: The First Remembering
---
Rain falls again — but this time, it burns.
Not the skin, not the earth. It burns memory.
Kojo forgets his late wife’s name.
A child forgets her own father.
A goat walks into the market and no one remembers who it belongs to — not even the owner when told.
And across the village, old gravestones fade blank.
The soil is being scrubbed of its story.
---
Mira gathers the elders.
They sit under the great baobab, the one older than any living villager. Its bark bears the names of five generations carved by hand. Now, two are missing.
Gone. As if never written.
“We are under attack,” she says. “But not by blade or curse. By forgetting.”
A woman named Dede mutters, “This is not war. It is... unweaving.”
Mira nods.
“The Root King does not destroy. He devours what binds us to ourselves. He erases.”
---
They begin The First Remembering the next morning.
Every villager must speak aloud three names of the dead and pour water on the ground for each.
It is not tradition.
