CHAPTER SIX: The Weight of Knowing
"Ọgbọ́n ẹni kìí tó ìmọ̀ àwọn àtàtà."
One's wisdom is never enough to comprehend the ancient ones.
Zainab wasn't sleeping anymore.
She closed her eyes but her mind wandered corridors that felt older than time. Her waking hours felt stitched together by dreams she hadn't dreamt yet. And her body—her body no longer felt like home.
She avoided mirrors now.
Each time she looked, she saw things out of place. Dust swirling without wind. Shapes forming and fading behind her. Shadows that didn't match her silhouette. Once, she swore her reflection blinked a second later than she did.
Zainab was tired.
She dragged herself through campus like someone walking underwater. The world was loud and too bright, but also strangely hollow. People spoke to her, but their voices came through like echoes across a valley. Professors called her name. She responded, but it never felt like hers. Not really.
The name that sat in her soul now was Ayéròyá (one whose life brings trembling awe). It wasn't a name—it was a burden.
She began asking more questions.
At the faculty museum, she asked the curator about the spiral-in-circle symbol.
> "We don't display that one," the woman said. "It's old. Very old. Some say it predates even the known òrìṣà. Found on carved stones in Ìjẹ̀bú. No one agrees on its meaning."
"Why not?"
> "Because it changes depending on who sees it."
Zainab felt something cold crawl across her skin.
Later, in the library archives, she found an old document about Orí that read:
> "To betray one's Orí is to drink water while dying of thirst. It is to forget the shape of one's own shadow."
She copied it into her notebook. But her handwriting looked like someone else's.
That night, the dreams returned.
She stood in the midst of a gathering. Women with painted faces. Men with eyes like night. A child holding fire without being burned. They spoke—but not in words. Yet she understood.
> "You were named before you were born."
> "The war you feel is not madness. It is memory."
Zainab awoke gasping. Her heart was thudding, but it wasn't fear. It was recognition.
Still, she doubted.
She stared at her ceiling and whispered to no one:
> "Is any of this real?"
> "Am I just... broken?"
> "Why me?"
The silence answered.
A breeze passed across her skin without the window moving.
On her wall, dust shifted once more.
This time it formed a new symbol—an eye inside the spiral.
She didn't scream.
She just sat.
And wept.
Because the more questions she asked, the more silence answered.
And in that silence, something ancient waited—not with malice, but with memory.
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If your soul remembers what your mind forgets, who do you trust when the remembering begins?