Bound by ancestry - Chapter 40: Chapter 40

For many days after the Circle walked toward the Cliff of Winds the village in Umuguma remained calm. The Dreamroots continued to pulse beneath the soil the Loom Circle welcomed memory after memory and children still played along the Spiral Path. Yet something beneath that calm began to shift. It was not a storm or a sound but something quieter. The silence began to breathe. It happened slowly. A woman named Nnenna woke one night to find all her pots overturned though her door remained bolted and her room undisturbed. A young boy began to speak in proverbs that no one had taught him then would forget his own name by morning. Fires lit themselves in the hearth without spark and sometimes did not give off warmth. The elders at first said nothing but their eyes grew wary. Adaeze noticed that each time she closed her eyes to listen to the Dreamroots she felt not only memory but presence. Something or someone else was remembering with her.
Chidubem had returned from the Cliff of Winds changed. He spoke little and kept to himself walking the edge of the Spiral Path for hours as if waiting for something to appear. Uche approached him one morning and asked what he saw. He looked at her for a long time then whispered that the wind had begun to speak in names not his own. The village held a gathering in the Loom Circle. They spoke of what had begun to stir. The traveler who once came from the north said that some memories were not meant to be remembered without preparation. Ogbonna suggested the Dreamroots had grown too deep into the veins of the land and now things long buried were surfacing. But Adaeze did not believe it was the Dreamroots alone.
One evening as the sun dipped behind the far hills a group of youths returned from the memory fields where they had gone to gather glowing bark. They arrived pale with wide eyes and shaking hands. They said they had seen figures watching them from within the tall grass figures that looked like their own shadows but moved in the opposite direction. That night no fire stayed lit past midnight. The wind whispered in voices not carried by breath. Dreams became dense and heavy and people awoke not refreshed but exhausted.
Then the first vision came.
Chidubem was the one to see it. He had sat beneath the old iroko tree after a restless evening and let his eyes close to the rhythm of the land. At first he saw nothing then a garden. Not of plants but of silence. In its center stood a figure clothed in white facing away from him. The man held no staff wore no crown and said no words. But Chidubem knew he was not alone. The silence around the man breathed with meaning. When Chidubem tried to speak the figure turned slightly and raised a hand not in command but invitation. Then Chidubem awoke heart racing breath unsteady and eyes full of tears.
He did not speak of the vision until Adaeze confessed one morning that the same figure had come to her but in her dream the man had been sitting and writing in the sand though there was no sand in her room. When he looked up at her he did not smile but his eyes were full of rest. He whispered one word before the vision ended a word she could not pronounce but remembered in feeling.
The dreams returned each night. Sometimes the man stood near water sometimes beneath trees sometimes in firelight. But always in white always silent always still. The villagers who had once danced beneath the moons now gathered in small quiet circles sharing dreams not laughter. Something had shifted in the air in the soil and in their own spirits.
Then came the hauntings.
It began with the elders. Those who had once served as keepers of ancestral tales began to speak in riddles even in daylight. They would wander toward the forest line and return with leaves no longer found in the village. One woman forgot the names of her children but remembered the name of her great grandfather’s great grandfather. Adaeze visited one such elder who stared at her for a long time and said I see two bloods in your veins one that calls forward and one that pulls backward. Then she closed her eyes and whispered a name Adaeze had never heard. That night the old woman passed away with a smile on her lips.
Uche reported that the Dreamroots had begun to retract in certain places curling inward as if shielding themselves. Animals no longer moved freely through the village. The wind sometimes blew backward. Time felt soft.
People grew afraid.
The Circle returned to the village with heavy steps. They had seen signs at the Cliff of Winds not marks not symbols but silence where there had once been song. Chidubem spoke to the village that evening in a quiet voice. He said the ancestors were no longer whispering. They were watching.
He said something was rising not just from the soil but from the decisions of the past. A reckoning perhaps or a revelation.
Adaeze then stood and told the people of the dreams the figure in white and the word she could not speak. She asked if anyone else had seen him. Hands rose slowly around the fire. Old and young men and women even a child who could barely speak said they had seen someone or something in white. Not threatening but heavy with presence.
That night the wind stopped. Completely.
And in the stillness a voice came not loud not outside but within. Chidubem heard it first. It said come away. Adaeze heard it too. It said be still. Others heard it later each receiving their own words like seeds planted in the chest.
Then one night the man in white appeared not in dream not in vision but at the edge of the village near the Spiral Path. He did not walk he stood. And when people gathered he spoke with eyes not voice. The villagers approached one by one and as each one stood before him he looked into them and they remembered things they had forgotten not facts not events but truths about themselves. A woman remembered the day she chose mercy instead of pride. A man remembered the vow he made as a boy but never kept.
Adaeze and Chidubem stood before him together. He looked at them both and placed his hands over theirs. Then he finally spoke.
Not in English not in the language of ancestors but in a quiet Igbo tone that rang louder than thunder. He said Nwa Chineke. He said Okwu. He said Onye Ndụm.
Then he said you are not lost the temple has always been within you. Close your eyes and you will find me. Enter your room and call upon me and I will be there.
He stepped back and was gone.
No footprints remained. No shadow lingered. But the stillness that followed was different. Not empty but filled.
The people did not speak much that night. But the next morning something changed. Fires lit gently and stayed. The Dreamroots uncurled. Birds returned to the sky. Adaeze entered the Loom Circle and closed her eyes. She did not seek vision she sought presence. And it came. Chidubem stood at the edge of the Spiral Path and placed his hand over his chest. The wind returned.
The temple was no longer a place they would build. It was a presence they would become.