Dawn over the eastern hills was the color of rusted iron.
Baba Adégbáyí watched it from the edge of their camp, staff in hand, cloak drawn tight against the chill. The earth here was different from Ayetoro's red‑brown loam. It was a deeper red, like old blood baked into stone. Every breath he drew tasted faintly of metal.
Behind him, the camp stirred.
Koleoso warriors rolled up their mats, checking spear points. The two Ifatedo men—Kola and Sunkanmi, both competent but young—packed bundles of herbs and chalk. Ogunremi stood a little apart, bare‑chested despite the morning cold, red and white beads gleaming against his dark skin as he stretched like a man preparing for battle.
Today, they would reach Òkìtì.
The abandoned city loomed ahead, half‑hidden by low, scrub‑covered ridges. Even from here, Baba could feel its presence—a hollow in the world, like a tooth pulled long ago but never fully healed.
"Do you want to pour libation?" Kola asked quietly, coming to stand beside him. "For…for the child."
Baba's jaw tightened.
He had not spoken Kike's name aloud since the staff cracked.
"There is no river here to carry it," he said.
"Earth listens too," Kola murmured.
Baba considered.
Then he nodded.
"Bring water," he said.
Kola fetched a small gourd from their supplies. Baba knelt, scooped up a handful of the red dust, and let the water trickle over it. The mixture turned to thin mud, dark and sticky.
"For the child who walked too briefly in our dust," he said, voice low. "May this red earth know her steps as kindly as the one at home. May what took her choke on the memory of her laughter."
He poured the rest of the water onto the ground.
The earth drank it without comment.
Ogunremi approached as Baba rose.
"We move within the hour," the war‑chief said. "The scouts say the outer walls of Òkìtì are just beyond that ridge. The place smells wrong."
"Wrong how?" Baba asked.
"Like rain that never falls," Ogunremi said. "Thunder without clouds. You will feel it soon enough."
He was right.
As they climbed the last rise, the wind changed.
It stilled.
The usual morning sounds—the distant calls of birds, the rustle of dry grass—fell away as if someone had clapped a heavy cloth over the land. The only sound was their own breathing and the crunch of boots on stony soil.
They reached the crest and stopped, almost as one.
Òkìtì lay before them.
The city sprawled across a shallow valley, its once‑tall walls broken and sagging. Towers sat like broken teeth against the sky. Roofs had long since fallen in; only skeletal frameworks of beams remained in many places, reaching up like fingers.
Red stone everywhere.
Blocks quarried from the iron‑rich hills, stained deeper by centuries of weather and, if the stories were true, more than a little blood.
A dry riverbed carved a pale line along one edge, its stones smooth and bone‑white—a scar where water had once run strong. At the valley's center, a low rise held what had been the palace complex: a cluster of larger buildings around a central courtyard, their walls still mostly standing, their windows like blind eyes.
Baba's stomach clenched.
He had seen ruins before.
None had felt so…aware.
"This place is not truly empty," he murmured.
One of the younger Koleoso men spat over the edge of the ridge. "They say even lizards avoid those stones," he muttered. "Look—no birds, no grass, nothing."
It was true.
The valley floor was bare save for the crumbling buildings. No trees, no shrubs, not even the scraggly thornbushes that clung to most neglected soil. Only red stone and dust.
Ogunremi rolled his shoulders, as if loosening tension.
"Remember," he said to his men, "we came because our fathers were too lazy to finish old work. Keep your eyes open and your tongues tight. Anything that whispers sweetly is lying."
He glanced at Baba. "That includes your own thoughts."
Baba snorted softly. "I will try not to trust myself."
They descended.
With each step, the air grew heavier.
By the time they passed through the half‑collapsed gate—its great wooden doors long gone, stone arch cracked—the weight felt almost physical, as if the sky pressed an unseen palm against their heads.
Kola stumbled.
"What is it?" Sunkanmi asked.
"Ears ringing," Kola muttered, rubbing the side of his head. "Like drums very far away."
Baba heard it too, now that he focused—a low, continuous hum at the edge of hearing, neither voice nor drum, but a more ancient rhythm. The pulse of something asleep, dreaming of its own name.
He tightened his grip on his staff.
