Kwaku didn’t stop running until the drums faded.
The forest swallowed sound first.
Then light.
Then certainty.
Roots twisted across the ground like coiled snakes. The air grew damp, thick with rot and green life. His lungs burned. His palm burned worse.
He collapsed against the trunk of an old tree and pressed his forehead to the bark.
he whispered.
The word sounded wrong in the forest.
His heart still pounded as if something were chasing him.
But nothing crashed through the undergrowth. No soldiers. No shouting. Just insects. Wind. The distant echo of celebration from a world that had already erased what it didn’t like.
His hand throbbed. He opened his palm.
The claw-shaped birthmark glowed faintly beneath the skin, as if embers lived inside it.
“You felt it too.”
Kwaku spun around...
A man sat on a fallen log a few paces away.
Barefoot. Dreadlocks tied back with a strip of faded cloth. Clothes patched so many times they no longer had an original color.
He looked as though he had always been there.
Oba Nante.
The village madman.
Kwaku staggered to his feet. “You—”
“Yes,” the man said calmly. “I saw.”
The forest felt tighter suddenly.
“You saw what he did?” Kwaku’s voice cracked. “The woman. The famine. They all—”
“—forgot,” Oba finished.
Silence stretched between them.
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A cicada shrilled somewhere overhead.
Kwaku searched the man’s face for mockery.
There was none.
“You’re not laughing,” Kwaku said.
“Should I?”
“They’re all pretending nothing happened.”
“They are not pretending.”
Oba’s eyes were sharp. Too sharp.
The words landed heavier than any accusation.
Kwaku shook his head. “That’s not possible.”
Oba tilted his head slightly, studying him.
“Memory is heavy,” he said softly. “Most people are grateful when someone offers to carry it.”
“That wasn’t carrying,” Kwaku snapped. “That was stealing.”
A flicker of something — approval, perhaps — passed through the older man’s gaze.
“And yet,” Oba said, “you still remember.”
The burning in Kwaku’s palm pulsed in answer.
Oba’s eyes dropped to his hand.
“Ah,” he murmured.
Kwaku instinctively clenched his fist.
“What is it?” he demanded. “What did he do to them?”
Oba rose slowly from the log. He was taller than Kwaku remembered.
“He corrected them,” he said. “The Palace does not like inconvenient history.”
“You talk like this is normal.”
“It is normal.”
“That’s insane.”
Oba smiled faintly. “Yes.”
Wind stirred the canopy. Leaves whispered overhead.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Oba’s expression shifted.
Subtle.
Alert.
He looked past Kwaku. Upward.
Kwaku followed his gaze.
He didn’t see anything at first.
Just branches.
Sky.
Then—
Movement.
A large black kite circled above the treeline.
Not hunting.
Watching.
Oba’s jaw tightened.
“You ran too late,” he muttered.
“What?”
“They noticed you.”
A cold weight settled in Kwaku’s stomach.
“Who?”
Oba ignored the question.
“If the Scribe had touched you with that seal,” he said quietly, “he would not have erased you.”
Kwaku swallowed. “Then what?”
Oba’s eyes met his.
“He would have opened you.”
The forest seemed to inhale.
Kwaku’s pulse roared in his ears.
“I don’t understand.”
“No,” Oba agreed. “You don’t.”
The kite wheeled once more overhead.
Closer.
Oba stepped back.
“You must go deeper.”
“Deeper where?”
“Into the forest.”
“I don’t even know what’s happening!”
“You are still here,” Oba said. “That is what is happening.”
The statement made no sense.
Which meant it probably mattered.
“Why me?” Kwaku demanded.
Oba studied him for a long moment.
Then he said quietly:
“Because some doors do not close once they have been opened.”
Kwaku’s palm flared white-hot.
He gasped.
When he looked up again—
Oba was walking away.
“Wait!” Kwaku shouted. “You can’t just—”
The man did not turn around.
“Find the place where the roots swallow the light,” Oba called back. “And do not trust the sky.”
“The sky?”
But Oba had already vanished between the trees.
Gone as if the forest had folded around him.
Kwaku stood alone.
The kite shrieked overhead.
Not a natural sound.
Sharp.
Piercing.
A signal.
Branches trembled somewhere in the distance.
Too heavy for wind.
Too deliberate for coincidence.
Kwaku’s breath quickened.
The drums from the village were completely gone now.
There was no going back.
He turned toward the darker part of the forest.
Toward where the roots thickened and the canopy blocked the sun.
“Find the place where the roots swallow the light.”
Another branch cracked behind him.
Closer.
Kwaku ran.
The forest closed around him.
And this time—
something ran back.
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