stone chamber. The ceiling glittered with paintings of pelicans, halos radiating from their lifted wings. The floor was painted with the same symbol from the Oluwan Imperial Library, and from Aiyetoro’s drum: two overlapping suns, bordered by a circle of linking hands.
My breath floundered. It was like the air had disappeared, and I inhaled nothing now but pure blue energy, thrumming through my temples. At the other end of the chamber, thousands of bright glyphs covered the wall.
“The heart of Sagimsan,” Woo In explained. “Every blue vein you’ve seen in the mountain finds its source in this room. I can’t read that wall. But you can.”
“How?” I crept toward the wall, squinting at script so complex, it made my eyes cross. “I don’t understand.” But the words began to murmur, whispers that wrapped around me in a seductive lullaby. My hand rose, as though possessed, and I pressed my fingers to the wall.
The script jumbled in dizzying patterns—and then it shot from the wall in a beam. I gasped as the glyphs covered my body, clinging to my skin like running water. I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, the symbols had vanished … and instead, four words glowed on the wall.
WELCOME HEIR OF WURAOLA
“Focus,” I heard Woo In yell, as though from a great distance. “Listen.”
His voice grew mute as another filled my ears: a deep, lovely roar, like the voice of a fathomless ocean. It was not old or young, neither male nor female. But I knew, without seeing its face, that this power could unmake me with a single word.
Tarisai.
I fell trembling to the ground.
Do not fear me.
“Shouldn’t I?” I whispered, my back against the cold floor. “You’re …” My breath caught while I tried to wrap my mind around the impossible. But I knew it in my bones. “You’re the Storyteller.”
A considering pause.
I am a memory of the Storyteller, it replied. Confined to rock, for when I am needed. You have ears. Will you open them?
I nodded dumbly.
Then you shall hear, Heir of Wuraola.
The chamber fell away. Part of me knew I still lay within the energy-charged mountain, my body still as death as Woo In hovered, anxiously waving a hand in front of my open, unseeing eyes. But the other part of me hurled through a sea of images, smells, voices. I soared over a patchwork of realms: cities rising, falling, evolving as though I were riding on time itself.
Several thousand moons ago, the ocean-voice said, a brother and sister, both warriors, watched their homeland being torn to pieces. Monsters rose from the deep, and contagions spread their fingers, and island turned on island. Enoba was brave, but Wuraola was wise. She saw how division weakened humans against the abiku. When she told Enoba, he enslaved an alagbato, demanding the power to unite twelve realms.
I was back in the Swana savannah. I watched from above like a star, as a broad-backed warrior approached a dewy-faced alagbato: Melu, five hundred years younger. The immortal slept peacefully by his pool, shimmering wings tucked around his smooth, long limbs. With catlike dexterity, the warrior snapped an emerald cuff onto the alagbato’s arm.
Familiarity chilled my spine. Through this story, I realized, The Lady had learned how to enslave Melu.
For Enoba’s first wish, he asked the alagbato to grow land across the oceans, uniting the islands so they could be ruled as one. The alagbato-turned-ehru said, “It is done—” and for miles, earth covered the waters. Enoba was satisfied, and crossed his new continent with a formidable army. But lands so vast could not be conquered by Enoba’s spear alone, and so Wuraola used her words to win the hearts and minds of the people.
Still, the brother and sister were unsure of victory against the abiku. Enoba returned to the ehru, and asked his second boon: the power to rule an empire for eternity. For this gift, the ehru climbed to the heavens and stole two rays from the blazing sun.
“No man escapes old age,” warned the ehru. “But for every heart moved by your Ray, one facet of death’s blade may not touch you. Your heirs shall be even more powerful, for they shall possess one immunity at birth. Take this Ray, and give the other to your sister and equal, for no being was made to rule alone.”
But Enoba, seeing the nations his spear had won, said, “I have no equal,” and devoured both Rays himself.
Melu’s savannah vanished, and again, time whirled past me in a