"Stay close," he told the group. "No one wanders. Not even to piss."
They moved through the empty streets.
Houses leaned inward, their doorways yawning. Here and there, remnants of old life clung on: a broken clay pot, a stone mortar, a fading painting of some long‑forgotten king on a fragment of wall.
At one crossroads, they found a circle of stones arranged carefully around a shallow pit.
Bones lay scattered within—animal, by the look of them. Newer than the rest of the city, though still old.
"Looks like others have tried to work here before," Sunkanmi said, poking one of the stones with his toe.
"Fools or desperate men," Baba replied. "Perhaps both. Do not touch any circles you did not draw."
They pressed on.
"Ogunremi," Baba said after a time, "where does Sango's pull feel strongest to you?"
The war‑chief closed his eyes briefly, tasting the air.
He pointed toward the central rise. "There. The palace. Old kings never hid their altars far from their beds."
"Then that is where we go," Baba said.
They climbed the low hill, boots scuffing red dust.
Up close, the palace buildings were more intact than they had seemed from a distance. Carvings still marked their walls: processions of warriors, stylized storms, rows of cowries and birds. The artistry was finer than anything in Ayetoro's more practical structures.
"Once, this place was rich," Ogunremi murmured. "You can see it in the stone."
"And in the pride that carved it," Baba said. "Pride and desperation built that shrine we seek."
They passed through a grand gatehouse whose roof had caved in, ducked under fallen beams, stepped carefully around a well whose sides had crumbled, exposing dangerously loose stones.
Finally, they entered the central courtyard.
Here, the weight in the air thickened until breathing felt like swallowing thick porridge.
At the courtyard's center yawned a circular pit, its edge lined with red stone slabs carved in intricate patterns. The pit descended in wide, shallow steps, like an inverted stepped pyramid, down into shadow.
Around the edge of the pit stood four squat pillars, each carved with a different symbol. Three were intact. The fourth had toppled at some point, lying broken nearby.
Baba approached the nearest standing pillar.
On its face a letter was carved deeply into the stone.
Not in any common script.
But his bones recognized the shape.
E.
He swallowed, moved to the next.
J.
Then the third.
E again.
He did not need to see the fourth to know what it had once carried.
H.
"The name that ate names," he whispered.
Ogunremi's face had gone hard.
"This is it," he said. "The first table where your king sat to bargain."
"It was not my king," Baba said automatically, then caught himself. The old story named no specific realm; kings borrowed and stole customs from one another more freely than they admitted. For all he knew, the man had been an ancestor of Ayetoro's throne.
"Is the missing pillar the same shape?" Kola asked.
It lay on its side a short distance away, cracked cleanly across the middle. The carved front had shattered into several pieces.
One of those pieces had clearly been torn away.
Not by time.
The break edges were too sharp, too precise—as if pried out by a careful hand and carried off.
"Someone else has been here," Baba said.
Ogunremi frowned. "Recently?"
"Not days," Baba said, running his fingers along the cleaner of the break edges. "Years, perhaps. But not centuries."
He stood and peered down into the stepped pit.
Darkness pooled at the bottom, but not the natural kind. It had a thickness to it, a sense of down that felt deeper than the few visible steps.
"If this is a mouth," Sunkanmi muttered, "I do not wish to see what it eats."
"We are here to see exactly that," Ogunremi said grimly.
He nodded to his men.
"Ropes," he ordered. "We go down in pairs, slow and careful. No one touches the carvings unless Baba Ifa tells you to. And if you feel something brushing your mind, you shout before it digs its teeth in."
They anchored ropes around the standing pillars and began to descend.
Baba went first with Ogunremi.
The steps under their feet were worn in the center, smoothed by many processions long ago. Symbols lined the risers: eyes, open hands, stylized flames, coiling shapes that made Baba's skin prickle.
Halfway down, the hum in the air grew louder.
It vibrated in his teeth.
He focused on his breath, the feel of the rope in his hand, the cool weight of the bead he had given Ifabola's twin of, now back in his pouch.
This body is my stake, he reminded himself. My feet are on stone. Not river. Not dream.
Ogunremi's voice floated up from beside him.
"You feel that?" the war‑chief grunted. "Like standing under a waterfall you can't see."
