When the gods fall silent, the world holds its breath.

  The air above Makoko hung heavy with moisture, thick with salt, smoke, and the muted hum of solar panels grafted onto rusted rooftops. Beneath the floating fishery—reinforced with scrap wood, insulation foam, and Taiwo’s makeshift energy cells—Afolabi knelt barefoot on the polished deck, his eyes shut, breath steady.

  He had been meditating for hours, syncing his breath with the ebb and flow of the lagoon’s tides.

  Then it hit him.

  A ripple.

  Not through the water. Not through the air. But through the world itself.

  His chest seized. A weightless pressure slammed into his spine and spiraled outward. Every thread of à?? inside him pulsed—once, then again. It felt like being named by something older than the gods.

  He gasped. The breath came late.

  Ara-Sango, who had been still, turned toward him. The golem’s ember-lined shoulders vibrated faintly, a low hum rising from deep within its core.

  “The world watches.”

  The voice wasn’t sound. It was resonance—an idea pressed into his bones.

  Afolabi staggered back, blinking. He hadn’t heard one of them speak so clearly before. Not like this. Not since the trial.

  At first, the golems had only radiated presence—emotions, gestures, battle instincts. Over weeks of training, the impressions had grown sharper. Ayanfe-Oya had once warned him by flaring her aura in wind-like pulses. Ina-Ogun had calmed him by sitting still for hours. But this...

  This was language.

  He placed his hand against Ara-Sango’s obsidian armor. “Did you say that?”

  The golem tilted its head but said no more.

  “Fola!” Taiwo burst onto the platform, barefoot and breathless. “Did you feel that?”

  “I—”

  Kehinde followed behind, tablet in hand. “No seismic data. No solar flare. But I felt it. Like a thread snapping between here and... somewhere else.”

  Afolabi looked past them both, toward the distant skyline of Lagos, cloaked in heat-haze and twilight.

  He whispered, “Something’s changed.”

  Far above them, unnoticed, a single bird spiraled away from the rooftop’s edge. It let out one long, echoing cry—then vanished into the glowing sky.

  They trained at dusk.

  The rooftop deck had been modified with weight-reactive tiles and thin railings. It was barely large enough for synchronized combat, but Afolabi needed the constraint. It forced him to focus.

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  The golems lined up—four giants of divine memory and elemental fury. He had learned their names, their habits, their energies. Today, he would test harmony.

  “Begin.”

  He surged forward. Ara-Sango matched his steps, moving like thunder. Ina-Ogun flowed beside him with anchored, silent precision. Ayanfe-Oya danced around their arcs like wind incarnate.

  But Omi-Yemoja refused.

  Her form shimmered, refracted like moonlight on water. She hovered—then pulsed a sharp wave of resistance. A burst of à?? rippled outward, breaking the pattern. Afolabi’s footwork collapsed.

  The rooftop tilted slightly as one of the supports gave under the spiritual recoil.

  Below, Taiwo’s voice cut through the tension—sharp, urgent. “Redirecting core bracers! Hold position!”

  A mechanical hum followed, and the deck plates beneath Afolabi’s palms pulsed with stabilizing energy. The rooftop groaned but held steady.

  He didn’t need to look—he could feel Taiwo beneath them, hands on patched circuitry, keeping the platform from folding under Omi-Yemoja’s resistance.

  Afolabi hit the ground, palms burning.

  “What’s wrong with her?” he muttered.

  None of the golems answered.

  He slammed his fist against the tiles. “Why won’t you listen?!”

  Kehinde’s voice cut through the thick evening air. “Maybe it’s not about them listening.”

  She stood in the doorway, arms crossed, eyes tired. “Maybe they’re waiting for you to say something that matters.”

  Night settled over Makoko like an ancestral shawl, the glow of scattered lanterns flickering across the water’s skin. Afolabi sat alone now, cross-legged on the training deck, his breath ragged, arms resting on his knees. His sweat had cooled. His anger had not.

  The four golems stood in a wide semicircle around him, unmoving yet watchful.

  He looked up. “You can speak. I know you can. So why the silence?”

  Ayanfe-Oya’s head tilted slightly, her silhouette veiled in flowing strands of wind-light. A pulse—not audible, but felt—stirred the air around him.

  “We remember what the world forgets,” her voice came, light as thunder before a storm.

  Afolabi’s heart slowed. He felt the meaning beneath the words—layered, old, echoing beyond language. She wasn’t just answering a question. She was calling something forth.

  Ina-Ogun stepped forward slightly. The polished iron of his shoulders shimmered with faint glyphs—new, uncarved by Afolabi’s hand. Runes etched by evolution.

  Omi-Yemoja said nothing. But her waters settled, no longer turbulent. She remained silent, still refracted, but no longer distant.

  Ara-Sango cracked his knuckles—lightly, like distant thunder grumbling across a sleeping city. Then, with a tilt of his head and a spark in his chestplate, he offered Afolabi a single, slow nod—acknowledgment, approval, or perhaps a challenge to rise.

  Kehinde and Taiwo watched from the doorway in silence, sensing something they couldn’t quite name.

  Afolabi looked down at his hands. “They’re not resisting me,” he said aloud, though mostly to himself. “They’re waiting for me to grow into who I’m meant to be.”

  Taiwo gave a quiet nod. Kehinde smiled faintly. She glanced at her tablet, still in sleep mode. “No metric in the world could have predicted this.”

  That night, sleep did not come gently.

  Afolabi lay on a thin mat beneath the lattice of exposed roof beams, the hum of water and generator coils singing low beneath the floorboards. His breathing slowed. The city murmured in its sleep.

  Then the world around him slipped.

  He stood within a dream—but not his own.

  A shoreline stretched to infinity, where stars swam beneath the ocean instead of the sky. In the distance, a colossal tree grew from a pool of molten starlight and ash. Its trunk twisted with ancient bark, glowing with glyphs he could not read. Its branches reached far beyond the dream, each etched with names—some fading, some shining, one pulsing like a heartbeat.

  His heartbeat.

  The four golems stood at the tree’s roots. Each knelt—not as warriors, but as sentinels.

  One branch above them ignited.

  His name shimmered across its bark, but he could not pronounce it. It was not in any human tongue.

  A voice echoed—not loud, but immense.

  “You were never unseen. Only unclaimed.”

  He turned, but there was no one behind him. Only wind. Only light.

  High above, the baobab tree rooted beside the Makoko hideout trembled once—its lowest branch shedding a single leaf that drifted upward into the dawn.

  When he woke, dawn was bleeding across the lagoon. The surface was still. The air, charged.

  He sat up slowly.

  “They’re waiting,” he whispered.

  Not just the golems. Not just the gods.

  The world.