an eyebrow. "You knew I'd go."
Adérónké smiled faintly. "I knew you wouldn't heal until you did."
They left together, two figures shrouded not in secrecy, but in reverence. As they passed the fields of the South Watch, the farmers bowed not out of obligation, but recognition. They were not bowing to a king, but to a man who had bled with them, wept with them, buried the dead with bare hands and lit candles for children lost.
The road to the Temple of Dust was no longer scorched and jagged. Nature, in its quiet mercy, had begun to reclaim the land. Flowers grew in the crevices where bones once fell, and birds nested in the hollows of shattered columns.
Tùndé waited by the stone archway, leaning on his spear, its tip dulled with age. He looked older, though not in body in spirit. War had a way of aging the soul.
"She still sings," he said softly, motioning to the ruins.
Ayọ̀kúnlé entered.
The Temple of Dust, once a monument to sorrow and sacrifice, now lay bathed in light. Vines curled around the broken altars, and saplings had risen from the cracks in the stone floor. The great braziers that had burned with cursed flame were now filled with wild lavender and sun-drenched moss.
But at the center, where the final battle had torn open the veil between realms, the earth was marked with a ring of smooth glass the place where Ayọ̀kúnlé had fallen and risen again.
He walked to it, removed his sandals, and stepped inside the ring.
Silence.
And then
The hum of the ancestors.
It was not a sound, but a presence. A chorus of breath and being. He knelt and placed his palm on the glass.
"I remember you," he whispered. "All of you. Every name."
Visions flickered behind his eyes faces of warriors who had stood with him, of enemies who had died with honor, of the mother who had named him not for vengeance, but for joy. He wept, not in grief, but in gratitude.
He stayed there for hours, unmoving. The sun crept across the sky and began its descent, casting golden shadows across the temple's bones.
When he rose, he turned to Tùndé and Adérónké.
"It's time we build a sanctuary here," he said. "Not of stone—but of story."
They understood at once.
The new generation needed more than swords and shields. They needed memory. They needed to know where they came from not just through books or bloodlines, but through the land itself.
"We'll plant a grove," Tùndé offered. "One tree for every name lost."
"And a path lined with their stories," Adérónké added. "So no child will ever forget."
Ayọ̀kúnlé smiled.
That night, they began the work.
No grand ceremony. No trumpets. Just three souls and their hands in the soil.
By moonrise, the first sapling stood where the final battle had ended.
Back in Odanjo, Móyèṣọlá stood before the Grand Council. Her robes shimmered with the colors of dawn, and in her hands was the newly bound Codex of Healing a compilation of chants, medicines, and ancestral wisdom gathered from every corner of the alliance.
"We must now learn to listen," she said. "Not just to the earth, but to each other."
Some elders nodded. Some resisted. Change was slow. But the seed had been planted.
Ayọ̀kúnlé returned days later to a city humming with life. Children practiced the ceremonial dance of the First Dawn, and artisans shaped murals from crystal and clay, telling the tale of the cursed prince who became the chosen king.
But Ayọ̀kúnlé knew the story wasn't truly his.
It belonged to them all.
And far to the north, beyond the Ridge of Unfinished Songs, scouts returned with news.
Another kingdom had sent envoys led not by warriors, but by poets.
Ayọ̀kúnlé smiled at the parchment in his hand.
The world was listening.
And the tale of Odanjo had become a song worth singing.
Ayọ̀kúnlé stood by the window of the palace's eastern wing, parchment still in his hand, the seal of the distant kingdom pressed deep into the wax like a gentle imprint on time. The envoys would arrive in a fortnight. Not to conquer. Not to demand.
But to learn.
And for the first time in many years, diplomacy did not taste of poison.
He looked beyond the palace walls, to the city blooming like a story rewritten its people walking with lifted heads, children splashing through restored fountains, elders singing lullabies not meant to lull pain, but to welcome joy.
The kingdom no longer trembled beneath the weight of a curse.
Now, it carried the promise of its own becoming.
Móyèṣọlá entered quietly, her steps light, but her presence grounded like stone. She held a clay bowl of kola nuts and honeyed baobab seeds, an offering for the evening's reflection. Ayọ̀kúnlé accepted one with a smile and gestured to the bench by the window.
"Still preparing for the Assembly?" he asked.
She nodded, settling beside him. "And beyond. The alliances are holding, but only barely. Old grudges do not dissolve with victory."
"No," Ayọ̀kúnlé murmured. "But they soften with shared purpose."
"Then may we keep finding purpose," she replied, her voice firm, "before those grudges turn to roots."
