Whispers by the river

They began before dawn.

No command was given.

No elder convened a circle.

The children simply woke, looked at one another, and began to gather wood.

Not just any wood.

Fallen wood.

Branches dropped by lightning. Bark shed by the Iroko. Slats from forgotten doors.

"Only what's been broken can hold the new rhythm," Rerẹ́ said.

By the time the sun crested the eastern ridge, twelve girls and five boys stood beneath the House of Listening, carving.

The Birth of New Drums

They worked in silence.

Not the fearful kind, but the reverent kind.

The kind that comes before thunder.

Their tools were stone, shell, and bone.

And their eyes? Wide with remembrance.

Rerẹ́ moved from one drum to the next, not as overseer, but as keeper.

She did not teach them how.

She listened as they taught themselves.

Each child carved not just a drum—but a story.

One shaped their father's name into the rim.

Another etched the outline of a drowned mother's braid.

A third carved only tears—fifty-seven of them—one for each year the river had been ignored.

And when they were done, they did not test them.

They waited.

For the Queen.

The Drumming Begins

She came not in water.

But in wind.

The Iroko tree bent. The river stilled.

And in the hush that followed, a single note rose from the drum Rerẹ́ had made.

A low, full sound.

It didn't echo.

It rooted.

Others followed—drums of grief, joy, resistance.

The courtyard pulsed with rhythm.

Not borrowed rhythm.

Not preserved rhythm.

New rhythm.

The Elders Arrive

Iyagbẹ́kọ arrived first.

She said nothing.

Only removed her shoes and sat cross-legged in the dust.

Ola followed, clutching the coal he'd recovered from the Ash-Mound.

Èkóyé, still recovering from a recent vision, leaned on his staff but did not stop watching.

They had come not to direct.

But to witness.

The Chorus Forms

Rerẹ́ stood at the center of the circle.

She did not drum.

She danced.

Each movement a verse.

Each step a question and a refusal.

She spun with her arms outstretched—becoming spiral, wind, and wave.

And the children followed.

Together, they formed a rhythm that did not ask the past for permission.

Only acknowledgment.

A New Ritual Is Born

When the sun reached its peak, the drumming slowed.

Rerẹ́ stepped forward and spoke aloud for the first time since the drums began:

"We do not drum for the river to bless us.

We drum because we are the river now."

A younger girl raised her voice: "And who blesses the river?"

Rerẹ́ looked toward the waters, eyes blazing with rhythm.

"The river blesses herself."

The Symbol Carved

That night, the children carved a new mark into the platform stone.

Not a spiral.

Not a flame.

Not the Queen's glyph.

But a palm.

Open.

Facing upward.

Etched with five concentric circles.

The mark of welcome and witness.

The mark of those who do not forget—but do not remain bound.

Iyagbẹ́kọ's Whisper

As the stars returned, she turned to Ola.

"The children do not carry our burden.

They carry our future."

Ola nodded.

"And they are singing it louder than we ever dared."

Final Lines

In villages far beyond Obade, drums began to sound.

In places where no one remembered the old songs, children woke with rhythm in their hands.

The daughters were drumming.

And the world was beginning to listen.