The whispers by the river

They met where the map ends.

No signs. No names. Just rusted walls, flickering bulbs, and the hum of fans that never cooled anything.

The door required no password—only silence. Not the kind made of absence, but the kind paid for.

The room stank of iron and ritual.

There were six of them.

All in different suits. All in different roles. But bound by one creed:

Some truths must stay buried.

And tonight, something had changed.

The Report

The youngest of them barely forty, skin smooth but eyes cold slid a folder across the table.

Obade. River flare. Mythic signs. A reactivated shrine. Eyewitness accounts.

At the end of the file: Durojaiye Fágbègbè.

"He's gone rogue," the man said. "Returned to the village. Broke containment protocols."

"Protocols?" sneered the woman at the far end. "There were no protocols. We signed off on silence."

Another added, "And now the girl's song is surfacing. We told you to ensure she remained forgotten."

The youngest swallowed. "We did. But… something is rising. There are whispers in Abuja. Even in Lagos. Priests are dreaming in verse. Children drawing maps of rivers they've never seen."

He hesitated.

"The Queen's name has re-entered the oral stream."

That made them pause.

Because oral stream was code.

It meant: It's in the blood now. In stories. In memory.

Too late to delete.

Orders

The chairman, silent until now, raised his hand.

His voice, dry as chalk: "Then we do what must be done."

"Which is?"

He didn't blink.

"Discredit. Disrupt. Destroy."

The room darkened as he spoke:

"The detective must be branded mentally unstable. Reopen his file he has trauma in his past."

"Burn the shrine. Quietly. Let them call it lightning."

"Flood the riverbank. Blame climate change."

"As for the Queen replace her with a tourist myth. Something softer. Marketable. Invent a 'mermaid blessing.' Rebrand her."

"But the villagers won't believe it," someone whispered.

The chairman smiled.

"They won't need to. We'll drown the truth in noise."

Elsewhere: Whispers in the City

In a radio booth in Ibadan, a late-night host played an anonymous tape.

It arrived in the mail. No return address.

Only one line scrawled in red ink:

"Let her sing."

The recording was scratchy, low-fidelity. But haunting.

A young woman's voice fragmented but rising singing in an unknown dialect.

It shouldn't have worked.

But by morning, it had gone viral.

Listeners said it made their babies stop crying.

Their ancestors walk their dreams.

Their hearts tremble with recognition.

Back in Obade

The shrine stood taller than before.

Children had started drawing pictures in the dirt: women with crowns of coral, rivers spiraling into drums, a man with a recorder for a mouth.

Durojaiye stood at the water's edge, listening.

He felt it before he heard it.

The pressure.

The counterforce.

Memory did not rise alone.

Erasure was coming.

He turned to Iyagbẹ́kọ. "They'll try to kill the story again."

She nodded. "Then you must carry it farther."

He looked across the horizon. "Where?"

"Where their lies are loudest."