There was silence for a while. Not the kind born of tension, but the kind that only exists between those who trust time to hold the space between words.
"I keep thinking about the beginning," Ayọ̀kúnlé said at last.
"The cave?" Móyèṣọlá asked.
He shook his head. "Even before that. The day I ran into the woods, cursed and alone. How the wind stung my face, and how I thought no one would ever find me again."
"But they did," she said softly. "We did."
"You did," he corrected.
Móyèṣọlá placed a hand over his. "You were never just cursed, Ayọ̀. You were called. And you answered."
The next morning came with thunder not from a storm, but from drums. Heavy, layered, urgent.
Ayọ̀kúnlé stepped out into the courtyard to see scouts arriving at speed, their mounts covered in dust, their expressions tight with warning.
One knelt before him, breath ragged. "From the coastlands," she panted. "A great fleet. Not flying banners of war yet not bearing gifts either."
Adérónké arrived, sword already at her side, and Tùndé joined her, his spear freshly oiled.
"Another envoy?" Tùndé asked warily.
Ayọ̀kúnlé read the messenger's eyes. "Something else."
That evening, the council gathered in the Great Hall. The map table burned with fresh ink and oil, as the scouts painted a picture both strange and sobering ships that glided without sails, hulls etched in markings none could decipher, drums that beat in time with waves, but no faces yet seen.
"It could be trade," one elder offered.
"Or conquest," muttered another.
Ayọ̀kúnlé stood.
"Let us prepare," he said, "but not for war. For witness."
Three days later, the ships anchored at the River Delta.
Ayọ̀kúnlé went himself unarmed, surrounded not by soldiers, but by musicians, farmers, healers. The display was not of might, but of meaning.
And when the strangers emerged from their vessels, the silence was complete.
They wore robes of twilight dark indigo, stitched with starlight and their eyes held stories layered in language no one yet understood. But when one of them stepped forward and placed a hand to his chest, then to the earth, Ayọ̀kúnlé did the same.
Peace, the gesture said.
Peace returned.
They exchanged no words, but the drums began to play one rhythm answered by another, foreign yet familiar, a dance of recognition.
By nightfall, the strangers dined under the baobab trees. And as music swelled, Ayọ̀kúnlé leaned toward Móyèṣọlá, whispering:
"Maybe the world is not so wide."
She smiled. "Or maybe hearts are larger than we thought."
Later that week, the Temple of Dust saw its first pilgrimage.
People arrived from neighboring villages bearing offerings, planting saplings, leaving scrolls with names of their fallen. The circle of glass now had a garden grown around it: sunflowers for joy, marigolds for mourning, bluebells for memory.
Children ran along the memory path, touching the carved stories, asking questions.
"Who was Olúwatóbi the Silent?"
"Did Chief Moreniké really ride a lion?"
"Why did the prince weep before the final battle?"
And each question found an answer not always from books, but from voices. Oral. Alive.
Ayọ̀kúnlé visited the grove often. Not as ruler. Not as hero.
Just as a man who once wandered too far into night and found morning waiting.
The tale of Odanjo now spread with wind and ink.
Scribes from other nations arrived to learn the ways of peace forged in fire. Artists sketched murals of unity, not conquest. A new generation began to grow up without the old fear stitched into their lullabies.
But Ayọ̀kúnlé remained watchful not out of worry, but out of reverence.
He knew peace was not a crown one could wear. It was a garden one must tend.
One dawn, as he stood on the highest rise overlooking the kingdom, a young boy approached. Barefoot, breathless, eyes wide with purpose.
"Your Majesty," the child said, holding out a woven bracelet of beads and copper.
Ayọ̀kúnlé knelt. "For me?"
The boy nodded. "My mother says you protected us from monsters."
Ayọ̀kúnlé took the bracelet, his fingers brushing the boy's. "Your mother is kind."
"Is it true?" the child asked. "That the world used to burn?"
Ayọ̀kúnlé paused, then tied the bracelet around his wrist.
"Yes," he said. "But we planted trees where it did."
The child blinked. "So it's safe now?"
He looked out over the hills, where cranes built towers beside shrines, where laughter rose from markets, and poetry was sung in public squares.
"It's safer," he replied. "Because of all of us."
The boy grinned and ran off.
Ayọ̀kúnlé stood a moment longer, fingers resting on the bracelet.
The curse was broken. But legacy it lived.
In seeds.
In stories.
In children who no longer feared their own shadows.
And as he turned to descend the hill, the first light of dawn caught his profile, casting it long and gold upon the stones. A man once cursed.
Now chosen.
Not by fate.
But by his people.