"Keep your thoughts your own," Baba replied. "It will try to pull at whatever cracks it finds."
"How comforting," Ogunremi muttered.
They reached the bottom.
It was a flat circular platform, perhaps six paces across, carved from one massive slab of red stone. In its center rose a waist‑high block—an altar—darkened with old, old stains.
Around the platform's edge, a narrow trough had been cut into the stone, running a full circle, connecting to tiny channels that led toward the four pillars above.
"Blood lines," Baba said softly. "Offerings poured here would flow up, feeding each letter."
Ogunremi made a disgusted sound.
"At least they were honest about what fed this thing," he said.
He stepped forward toward the altar.
"Careful," Baba warned.
"I am careful," Ogunremi snapped. "I do not intend to kiss anything in this hole."
Still, he reached out.
His hand hovered a finger's width above the stone.
Heat radiated from it—not physical heat, but a prickling warmth that crawled up his arm, into his chest, like the first hint of fever.
He jerked his hand back.
"Something is already listening," he said. "Like when Sango answers, but sideways."
Baba approached more slowly.
He did not touch the stone.
Instead he knelt, unrolled his divination mat beside the altar, and placed the bag of cowries on it.
"You really intend to ask it questions?" Ogunremi growled.
"I intend to ask those who battled it last," Baba said. "If any of their echoes still cling here."
He took a breath.
"Guard me," he said simply.
Ogunremi set himself with his back toward Baba, eyes scanning the circle's edges, one palm resting lightly on his sword.
Above, the others reached the bottom in twos, spreading out along the wall, torches held high.
The light pushed the darkness back only a little.
Baba poured the cowries into his hands.
They tingled.
"You know where you are," he murmured. "You remember what was spoken here. Show me not the hunger's joy, but the priest's regret."
He cast the shells.
They scattered across the mat, mouths up and down in a chaotic pattern.
Then, slowly, some began to move.
Not with the jerky, rebellious motion he had seen at the king's death reading, but with a different intent—as if repositioning themselves into an old, familiar shape.
When they stilled, they formed four clusters around a central gap, like petals of a flower.
The space between them remained empty.
Baba felt sweat bead at the back of his neck.
"Gaps," he whispered. "Missing steps. Broken bargains."
His vision swam.
The air above the altar thickened.
From the stone's stained surface rose images—not clear, but hints: the curve of a man's back bowed in supplication, the outline of a faceless carving, a thin trickle of blood crawling along a channel like a curious snake.
A voice layered itself over the hum.
Not the deep, hungry growl Baba had heard in Ayetoro.
This tone was higher, brittle with age and stale fear.
"—only until the famine passes," it panted. "Only until the war ends. Then I will pay. Then I will close the door."
Kings, another, darker voice purred. You always say that.
The images sharpened.
Baba saw the old king clearly now: thin, eyes hollow from sleeplessness, hands shaking as he held them over the altar. Around his wrists, gold bracelets clanked like chains.
"You will not touch my children," the king whispered. "Swear it."
I do not swear, the darkness replied. I eat. Bring them, if you want to be sure they are safe. Here, in my shadow. With you.
The king recoiled.
"No," he breathed.
"Then take me," another voice said.
A small figure stepped into view.
A boy.
No older than Ifabola.
His limbs were thin, but his gaze burned with a desperate sort of pride.
"I will live," the boy said. "I will protect them. I will not die like the others."
The king grabbed him. "No—"
The darkness coiled closer, amusement crackling.
Brave little door, it murmured. You will do nicely.
The boy's shadow stretched.
It flowed along the floor, up the altar, into the channels, tasting.
The image began to blur.
Baba's stomach turned.
He knew this story.
He had just read it in palm‑leaf.
But here, under the red stone, the old tale had weight and smell.
He forced his attention away from the child and back to the spaces between the cowrie clusters.
"What did they leave undone?" he whispered. "Where are the cracks we can still use?"
The shells shimmered.
For a heartbeat, four of them flared bright, then dimmed, leaving faint scorch marks on the mat.
They formed a small circle, broken in one place.
A missing piece.
"One anchor gone," he murmured. "Three remain."
Yes, a new voice said.
Not the old king.
