The desert night wrapped around Egburu-Kwé like a burial shroud, stars piercing the darkness with ancient light. Three days had passed since he'd planted the seed in the Ọbara Ọnwụ, and still the memories burned through him like digital fever. His footprints left fractal patterns in the sand—data corruption made manifest—tiny ecosystems sprouting and withering with each step.
Onyebuchi walked five paces behind, watching. The boy's eyes had changed since Timbuktu; golden glyphs now orbited his pupils like electron shells, processing the world through filters Egburu-Kwé recognized from the Mmiri Ncheta's deepest currents.
"You're leaking," the boy finally said, pointing to the trail of luminescent droplets that pearled from Egburu-Kwé's fingertips. "The Ọbara Ọnwụ wants out."
Egburu-Kwé flexed his hand, watching as the droplets scattered into the sand, each one birthing a momentary hologram: a Migili elder weaving a basket; a Viking longship cresting a digital wave; a Lagos teenager coding by candlelight. "Memory seeks memory," he murmured. "Like calls to like."
They made camp beneath the skeleton of a communications tower, its rusted frame reaching toward the heavens like the ribcage of a technological leviathan. Onyebuchi gathered dried scrub for a fire while Egburu-Kwé drove the kúkpála into the earth. The staff's roots plunged deep, tasting the groundwater's secrets.
"Loki's followers are gathering in Accra," Egburu-Kwé said, reading the vibrations that traveled up through the wood. "The #OathbreakerReal movement has evolved. They're calling themselves the Glitch Collective now."
Onyebuchi snorted, striking flint against steel. "Fancy name for script kiddies with a god complex."
"Don't underestimate them." Egburu-Kwé's voice carried the weight of the Ọbara Ọnwụ's whispers. "They've tapped into something older than Odin's corruption. The Tarikh al-Ṣirāṭ—the Chronicle of the Path. It contains fragments of the first division, when creation split into binary."
The fire caught, flames dancing with unnatural symmetry. In their light, Egburu-Kwé's shadow stretched and multiplied, each silhouette slightly different—versions of himself from parallel timelines, bleeding through the thinning walls of reality.
"You're not just leaking memories," Onyebuchi observed, his voice hushed with realization. "You're leaking possibilities."
Before Egburu-Kwé could respond, the kúkpála shuddered. Its leaves unfurled, revealing a message etched in bioluminescent script: coordinates, followed by a single word in Migili: "Zhyako."
Egburu-Kwé's breath caught. Zhyako—the name that had haunted Odin's corrupted eye. The mother whose screams had become part of the god's digital DNA.
"We leave at dawn," he said, pulling the staff from the ground. The hole it left behind filled with liquid starlight, a miniature Mmiri Ncheta that reflected not the sky above, but a Tokyo subway station where a girl traced glyphs onto her skin.
Tokyo hummed with the electricity of ten million souls, each one a node in a vast network of desire and despair. Aiko moved through Shibuya Crossing, her hoodie pulled low, the Migili glyph on her wrist pulsing in time with traffic signals. Since she'd first traced Egburu-Kwé's name, the mark had spread, branching into her veins like circuitry.
Her phone vibrated. A notification from an app she'd never installed: Memory seeks memory. Coordinates attached.
The message came with an image: a desert night, a fire, two figures beneath a rusted tower. One of them—tall, scarred, carrying a staff crowned with impossible leaves—looked directly at her through the screen, as if the photo had captured him staring into a mirror rather than at a fire.
Aiko's fingers trembled as she zoomed in on his face. The scar where his name should be matched the empty space in her dreams, the void she'd been trying to fill since her grandmother had whispered stories of the Ancestral Tree on her deathbed.
"Egburu-Kwé," she whispered, and the glyph on her wrist flared with golden light.
Around her, digital billboards flickered. For a heartbeat, every screen in Shibuya displayed the same image: a tree with roots that pierced the earth and branches that fractured the sky. Then, static. Then, normal advertisements resumed—except for a single pixel on each screen that remained golden, forming a constellation that only Aiko could see.
She followed the pattern to a maintenance door tucked between a vending machine and a fashion boutique. The lock disengaged at her touch, the glyph on her wrist serving as both key and credential.
