Ore had barely finished saying "Ago ilé, Agoo" when the noises started.
Not small noises. Things falling, things crashing, something heavy dragging across the floor, a sound like the entire inside of the house was rearranging itself at speed.The house just kept making some terrible noise.
"Ei, what is that?," Idowu said, stepping back.
"Ore should we run?" Sena asked. She was already calculating the distance back to the main path.
Then Ore laughed.
Not a small laugh. A real one, sudden and warm. The squad turned and stared at her because in all the time they had known Nandi-Ore, they had never heard that sound come out of her. She covered her mouth immediately, composure returning, but her eyes were still bright.
"It's fine," she said.
"That does not sound fine," Idowu said.
Then the door opened.
She was short, rounder than Ore, wearing a large printed kente coat that had looked very old and had clearly been washed so many times. Her hair was wrapped in a cloth tied at a jaunty angle that suggested she had done it in a hurry or didn't care or both. She was not holding anything. Her hands were empty but her eyes were very full.
She looked at Ore.
"Nandi Ore!"
Ore stepped forward and the old woman grabbed her with both arms, the hug immediate and complete, the kind that has years in it.
"Eyy I heard what you did to Efo," Ìyá Àṣàbì said, still holding her. "Eleven years, that man has not lost. Eleven years!" She pulled back to look at Ore's face, then pulled her back in. "Eh heh. That's my great granddaughter."
Ore said nothing but she was still smiling.
Ìyá Àṣàbì released her and looked past her at the four people standing in various states of confusion on the path.
"Oh, you brought your friends." She looked them over once. "Come in, come in. I'll get you some roasted plantains and groundnuts. You must be hungry from all that trouble you've been causing."
She turned and walked back inside before anyone could respond.
Inside was perfectly calm.
Not a single thing out of place. The mats were straight, the lamp was lit, the shrine in the corner was undisturbed. Whatever had been happening in here sixty seconds ago had left no evidence of itself.
Idowu stood in the middle of the room and looked around slowly.
"Ah ah," he said. "Then what were we hearing?"
Nobody answered. Ìyá Àṣàbì was already at the fire.
"Idowu" Ayim said, "chale chale, that's not what we came here for—"
"Food's ready," she said.
The bowls came in flying, drifting through the air from the direction of the fire, each one finding a person and stopping in front of them at chest height, waiting. Roasted plantain, still warm. Groundnuts in a smaller bowl alongside. The squad watched them arrive with their mouths open.
Ore was already eating.
"Sit around the stool," Ìyá Àṣàbì said, lowering herself onto her mat. "All of you. We have things to discuss."
....
"Talk," Ìyá Àṣàbì said, looking directly at Ayim.
Ayim set his plantain down.
He told her everything. The fire, not Befa fire, the ugly collapsing kind. The strange tall buildings. The bridge. The screaming that he felt in his chest. The helping hands becoming fists. Then the ocean breaking wrong, and the hand — not a wave, not a natural thing, a hand, rising with intention, ancient and familiar in a way that made no sense because he had never seen it before. The figures calling his name. And beyond all of it, the world with the wrong sky.
When he finished, the room was quiet.
Then he said the other thing.
"And since the vision—" he paused, trying to find the right words. "My powers feel off. Dampened. Like something shifted when it happened and hasn't shifted back. I don't know what to do with that."
Ìyá Àṣàbì nodded slowly, like this confirmed something she had already suspected. She said nothing yet.
It was Ore who spoke next.
"I also saw something."
Everyone turned. Even Ìyá Àṣàbì, which meant it was news to her too.
Ore was looking at the floor, knees pulled up, wraps tight on her hands. She said it in the way she always said things when she was scared, quietly.
"It was way way different from what Ayim described, I think, It was last night. I saw Ayim and Sena flying out of Befa together. The rest of us were on a boat, sailing. And Idowu-" she paused. "As for Idowu he was underwater. And it looked as if we were shasing something, or someone, but it felt very dangerous and scary."
