The room was cold.
Not from weather but from something deeper.
An absence of warmth.
Of presence.
Kareem stood in front of the carved drum symbol on the floor of Ola's aunt's home. He stared at it as if it might blink back.
Beside him, Amaka snapped photos.
"I ran the symbol through some old Ifá texts," she said. "It matches a forgotten river deity one not worshipped anymore. A spirit known only in whispers."
Kareem turned to her. "What's her name?"
Amaka hesitated. "She has no name. Not a real one. They call her Ìyá Mú, 'The Mother Who Swallows.'"
"She's the one in the river?"
"No," Amaka whispered. "She is the river."
Meanwhile...
Ola ran.
His bare feet slammed into the wet jungle floor. Thorns tore at his legs. The wind howled behind him not from the trees, but from voices.
He didn't know how he got here. One moment he was in his aunt's house, sleeping on the couch... the next, he was staring into a mirror and the mirror stared back.
Then the whispers began.
They didn't call his name.
They breathed it.
Olaaa... come see... come hear...
Now he was deep in the forest.
Lost.
But the strangest part?
He wasn't scared.
Because she had spoken to him.
She, the one the elders had feared.
The Mother of Silence.
And she didn't speak like people did.
She spoke through memory. Through the river in his blood.
"You hear them too," she had told him, her voice soft and ancient. "You carry the song."
Ola had seen things.
Flashes.
A past that wasn't his:
—A woman bound in chains, thrown into a river.
—A drum made from her bones.
—A town swearing an oath to forget.
"You're the key, little one," she had said. "And they fear keys more than they fear gods."
Now, in the distance, he saw a hut.
Old. Wooden. Covered in vines.
Drawn to it, Ola stepped inside.
And there, hanging from the ceiling
Was the fisherman's net.
Still wet.
Still full.
And from within it, something moved.
Back in Obade
Kareem and Amaka stood at the riverbank.
Children had begun humming again. Not songs. Chants. Ones they shouldn't know. Ones Kareem remembered from the ritual.
"They're infected," Amaka said. "By memory. By history. The river's pulling pieces of the past back through them."
"Then we need to go back to where it started," Kareem said.
Amaka nodded. "The original settlement. The one buried during colonial times."
"The first sacrifice."
"Yes. Because if the river is waking... then so is the truth."
And truth, once uncovered, has a price.