Forest of the Remembering Trees

The first tree bloomed overnight.

No hand had planted it.

No spade had tilled the earth. No rain had graced the soil.

And yet it stood—elegant and impossible—just beyond the northern ridge of Obade. There, where the earth still bore the ashen scars of the Fires of Forgetting, where nothing had dared to grow since the Reaping, a sapling had taken root. Its bark shimmered faintly silver, veins pulsing with a gentle, ethereal rhythm. Leaves unfurled like ancient script, whispering softly in the breeze.

It hummed—not as a wind-chime does—but like a distant choir remembering an old refrain.

Ola saw it first.

He had wandered out at dawn, far from the chatter of the compound, seeking what he always did in moments of unrest—silence.

Instead, he found rhythm. In bark. In air. In breath.

He stood before the tree for a long time. His fingers hovered inches from the trunk, unsure whether it would burn or bless. The hum coursed through him like a memory he hadn't known he'd forgotten.

He knelt.

And the tree hummed lower, closer, as if acknowledging his reverence.

The Grove Awakens

By mid-morning, there were five trees.

By dusk, twelve.

By the time the moon completed its next full arc—there were over seventy.

The grove arrived like breath after mourning. A slow, sacred reclamation.

And none of the trees were alike.

One bore leaves shaped like river spirals—fluid, curling in on themselves like the motions of the Ẹ̀nítàn when she danced before the river.

Another grew long, gourd-like fruits that glowed with a dull gold in the dark. When one burst upon falling, it released a luminous mist that smelled like old kitchens and lullabies.

A third tree wept clear sap. And when touched, the sap sang—tones not heard with ears, but with skin, bone, and memory. One boy who had never spoken a word since birth began to hum after pressing the sap to his lips. Another girl, deaf from infancy, claimed she could hear the river speaking through the roots.

Iyagbẹ́kọ, the oldest of the river's memory-bearers, stood at the grove's edge and wept.

"This land was salted," she whispered. "They burned everything."

"Not everything," came the soft response from beside her.

Echo, dressed in a robe stitched from old drummer cloth, eyes half-glowing with the weight of borrowed memory, laid her hand against one of the trunks.

"Memory roots deeper than flame," she said.

And the trees seemed to nod.

What the Trees Hold

No one cut them.

No one dared.

Not because of law or decree, but because of instinct. Reverence. Fear, perhaps.

When Ayọ̀bùkúnmí—the grieving mother whose voice had cracked into silence years ago—pressed her ear to a slender tree near the grove's edge, it began to hum. A lullaby. Soft. Weathered. One her own mother had sung to her as a child.

She didn't remember the words. But the tree did.

She wept into its roots, and the roots turned golden for a moment.

Later, Ọlábánjí, a man who had lost his only daughter during the uprisings—buried quickly, without ceremony or rhythm—walked among the grove with a drum clutched to his chest.

He whispered her name: "Ọmọtáyọ̀…"

The leaves above him trembled.

A soft rustle.

And from the base of the tree nearest him, a small stone rolled forward—smooth, rounded, and etched with her name. Beneath the name, the old drumming glyph for journey complete.

He fell to his knees.

"I buried her with no rhythm," he choked out. "No farewell."

Echo knelt beside him, her hand upon his back.

"But the tree did not forget," she said.

Visitors from Afar

The stories spread faster than fire.

Whispers crossed hills and valleys.

From villages burned of myth…

From cities where control still pressed tight over tongue and skin…

From settlements where silence had grown roots of its own…

They came.

They did not arrive as tourists or witnesses.

They came as returners.

Some brought drums. Old, cracked, wrapped in leather faded with age and bloodline.

Some brought offerings—calabashes filled with story-fruits, woven cloth bearing names long erased.

Some brought nothing but tears and stories that had never found breath.

And still, the forest listened.

The trees, vibrant and various, received each visitor as if recognizing something they themselves had once carried.

Old songs returned to the wind. Forgotten languages crept back into mouths that hadn't shaped them since childhood.

Children began to run among the trees, their laughter merging with the hum of bark and leaf.

The forest did not speak in words.

It responded in rhythm.

In resonance.

In return.

The Song of the Soil

One evening, Echo summoned the elders—those who still remembered what it was like before the River's Curse, before the Silencing.

They gathered beneath the oldest tree in the grove. Its trunk bore thick scars, as if struck many times with axes that could not kill it. Yet it stood.

Echo climbed onto a large root that jutted upward like a pulpit.

"This is not an Archive," she said.

The elders murmured.

"This is not a vault or a temple. It is not to be guarded or preserved as artifact."

"It is a choir."

They stilled.

"It sings us back to ourselves."

The elders bowed their heads.

From that day, there were no walls built.

No guards stationed.

Only markers: stones etched with verses of return.

One bore a prayer:

"Here, forgetting becomes root.

And memory becomes branch."

Another:

"To remember is to live twice."

A third:

"Breathe your name into the soil. The earth is listening."

A New Kind of Remembering

The people began to write without ink.

They buried songs at the tree roots—melodies passed through generations, once muted by fear.

They braided memory into the bark with threads of hair from the dead and the living.

Names were spoken aloud—not in ceremony, but in confidence. "This is who I am. This is who I was. This is who we were."

Children were brought at birth to the grove—not for blessings, but for recording.

Iyagbẹ́kọ stood before new mothers and fathers, her eyes like riverstones glinting beneath moss.

"Let the trees witness your name," she told them. "So even if no one else remembers, the land will."

The children would grow, not marked by scar or exile, but by the grove's remembering.

Some claimed they could feel their names vibrating in the roots when they walked barefoot among the trunks.

Some said the trees leaned toward them at dusk, casting shadows shaped like ancestors.

A Warning in Bloom

But not all trees were comfort.

One night, the sky split with violet lightning. No rain followed. Only heat.

The next morning, a new tree stood at the grove's southern edge.

Its bark was black as charcoal. Its branches curled inward like claws.

And its leaves—tipped in red—shimmered with something darker than memory.

Echo arrived at first light. Alone.

She stepped to the tree and placed her palm upon its trunk.

She did not speak for several minutes.

Then, suddenly, her breath hitched.

"It remembers the ones still bound," she said. "The places where silence has not yet broken."

The tree bore one fruit. Small. Obsidian. As though it drank light instead of reflecting it.

Ola, who had first found the grove, stepped forward.

"Should we let it fall?"

"No," Echo said.

Ola reached up and plucked it. It was warm to the touch. Alive.

He cracked it open slowly.

Inside: a hollow filled with dark red ink. Blood-like.

And scrawled across its inner skin, a single line:

"She is not the only queen who waits beneath water."

Silence fell over the grove.

A silence unlike before.

This one was thick. Prophetic.

Final Lines

The Archive is no longer scroll and chamber.

It is root and breath.

The land is not merely soil.

It is memory incarnate.

Each tree, each stone, each whispering wind is a record waiting to be heard.

And where silence once ruled—

Now, even the trees speak.

They speak of grief turned into song.

Of forgetting undone.

Of names once lost, now echoed across bark and blossom.

And of what still waits in the depths of water and history.

The forest is alive.

The remembering has only just begun.