CHAPTER ONE: The Whispering Dust
"Bí a bá fi ẽwọ́ kan itan, itan a fi ẽwọ́ kan ni pada."
When you touch history, history touches you back.
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Zainab had always felt it—something ancient pressing against the edges of her memory, like a name she'd once known but had long forgotten.
The night was loud with silence.
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Two weeks ago, Zainab met Zola.
She had transferred into the university mid-semester, a quiet Hausa girl with thoughtful eyes and braids like coiled rope. Zola never wore perfume, yet the air always smelled of rain when she was around. Her Yoruba was fluent—fluent in that way elders spoke, where every sentence could mean three different things if said under the wrong moon.
They met at the library—no coincidence, Zainab would later admit.
Zola had been reading something bound in cloth. No title. Just a faded symbol: a spiral drawn into a circle.
Zainab asked what it was.
> "History," Zola said. "But not the kind anyone survived by writing."
In the days that followed, they became inseparable. Zola shared stories—strange ones. Stories about names and dreams, about voices that came before voices. She spoke of Orí—the inner head, the soul's compass, the path chosen before birth. Zainab didn't fully understand.
But she listened.
They sat under trees that had outlived centuries, beside rocks that bled rust like memory. Zola had a gift for silence. She never hurried her words, and she never explained a second time.
One evening, she brought Zainab to the old chapel behind the hostel.
"Places remember," she said. "Some things wait for someone who still believes in memory."
They sat under the broken rafters, reading lines Zainab couldn't pronounce but somehow understood. Zola whispered of the Ajogun—the invisible enemies of destiny—and how only those aligned with their Orí could withstand them.
Zainab always felt something shift in her when Zola spoke—like forgotten blood stirring.
But then, three nights ago… Zola went out.
She said she needed to walk.
That the wind had changed.
She never returned.
Campus security said she probably left for home early. Nobody suspected anything. Not officially. But Zainab knew.
Something had been stirred.
A week later, Zainab found the paper.
Folded carefully into the spine of a book Zola had once handed her.
It was blank. Until it wasn't.
Words began to bleed onto the page—not written, but revealed:
> "Àwọn Bàbá ọ̀ jí lórúkò rẹ."
The Ancestors rise at the sound of your name.
Then another line:
> "Ọ̀ràn-ọ̀-yàn wá, Orí ọ̀ pẹ̀ ọ̀ sẹ́yìn."
Trouble has chosen. Your soul calls you backward.
Zainab's hands trembled.
She didn't speak Yoruba fluently. But the words rooted inside her like they'd waited a lifetime.
She looked up—and the mirror above her dresser shifted.
Not physically.
Just… subtly.
The dust on it rearranged into a spiral drawn into a circle.
Her phone buzzed.
No number. Just a message.
> "Ṣé o mọ orúkò rẹ gangan?"
Do you know your true name?
Zainab stared.
She had always known Zainab as the name her parents gave her.
But not the one the earth recognized.
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Chapter One Ends
If history touches you back, what does it want in return?