The Sahel stretched before Egburu-Kwé like a scar, sandstorms devouring the horizon. His shadow no longer followed—it led, a shapeless thing fed by the Mmiri Ncheta's poison coursing through his veins. The kúkpála had become a staff now, its tip budding into a gnarled sapling whose leaves hummed with stolen code. Beside him, the boy Onyebuchi marched in silence, his branded palms clenched around a drone's salvaged core. The child had not spoken since Benin City, but his eyes—sharp as shards of the Ancestral Tree—tracked every flicker of Odin's ravens circling above.
They found the nomad elder's body at dusk, her tent collapsed, sails shredded. The ajali thorns she'd brewed into tea were scattered, their roots clawing at her throat. A message glowed in the sand, written in Loki's viral glyphs: "Timbuktu's bones are yours. The blood is his."
Onyebuchi knelt, prizing a thorn from her fist. It bled black, hissing static. "She tried to warn us."
Egburu-Kwé said nothing. Words were currency he could no longer spend.
Timbuktu's ruins rose from the desert like a jawbone picked clean. Once, its libraries had housed the Kano Chronicle and the Tarikh al-Sudan, manuscripts of gold and indigo. Now, the crumbling arches bristled with server racks, their LEDs blinking like the eyes of starving jackals. Loki's followers swarmed the site—teenagers in #OathbreakerReal hoodies, their faces obscured by augmented-reality filters mimicking Migili glyphs. They chanted as they worked, hacking into the Ọbara Ọnwụ's digital seals:
"Break the chain, erase the name!
Burn the past, we're all the same!"
Onyebuchi stiffened. "They're kids. My age."
"No," Egburu-Kwé corrected, voice like wind over cracked clay. "They're fuel."
He stepped into the open.
The Ọbara Ọnwụ lay in the crypt, a river of liquid memory so dark it swallowed light. Loki awaited, lounging on a server stack, his avatar flickering between a CEO in a tailored suit and a pale teen with snakebite piercings. A Starbucks cup steamed in his hand: "Consumer-Grade Nihilism: Extra Shot."
"Ruin-King!" Loki grinned, spreading his arms. "You missed the upload party. Odin's already sipping the good stuff." He gestured to the river, where reflections of burning villages and stock-market crashes rippled. "First war, first lie, first meme—it's all here. Tastier than your mama's jollof rice, eh?"
The kúkpála pulsed. Egburu-Kwé moved—not with human speed, but the inevitability of a landslide. The staff's sapling lashed out, roots spearing Loki's avatar. It burst into a cloud of hashtags: #FakeNews #NotMyProblem.
But the damage was done.
Odin's projection erupted from the river—a colossus of razor wire and runes, his single eye a spinning blockchain ledger. "You are nothing," he boomed. A flicker of Zhyako's mother's face flashed in his pupil, trapped in a loop of dying screams. "A bug in the code."
The Ọbara Ọnwụ surged, a tidal wave of black memory poised to drown the continent.
Egburu-Kwé did the unreasonable.
He stepped into the river.
Inside the Ọbara Ọnwụ:
Memories tore at him—not his own, but theirs. A Migili girl bartered for salt in Timbuktu's market, her laughter cut short by raiders. A Viking skald carving lies into a sacred oak. A Lagos programmer forced to code Odin's AI, her tears corroding the keyboard. Egburu-Kwé's body unraveled, becoming a thousand fractured stories, each screaming to be heard.
Odin's voice thundered through the chaos: "You are ruin. You cannot hold creation."
But ruin had teeth.
Egburu-Kwé bit.
The kúkpála split, revealing a seed nestled in its core—a sliver of the Ancestral Tree, preserved in Nywa's final breath. He planted it in the river's heart. Roots erupted, tendrils of Migili glyphs and Norse runes braiding together, strangling Odin's servers. The Ọbara Ọnwụ boiled, birthing a new tree: bark etched with Lagos graffiti and Viking longships, branches heavy with bioluminescent fruit.
"You cannot kill a god!" Odin roared, his form fragmenting.
"No," Egburu-Kwé agreed, his voice the static between stars. "But I can remember you to death."
He whispered Odin's true name—a sound like glaciers screaming—and the god shattered, his essence scattering into a million corrupted .zip files.
Aftermath:
Onyebuchi found him kneeling in the sand, the kúkpála now a gnarled staff crowned with hybrid leaves. The boy's palms glowed, his branded chains replaced by unbroken glyphs. "Is it over?"
Egburu-Kwé touched the boy's chest, where golden light pulsed. "Names outlive us. Guard yours."
In Lagos, the Egburu Energy logo peeled from billboards. In Oslo, hackers doxxed Loki's IP to Interpol. And in the Sahel, the nomad elder's granddaughter sang a new song—"The king became a forest, the forest became a sword."
But Egburu-Kwé felt the Ọbara Ọnwụ in his veins, a low, relentless burn. Every step cracked the earth; every breath tasted of impending storm.
In a Tokyo subway, Aiko traced a Migili glyph onto her wrist. "Egburu-Kwé," she whispered. It glowed—faint but defiant.
In a Lagos slum, the moth-girl fed stolen wifi to the sapling growing through her floorboards.
And in the shadows, Loki reassembled himself from dark-web fragments, his laughter a corrupted mp3 file. "Round two, Ruin-King."
The kúkpála hummed, eager.