The Grove of Shells no longer slept.
Since the awakening of the Eighth Rhythm, the land itself had become restless. Trees whispered secrets not meant for day. Rivers changed their course mid-song. Even the sky, once consistent in its shades of blue and dusk, now flickered—sometimes gold, sometimes storm-black, always uncertain.
Ayanwale stood at the center of it all.
Surrounded by rhythm.
Haunted by prophecy.
And hunted—by something older than sound.
The night had not come yet, but the shadows did. Long, reaching tendrils that stretched across the earth even while the sun still burned.
And from the deepest of them, he felt it.
A rhythm forming.
Wrong.
Not broken like Baba Oro's cursed beat.
Not corrupted like the Ajalu's resonance.
Something else.
A Rhythm That Should Not Be.
A Rhythm That Tried to Rewrite What Had Been Written.
Amoke found him beside the Drum With No Skin, his hands trembling as he traced the rim.
"Another dream?" she asked, her voice low but steady.
He nodded. "Not a dream. A summons."
"To what?"
"To silence masquerading as song."
She sat beside him. The Drum With No Skin thrummed once beneath their joined presence, echoing what neither dared speak aloud.
"I saw her," he whispered. "Not in form. In feeling. A cold before a storm."
"Ìkàkú," Amoke said, breath catching.
Ayanwale nodded.
"She's moving now. Not hiding. Not whispering. Composing."
Amoke stiffened. "But she's not a drummer."
"She doesn't need to be. She's the reason rhythm began. The threat that made the spirits invent the beat to keep her back."
"Then what does she want?"
He turned to her, eyes haunted.
"To unwrite the Tenth Rhythm."
They called a gathering.
Elders. Children. Spirits once feared. Allies once scattered.
All came.
All listened.
Ayanwale stood in the sacred circle beneath the Iroko tree and told them what he had seen.
What he had felt.
What was coming.
"A Rhythm That Was Not Meant To Be. It's trying to take form. It feeds on fear. On doubt. On silence we buried but never mourned."
Yèyé Àṣà stepped forward. Her cane struck the earth three times. A hush fell.
"There is no Eleventh," she said plainly. "The Eight are ancient. The Ninth was born of balance. But this… this thing…"
She trailed off.
"It's not a rhythm," she finally said. "It's an echo of erasure."
A boy—Ṣadé's younger brother—raised his hand.
"But how can something that was never meant to be... become?"
Ayanwale answered quietly.
"Because we keep forgetting to grieve what we never said."
The days that followed were quiet. Too quiet.
Spirits stopped showing up to the Drum Circles.
Children forgot the songs they'd learned just days ago.
The trees bowed farther each morning, leaves shriveled with sorrow.
And then…
It began.
A girl named Temi—six, bright-eyed, beloved of the ancestors—vanished.
No scream.
No struggle.
Just… gone.
Only her drum remained.
Cracked down the middle.
Bleeding ash.
When they found the spot where she'd last played, the earth was silent.
Not mute.
Hollow.
Even the insects refused to crawl there.
And on the tree behind her abandoned drum, a mark was carved.
A spiral twisted backward—uncoiling.
The opposite of rhythm.
The beginning of undoing.
"Ìkàkú's begun harvesting memory," Amoke said, holding the cracked drum close to her chest like a lost child. "She's not striking. She's collecting."
"To build her own rhythm," Ayanwale said. "From the silences we ignored."
"But how do we fight silence?"
He turned to her slowly.
"We play the Tenth."
But no one knew it.
Not even the spirits.
Not even the Archive of Shells or the Elders' Drum Codex held mention of a Tenth Rhythm.
It was whispered in fragments.
In lullabies that stopped midway.
In chants where the last line was always lost to wind.
It wasn't meant to be played.
It was meant to be inherited.
And the one who carried it?
Ṣadé.
They found her at the edge of the river, drawing spirals in the mud.
"Do you hear it?" she asked before they even spoke.
Ayanwale crouched beside her.
"What do you hear?"
She didn't look at him. Only whispered:
"Something behind the songs. Behind the drums. Like breathing. But angry."
Amoke knelt, brushing the girl's hair gently.
"We need your help, Ṣadé. There's a rhythm only you can carry."
"I don't want it," the child said, voice breaking.
Ayanwale's heart ached.
"I didn't want mine either."
"But yours was chosen by drums. Mine… mine was chosen by something that hides under them."
Silence.
Then Ayanwale did what no elder or spirit had done since her birth.
He took off the Royalty Drum—and handed it to her.
It shrank to fit her lap.
Trembled.
Hummed.
And when she struck it—
The Tenth Rhythm answered.
It didn't sound like music.
It sounded like a question.
Who are you?
Who were you?
Who do you choose to be?
Every soul in the village felt it.
Not heard.
Known.
And with every beat, something old and angry twisted in the distance.
Because with every beat, Ìkàkú's rhythm unraveled.
The earth split open near the old shrine.
A wound.
And from it, she rose.
Not walking.
Not floating.
Just being.
No eyes. No skin.
A silhouette of grief and forgetting.
Behind her, hundreds of spirit fragments followed.
Drummers who never learned.
Children whose songs were stolen.
Mothers who had no one left to sing to.
And in her hands: the Drum of Regret.
It beat without her touching it.
A sound like a heartbeat too tired to continue.
She looked toward the Grove.
No, she felt toward the Grove.
And she moved.
That night, the village prepared.
Ayanwale and Amoke stood side by side with Ṣadé.
All three bore drums.
But only one beat had not yet been fully played.
The Tenth.
And now, it must be.
"Once we play it," Ayanwale said, "there's no going back."
"Are we playing to stop her?" Amoke asked.
He looked at the sky.
"No," he said.
"We're playing to remind her."
They met at the sacred hill—the same one where Oluwafemi's shadow was once exorcised.
Now, it pulsed with grief.
Ìkàkú stood alone.
Behind her, the forgotten followed like smoke.
Before her, three drummers.
Three souls.
One rhythm yet born.
She did not speak.
She did not need to.
She struck the Drum of Regret.
BOOM.
And the stars above flickered.
The wind fled.
The world dimmed.
But Ayanwale, Amoke, and Ṣadé raised their drums—
And answered.
The Tenth Rhythm was not played in defiance.
It was played in remembrance.
They played for the silences that broke families.
For the songs lost in migration.
For the grief never named.
For the spirits who died waiting to be heard.
For the mothers who whispered lullabies no one remembered.
For the child inside Ìkàkú—before she became a warning.
They played until their hands bled.
Until the earth cracked with memory.
Until even the forgotten began to hum along.
Until Ìkàkú lowered her hands.
And wept.
Not as a spirit.
Not as a monster.
As a rhythm long misunderstood.
And when she dissolved into the wind, she left behind only the Drum of Regret—
Now silent.
And beside it, a new mark appeared on the earth:
A spiral uncoiling into a river.
Not of sound.
Of memory.
Of truth.
The world did not cheer.
It exhaled.
And in that breath, the Rhythm That Was Not Meant To Be
became the Rhythm That Was Always Waiting.