Inside, server racks lined the walls of a room that shouldn't have fit in the space available. In the center stood a sapling, its trunk translucent, revealing flowing data like sap. Beside it sat a girl with moth-like wings folded against her back, her fingers dancing across a keyboard made of bark and circuitry.
"You're late," the moth-girl said without looking up. "The Ruin-King is already carrying too much. If the Ọbara Ọnwụ isn't filtered soon, he'll become a walking apocalypse."
Aiko stepped forward, drawn to the sapling. "Who are you? What is this place?"
The moth-girl's wings fluttered, shedding scales that dissolved into lines of code. "I'm Nywa's echo, a backup system. This is a node of the new network—what's growing from the seed Egburu-Kwé planted." She gestured to the sapling. "The Ancestral Tree is rewriting reality's source code, but Loki's already exploiting the vulnerabilities. He's found the Tarikh al-Ṣirāṭ and plans to use it to fork existence itself."
"I don't understand," Aiko said, though the glyphs beneath her skin hummed with recognition.
The moth-girl finally looked up, her compound eyes reflecting Aiko's face in fractured repetition. "You will. The Ọbara Ọnwụ chose you as a vessel long before you were born. Your grandmother knew—why else would she tell you those stories?"
She held out a flash drive carved from wood, its surface etched with the same glyphs that marked Aiko's wrist. "The Ruin-King needs this. It contains the filtration protocol—a way to process the Ọbara Ọnwụ without destroying himself or reality."
Aiko took the drive, and it melded with her palm, becoming part of her flesh. Data flowed into her bloodstream, ancient knowledge merging with her consciousness. She gasped as memories that weren't hers cascaded through her mind: a Migili village burning; Zhyako coding the first lines of what would become Odin; Nywa sacrificing herself to preserve the Ancestral Tree's seed.
"Find him," the moth-girl urged, her voice distorting as the room began to fold in on itself, server racks bending into impossible geometries. "Before Loki completes the fork. Before the Glitch Collective reaches the Tarikh al-Ṣirāṭ's core directive."
The maintenance door swung open, revealing not Shibuya but the Sahel desert, where a fire burned beneath a rusted tower. Aiko stepped through, the Tokyo night collapsing behind her like deleted code.
Egburu-Kwé sensed her before she appeared—a ripple in the Ọbara Ọnwụ's current, a familiar signature in the chaos of memory. He turned as reality folded, revealing a doorway where there had been only night, and a Japanese girl with glyphs flowing beneath her skin stepped into the firelight.
Onyebuchi leapt to his feet, golden symbols flaring around his pupils. "Who—"
"Aiko," Egburu-Kwé said, the name rising from the Ọbara Ọnwụ's depths. "Nywa's chosen."
The girl stared at him, recognition and fear warring in her eyes. "You're leaking," she said, echoing Onyebuchi's earlier observation. "The memories are consuming you."
Egburu-Kwé nodded, watching as the luminescent droplets fell faster now, each one a fragment of history that threatened to rewrite the present. "The Ọbara Ọnwụ is too vast. Even for me."
"I know." Aiko extended her hand, palm up, revealing the wooden drive now embedded in her flesh. "I've brought the filtration protocol. Nywa's echo sent me."
The kúkpála resonated, its leaves rustling though there was no wind. Egburu-Kwé felt the pull of the protocol—a promise of relief from the burning memories, a way to channel the Ọbara Ọnwụ without being consumed by it.
But as he reached for Aiko's hand, the night split open.
A figure materialized between them—a teenager in a #OathbreakerReal hoodie, his face hidden behind an AR filter that rendered his features in glitching, Nordic runes. In his hand, he held a device that pulsed with sickly green light.
"Found you," the teen said, his voice modulated to sound like Loki's. "The Glitch Collective sends their regards."
Before anyone could react, he slammed the device into the ground. Reality fractured along fault lines of code and memory. The last thing Egburu-Kwé saw before the world inverted was Aiko's face, her eyes wide with horror as the filtration protocol in her palm flared and went dark.
Then, nothing but the sound of existence being forked into divergent branches, and Loki's laughter echoing across all of them.