Not the hunger.
Something else.
Baba's heart stuttered.
"Who speaks?" he asked.
One of those who tried to shut the door after it opened, the voice answered, dry as old leaves. We failed. But we scratched some wisdom into the stone as we died. You have read some of it. The rest lies where you stand.
"Tell me," Baba whispered. "How do we bind it again?"
Above the altar, blood‑colored images swirled, coalescing into symbols.
Not the hateful letters.
Different lines.
Curves that bent back on themselves.
Crossroads.
Locks.
He recognized some from obscure corners of the Ifa corpus—old, rarely used signs whose meanings had dimmed with time.
One, though, shone clearer than the rest: a spiral pierced at three points.
"Counter‑names," he breathed. "Not to erase, but to tangle."
You cannot kill a hunger, the echoing priest said. You can only starve and bind. Each letter of its name was given a stone, a channel, a path. If those stones are scattered, reversed, written over—its claws dull. Its reach shrinks.
"The pillars," Baba said.
Three intact.
One broken.
One missing piece already stirring trouble nearer home.
He saw now: the circle of four was not just altar decoration.
It was an anchor.
A lock.
And someone in the years since the shrine's fall had come and taken one key.
Ajani's cracked stone had not been the river's casual gift.
It had been spat out from this circle's broken tooth, carried by currents until it found a man bitter enough to listen.
As that realization settled, the hum in the air deepened.
The hunger woke more fully.
Priest, it said, voice rolling through the pit like distant thunder. You return to nibble at old bones. I remember your breath from before. You ran then.
Baba's skin crawled.
Ogunremi stiffened, hand flying to his sword.
"Is it speaking?" the war‑chief demanded.
"Yes," Baba said. "To me. To us."
You bring thunder, the presence crooned, tasting Ogunremi. And red dust. And grief. So much grief. Your house is full of small empty beds now, priest. More than before.
Rage flared, sharp and blinding.
"You did that," Baba snapped. "You and the fools who fed you. I am here to tie your jaws."
The darkness laughed.
With what? Old shells and cracked chalk? You stand in my first eating‑place. I grew fat here before your grandmothers ever bled. You cannot unchew the world.
A gust of wind, impossibly cold for such a closed space, swept through the pit.
The torches flickered.
Kola stumbled, grabbing for the wall. "Baba…"
"Hold!" Ogunremi barked. "Do not drop the light."
Baba forced himself to breathe.
His eyes fixed on the faint scorch‑circle between the cowries.
"One anchor is missing," he said aloud, more for himself than for the presence. "You are not whole. Not yet."
The laughter snapped off, like a drumhead slashed.
The air stilled.
You think yourself clever, the hunger hissed after a moment. Breaking your own kneecap so I cannot walk quickly through you again.
"Not clever," Baba said quietly. "Desperate. Like the king before me. But perhaps not as blind."
He scooped up the four scorched cowries, fingers moving fast.
With a sharp motion, he cut his own palm on the edge of one shell.
Blood welled, dark and thick.
Before it could drip onto the altar, he pressed his bleeding hand against the stone's side, not the stained top.
He traced a spiral with it, the old counter‑sigil from the visions.
"By red earth that remembers," he murmured, voice low and fierce, "by shells that saw and did not die, by the price already paid in my house—I mark this anchor as contested. You may pull, but so will we."
Heat surged under his palm.
The stone shuddered.
Cracks spiderwebbed across its surface, faint but real.
Above them, one of the standing pillars groaned.
A thin line split its carved face, slicing through the old letter.
The hunger recoiled.
Its voice came now not as a rolling boom but as a concentrated spear.
You dare, it hissed.
The air itself seemed to vibrate in fury.
Baba's hand burned.
"Now, Ogunremi!" he gasped. "Call your lightning!"
The war‑chief did not hesitate.
He dropped his torch, raised both arms, and shouted Sango's praise‑names with the full power of his lungs.
"Owner of thunderstones! Splitter of stubborn trees! Drinker of lies!"
His beads rattled; his voice echoed.
Far above them, beyond the cave‑like pit, the sky answered.
With no clouds to herald it, a bolt of lightning slammed down the open center of the circular pit, striking the altar block.
The world went white.
