Night didn't end in Ọhịa Udo—it deepened.
The sky remained bruised, thick with clouds that pulsed like something alive. Birds refused to fly. Goats wailed like children. And in the compound of the oldest living woman, Nneka the Bonekeeper, the wind began whispering names.
She hadn't spoken in twenty years. Not since the war that silenced her children and took her tongue with fire. But now, she sat straight in her raffia mat as if her spine remembered the weight of prophecy. Her eyes glowed faintly, the color of smoldering coal.
"Nwanyi," she rasped to no one. "Ọgbanje is among us."
***
In the sacred grove, the twelve daughters kneeled as the earth pulsed beneath them. Their eyes were still marked with ash and chalk. Adamma's arms burned with light now—not fire, not magic, but something older, ancestral, inherited.
"She hears them," one girl whispered.
Adamma raised her head slowly. Her face was wet, but she hadn't cried. Not tears. Blood.
"They say we must choose," she whispered. "Either silence… or storm."
Mma Oluchi nodded solemnly. "Then let the choosing begin."
One by one, each daughter was handed a relic from the earth—a tooth, a shard of bone, a feather from a long-dead vulture, a stone marked with iron. Each one tied to a secret, a truth, or a curse.
Only Adamma was given nothing.
She was the one who would remember.
***
Far from the grove, in the governor's office in Enugu, the floor cracked open beneath the deputy's desk. A wave of locusts burst from the cement, screaming. The wall cracked, and an ancient map—long dismissed as myth—bloomed like fungus under the plaster. The old borders. The real names. The hidden kingdoms.
And every time someone tried to erase it, it returned—darker, sharper.
The historian who had vanished in Chapter Seven was not lost.
He was underground—writing.
With ink made from his own blood.
Etching names into bones.
***
By dawn, three of the strangers who had come to the village were dead.
One had drowned in dry sand.
One had clawed his own eyes out, whispering, "I saw her… She remembers me…"
And one simply vanished, leaving behind a journal that read only:
*"The daughters are not rising. They were never buried."*
In the grove, the girls stood beneath a tree no one had planted.
Its branches bore skulls instead of fruit.
Adamma looked up.
And the wind carried the voices of the ancestors.
*"The empire fed on us. Now we are the teeth."*
—