The Flooding of Memory
It began with mist.
Not rain.
Not storm.
Just mist.
Soft as breath. Heavy as mourning.
It crept through streets.
Climbed stairways.
Seeped into palaces.
And with it came sound.
Not voices.
But rhythm.
The heartbeat of buried memory made liquid.
The River Moves
In Obade, the water rose first.
But it did not surge.
It did not consume.
It remembered.
It curled around trees marked by past violence.
It seeped into the cracks of homes where truths were once silenced.
And where the water touched stone, the stone sang.
The Archive Trembles
In the capital, the lowest levels of the Archive began to flood.
Clerks rushed to save scrolls.
Servers blinked.
And then—stopped.
Not in malfunction.
But in submission.
Screens lit with images long deleted: mothers drumming with daughters, secret rituals hidden under colonial codes, names once redacted now restored.
The Archive did not resist the water.
It listened.
And in doing so, rewrote itself.
Voices from Below
As the mist thickened, people began to hear things:
A father's apology, long left unsaid.
A lover's name, whispered in a tongue they were punished for using.
A child's laugh, lost during war.
These were not ghosts.
They were echoes.
Freed.
Not to haunt.
But to return.
Iyagbẹ́kọ's Vigil
The elder stood on the temple steps, arms spread, eyes closed.
Water lapped at her ankles.
"Let it rise," she said.
"Let it claim what forgetting tried to bury."
By her side, Èkóyé stood silent, eyes wet—not from fear.
From recognition.
A Map Remade
By midday, the rivers had redrawn borders.
The land had not drowned.
It had been retaught.
Villages that had been erased from maps now reappeared.
Languages once banned whispered again in breezes.
Even the stars that night seemed closer—as if they, too, were leaning down to hear the new rhythm.
The River's Voice
As dusk settled, the water began to recede.
But it left marks:
New veins of memory across the soil.
Symbols once etched by myth now shining faintly in tree bark and clay.
Calabashes carried ash and light in equal measure.
And through it all, one voice echoed—not from above, but within.
Ẹ̀lúru.
"This is not retribution," she whispered.
"It is remapping.
Not to erase, but to restore."
Rerẹ́'s Vision
She stood waist-deep in the river, her staff glowing.
All around her, children played in the newly formed streams.
They did not ask what had happened.
They already knew.
Because the water now carried story again.
She closed her eyes.
And in the distance, she saw it:
A future not ruled by fear.
A land not shaped by forgetting.
A river that no longer buried queens—but lifted them.
Final Lines
The floodwaters did not take.
They gave.
Not destruction.
But clarity.
And in that gift, the land exhaled.
The silence was no longer empty.
It was full of names.