CHAPTER FOUR: The Scent of Rain Without Clouds
"Tí ojú bá ti rí nnkan, inú a balẹ̀."
When the eyes have seen a thing, the heart is no longer restless.
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The campus air tasted like something had broken but hadn't yet fallen apart.
Zainab walked with a purpose she didn't name, following a trail she couldn't see. She passed the old chapel again—silent, watching—and felt the stir again in her chest. She didn't enter. Not yet.
Instead, her path bent toward the back of the arts department, where old Yoruba sculptures lay abandoned like forgotten ancestors. A spiral symbol had been carved into the base of one of them. She had seen it before. Too many times.
Her phone buzzed. A message.
> "Ẹ̀rù kò mọ ibi tí a ti dé sí. Ṣé ìwọ mọ?"
Fear does not remember where we arrived. Do you?
No name. No number. Again.
Later that night, she returned to her hostel and opened Zola's book again—the one without a title, the one that still smelled faintly of rain. A paper fell out. One she was sure wasn't there before.
This one was old. Yellowed, fragile at the corners. She unfolded it, and again, it appeared blank.
Until it wasn't.
Words surfaced like they were being breathed through the page:
> "Ìrántí kò kí n tan lójú, kó máa pé."
Memory does not lie. It only waits.
Then underneath:
> "Ẹni tí ó sọnù, kì í mọ ibi tí òun ti mọ́."
He who is lost cannot remember where he became forgotten.
Zainab didn't speak the Yoruba of the ancients. But the words struck her like thunder hitting old iron.
She heard it again.
The name.
Whispered.
Not in sound, but in sense. As if the dust in the corners of the room said it. As if the bones in her wrist remembered it.
She said it aloud.
And everything stopped.
Even silence stepped aside.
The mirror above her desk rippled—not with water, but with recognition.
Her reflection blinked slower than she did.
Then a flash—just for a moment.
A room with no walls. A drum. A circle of women singing without mouths.
Zainab fell back. The paper burned to ash in her hands. But there was no fire.
Only scent. Of rain. Again.
And laughter. A child's.
Somewhere close.
She ran to the window. The hostel yard was empty.
Except… one stone had been turned over.
On it, the spiral again.
Drawn in salt.
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Chapter Four Ends.
What if what you seek is not ahead of you, but waking behind you?