woven in time

Chapter 4: The Forest Remembers

The next few days passed like a dream wrapped in fog—quiet, tense, full of questions nobody dared to say aloud.

The red crescent moon now appeared every night, faint but persistent, like an eye half-open, watching.

Kehinde and I barely spoke in school, but when we did, our voices were low, urgent, always checking if the other had felt anything strange.

And we always had.

Dreams of the same door.

Whispers from trees that didn’t move.

Marks on our wrists glowing brighter each night.

Taye, the boy with the red thread, never spoke to us again—but he watched. He stood at the edge of crowds, in corners of hallways, like a shadow that refused to disappear.

And then, one afternoon, something changed.

---

It began with a book.

I found it buried under a loose floorboard in the school’s abandoned science lab—now used to store broken chairs and dusty tools. It had no title, only an old leather cover marked with the same twin crescent symbol on our wrists.

Inside were drawings of symbols, stories written in ancient Yoruba, and a hand-drawn map of Agbede.

But it wasn’t the Agbede I knew.

This one had a forest that didn’t exist on any current map—Òkè Aparo, “The Hill of the Sparrow.” A place surrounded by warnings in red ink.

“Only the chosen may enter.”

“The door is buried where the roots breathe.”

I felt the breath leave my body.

That night, I showed Kehinde the map.

“We have to go there,” I said, the wind tugging at my scarf as we stood outside his gate.

He looked down at the page, then at me.

“I’ve seen that forest in my dreams,” he said. “But the trees were taller. Silver. Breathing.”

I swallowed. “Then maybe dreams aren’t dreams anymore.”

---

We left before dawn, before the roosters crowed.

We followed the path marked in the book, cutting through old yam fields and thick bush, until we reached it—tall trees with bark as dark as charcoal, and leaves that shimmered like glass when touched by sunlight.

Òkè Aparo.

The air shifted the moment we stepped in.

It was like stepping underwater—quiet, heavy, slow.

The forest was alive.

And it knew us.

---

Deeper in, we found it.

A circle of ancient stones surrounding a hollow tree with markings on its trunk. The exact door from our dreams, etched in bark and ash. The twin crescent symbol glowed faintly, just like our marks.

Kehinde stepped forward.

A breeze stirred—except it didn’t feel like wind.

It felt like a breath.

Something whispered.

“You’ve come back… too early.”

I grabbed Kehinde’s arm.

But before we could move, the sky above the trees cracked with red lightning, and a shadow fell across the clearing.

Not an animal.

Not a human.

Something in between.

Watching. Waiting. Remembering.

And the door…

began to pulse.