Before rhythm.
Before silence.
Before the first tree fell and echoed through the forest—
There was her.
She did not walk.
She drifted.
Not through space, but through what would become memory.
Her name was never spoken aloud. Not because it was forbidden, but because it was forgotten before it could be named.
The spirits called her Ìkàkú—not in reverence, not in hatred. In caution.
She was not evil.
She was not good.
She was unrhythmic.
And in a world born from sound, what has no rhythm is feared most.
The Pre-Sound
In the beginning, there was no drum.
There was pulse.
The universe inhaled, exhaled, and forgot it had done so.
And in that forgetting, Ìkàkú was born.
She was not a god.
She was not a spirit.
She was absence.
Before fire learned to crackle, before rivers learned to babble, before the wind found the courage to whistle—she existed.
She wandered the hollow spaces where stories had not yet happened.
Where ancestors had not yet dreamed.
Where sound could not form because time had not started counting.
She did not hunger.
She did not thirst.
She only… watched.
The forming.
The shaping.
The making of the First Sound.
When it came, it was small.
A leaf falling onto an empty stone.
A whisper born by accident.
But to Ìkàkú, it was violence.
To her, sound was invasion.
The Day She Heard
The first time Ìkàkú truly heard the drum, she screamed.
Not aloud.
Inwards.
And in that scream, a tear formed in the folds of nothingness. It bled no blood—only unmade rhythm.
From that tear came wraiths—creatures that fed on unfinished songs.
They devoured lullabies before they reached mothers' lips. They shredded chants before they could heal. They unraveled the threads of ancestral praise before they could be remembered.
The spirits of the land tried to fight them.
They crafted drums of fire.
Flutes of bone.
Voices wrapped in earth.
But the wraiths were endless.
Because Ìkàkú was endless.
Not made of flesh.
Not made of soul.
Made of every unsung word that ever wanted to exist—and never did.
It was Olujimi the Deep-Song, first among the spirit drummers, who confronted her.
He walked to the edge of the Hollow World—the place where sound still feared to tread—and called her by what the spirits had agreed to name her:
She-Who-Silences.
She appeared.
A face without mouth.
Eyes stitched shut.
And yet, she saw him.
And she spoke.
But not with voice.
With undoing.
The trees behind him forgot they had roots. The mountain under him unlearned how to stand. His drum turned to dust in his hands.
Yet he did not kneel.
Instead, he did what no spirit had dared.
He sang.
Just one note.
Low. Brave. Grieving.
And for a breath—a single, fragile breath—Ìkàkú paused.
She had never been sung to.
Only feared.
Only hidden from.
Only avoided.
And the note he gave her—it was not power.
It was recognition.
A sound saying:
"I see you."
The Gift She Rejected
Olujimi offered her something then.
Not a drum. Not a home.
A skin.
A wrapping.
A name.
"I will wrap you in rhythm," he said. "So you may dance, even if you do not sing."
He held out a calabash carved from memory, sealed with a single line of music.
"If you take this," he said, "you'll be bound—not silenced, but felt. Not erased, but echoed."
For the first time, she reached out.
The wraiths stilled.
The Hollow World hummed with cautious hope.
And just before her hand touched it—
She recoiled.
Because in it, she saw her end.
To be felt meant to be defined.
To be echoed meant to be heard.
And to be heard meant to be remembered.
But Ìkàkú was not meant to be remembered.
She was the pause before the scream.
The breath before the birth.
The last moment of peace before the first note is struck.
She flung the calabash into the sky.
It cracked.
Became the moon.
Marked forever with the scar of what was almost a gift.
And then she vanished.
Into the places where forgotten things hide.
Not destroyed.
Just waiting.
The Returning
Centuries passed.
The world sang.
Drums were carved, played, broken, buried, and resurrected.
Legacies rose. Fell. Rose again.
A boy named Ayanwale was born.
And in him stirred a rhythm even she had not expected.
She felt it the day the Eighth Rhythm cracked the boundary between human and spirit.
Felt it like a stone in her chest.
Like a memory she was never supposed to carry.
"He's remembering too much," she whispered.
And in her wake, echoes died.
Small ones at first.
A lullaby forgotten before sleep.
A chant lost in translation.
But it grew.
Because she had started walking again.
Not in rage.
Not in hunger.
In balance.
Because the world had tipped too far toward song.
And every song must have a rest.
The Drum of Regret
She crafted it in a place no map dares name.
Not from wood.
But from regret.
Every broken promise.
Every unsaid goodbye.
Every silence that hurt more than sound.
She layered them.
Wove them into a drum.
Not round.
Not smooth.
Not alive.
A drum that beats not to speak—but to erase.
She whispered its name into a corner of the world that no ear could hear.
But the river heard.
The trees heard.
Even the dead heard.
And they shivered.
Because the last time she had made a drum…
The stars dimmed.
And Now
Now, Ìkàkú stands at the edge again.
Watching Ayanwale.
Watching Ṣadé.
Watching the Grove become more than memory.
She does not hate them.
She does not envy them.
But she knows:
Too much rhythm is a threat.
Too much memory can undo healing.
Too many drums beating at once can wake something even she fears.
A final rhythm.
Not of silence.
Not of sound.
But of unbeing.
And so, she comes with a choice.
To remind the world that before the first beat—
There was her.
Not the mother of drums.
Not the death of songs.
Just the space where nothing dared to become something.
And she whispers to the stars:
"When they play the Tenth, I will listen."
And if it's wrong—
I will close the door.