Silence.
Then Idowu sat up very straight. "Underwater chasing something?" He looked around at the group. "That is not scary. That sounds very cool."
Everyone was seated still, waiting for someone to speak.
"There are two visions," Joojo spoke. "Two different pieces."
Ìyá Àṣàbì had been watching all of them. Now she set her own bowl down and leaned forward slightly on her mat, her walking stick across her knees.
"The ancestors do not send the same message twice," she said. "They send it in pieces, to different people, because no one person can carry the whole truth of what is coming." She looked at Ayim. "Your vision showed you what is happening. The threat. The scale of it." She looked at Ore. "Hers showed you what must be done. How you must move." She paused. "Together they are one picture."
"And my powers?" Ayim asked.
"The vision cost you something," she said simply. "What you saw was not meant for a mind that has never left Befa. It came through you at full force because there was no time for it to come gently. Your body is adjusting." She looked at him steadily. "They will return. Stronger than before. But not here." She let that land. "Only when you go."
The fire crackled.
"Go where?" Sena asked, even though she already knew.
Ìyá Àṣàbì looked at all five of them.
"To the other world," she said.
"But why?" Sena asked. "The elders said we must stay hidden. The prayer says we must stay hidden. So why are you telling us to go?"
Ìyá Àṣàbì looked at him with something like approval. Like she had been waiting for that question specifically.
"Because the prayer was never just about hiding," she said. "Adwoa did not get on her knees in the dark of that ship and beg the ancestors for a place to disappear forever. She asked for a foundation. Something to stand on. Something to build from." She tapped her stick on the floor once. "You do not pour a foundation and then refuse to build. That is not sanctuary. That is a grave."
Nobody spoke.
"But if you go," she continued, "you will no longer fully belong to Befa. The island will still be here. Your people will still be here. But you will have crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed. The surface world will not understand you. Befa will not fully claim you." She paused. "You will be Àjòjì. Strangers. To both worlds."
Ayim frowned. "Àjòjì? What does that-"
"Strangers, she just said it," Ore said from her corner. She hadn't moved. "It means strangers."
Ayim looked at her. Then at the group. Then at his own hands, again, the ones that hadn't felt right since the vision.
Sena set her bowl down. Her voice, when it came, was smaller than usual. "I don't want to go," she said. Not dramatically. Just honestly. "I have a life here. We all have lives here. What you're describing, becoming strangers to our own home, that's not a small thing ooo, Ìyá. That's everything."
"I know," Ìyá Àṣàbì said. And she meant it. She did not try to minimize it or talk around it.
She let the fear sit in the room for a moment.
Then she said: "The Fynn."
Something shifted. Even the lamp flame seemed to steady itself.
"That is what is in your vision, Ayim. That is the hand rising from the water. That is what is making those people fight each other, turn on each other, become the worst versions of themselves." She looked at each of them. "It was born from the hatred of drowned soulless men. Four hundred years of it, sitting in the deep Atlantic with nowhere to go, learning, growing, finding the cracks in people and making them wider. It does not possess. It amplifies. Whatever darkness already lives in a person , grief, jealousy, fear, cruelty, the Fynn finds it and feeds it until there is nothing else left."
She paused.
"And if no one stops it, it will not stay in one city, or one country, or one coast. It will move through the whole world the way water moves through everything finding every crack, every weakness, every person who has ever been afraid or angry or broken. And it will make all of that enormous. Until there is nothing left of the world above but people consuming each other." She looked at Sena directly. "That world is connected to this one. When it falls, nothing protects Befa. Not even Adwoa's prayer."
The fire crackled.
Sena was quiet. She did not say she wanted to go. But she did not say she didn't anymore either.
It was Idowu who broke the silence.
He had been sitting there through all of it, through the visions and the Fynn and the Àjòjì and Sena's fear, eating the last of his groundnuts with the focused expression of someone processing very large information in real time. Now he looked up.
"So," he said. "When do we set off?"