The boom that followed felt like the earth's own bones cracking.
For several heartbeats, Baba knew nothing but light and noise.
When his vision cleared, he found himself on his back against the wall, ears ringing, staff a short distance away.
The air stank of ozone and something fouler—burned meat, old and new.
In the center of the platform, the altar lay split in two, a jagged crack running from top to bottom.
The blood channels carved into its surface had fused into blackened glass, melted by the lightning's heat.
One of the pillars above had toppled—a different one than the already broken H—crashing inward, sending up a spray of dust and red chips.
"Everyone alive?" Ogunremi's voice shouted through the ringing.
Groans answered.
Kola coughed, sitting up, hair singed at the edges.
Sunkanmi rolled onto his side, clutching his arms; small burns mottled his skin.
Two of the Koleoso warriors lay stunned but breathing.
One did not move.
Blood trickled from his nose and ears, soaking into the red stone.
Baba's chest tightened.
Another death.
Another name to carry.
But when he reached out with his spirit, he did not feel the same greedy tug that had yanked Kike toward the halfway river.
This death belonged to thunder, not hunger.
Sango took his own.
The air hummed one last time.
Then the deep, ever‑present vibration that had filled the pit since they entered…eased.
Not gone.
But thinner.
Weaker.
Like a drum still stretched but no longer hammered with both fists.
Baba dragged himself upright.
His right palm throbbed where he had cut it. The spiral of blood he had traced on the side of the altar glowed faintly through the soot, steady as a heartbeat.
"We cracked it," he whispered.
Ogunremi grinned, more feral than joyful.
"Good," he said. "Let it limp."
"Not enough," Baba said. "The missing stone…wherever it lies now…it feeds him more cleanly than this broken mouth. We must find it."
He stooped, heart pounding, and searched the debris at the altar's base.
Among the scattered chips of red stone, his fingers closed on something heavier, smoother.
He lifted it.
A curved piece of rock, about the size of his palm.
Its outer edge was rough, broken.
Its inner surface was carved with part of a letter—the top half of an H, he guessed—and over it, faint lines of the same counter‑spiral he had drawn.
This had been part of the original binding, chiseled and hidden by that ancient desperate priest.
Now it had broken loose.
Ogunremi peered at it.
"What is it?" he asked.
"A tooth," Baba said grimly. "One of four. The one near Ayetoro is in a stranger's mouth. This one…" He closed his bloody fingers around the fragment. "This one is ours now."
He tucked it into a leather pouch and tied it securely to his belt.
The hunger, still retreating from the lightning's assault, felt the movement.
Thief, it hissed faintly in the back of Baba's mind.
He ignored it.
"For now," he muttered, "call me that. Later you may call me worse."
They climbed out of the pit slowly, carrying their dead comrade between them.
The sky above Òkìtì had changed.
Clouds had gathered while they were below—a bruised ring circling the valley, though no rain fell.
As they stepped back into the central courtyard, a strange stillness met them.
Then, faintly, from somewhere beyond the broken walls, came a new sound.
Drums.
Not their own.
Ogunremi's head snapped up.
"Do you hear that?" he said.
Baba listened.
The rhythm was wrong for Sango's praise‑songs, wrong for funeral lamentations, wrong for market dancing. It had a heavy, hollow quality…like fists beating on the underside of a dry gourd.
It seemed to come from very far…and yet echo inside his own skull.
Ajani's anger, poured rhythmically into a cracked stone.
The hunger stretching between two awakened anchors.
Baba's stomach clenched.
"Someone is knocking from the other side," he said.
Ogunremi spat.
"Then let them find only broken teeth," the war‑chief growled.
They left Òkìtì before the sun reached its highest point, carrying their dead and their stolen fragment.
Behind them, in the depths of the split altar, something seethed.
Wounded.
Enraged.
But also…intrigued.
Two anchors now stirred—one cracked and contested under red stone, one hot and eager in a hut full of bitter men.
The third, still buried near the palace of Ayetoro, slept lightly.
The fourth, now wrapped in river sigils on a child's palm, pulsed with a rhythm that did not fully belong to it.
The pattern of the war was changing.
And none of the humans walking under its shadow yet saw how deep the lines would cut.