The tree of skulls stood silent at dawn, its bone-fruit clattering softly in the wind like ancient chimes. Each skull bore markings—carvings not done by hands, but by time, by pain, by memory. The twelve daughters circled the tree as if orbiting a god that had never needed worship. Adamma stood at its roots.
She could feel it now—the heartbeat in the soil.
It was not hers.
It was the land's.
Mma Oluchi approached her, holding a bowl carved from obsidian. In it, a dark liquid shimmered unnaturally. It was not wine. It was the blood of names—extracted from the hidden pages of history, mixed with ash from the burnt scrolls of stolen ancestors.
"You must drink," Oluchi said.
Adamma took the bowl. Her hands didn't shake.
One sip.
The world tilted.
***
She fell.
Into memory. Into a time before time.
Men with metal skins came across waters, calling the children "tools," the women "wombs," and the land "empty." But it had never been empty. It had simply been listening.
She saw the sacred drum taken to London, hanging in silence in a glass cage.
She saw the bones of twins drowned in colonial rivers, reborn as lightning in the mouths of unborn girls.
She saw her own face—older, bloodied, crowned with red clay.
Then—blackness.
***
She awoke screaming.
Not in fear.
In power.
The other daughters stepped back. Her hair had gone white as salt. Her veins glowed beneath her skin like threads of fire.
"What did you see?" Mma Oluchi asked.
Adamma opened her mouth.
But another voice answered.
From the trees.
"They know now," the wind whispered.
"They've remembered us."
***
In the village square, the elders stood frozen. Chickens had pecked themselves to death. Mirrors cracked without being touched. And every infant born in the last two days had eyes that never blinked.
The Bonekeeper, Nneka, stood before the shrine.
She spoke again—clear and sharp.
"They named us slaves," she said. "But the land never called us that."
Her tongue—thought lost—hung bloody in her hand.
She had torn it from her throat to speak once more.
***
Adamma led the daughters to the river that night.
Not to cleanse themselves.
To awaken what had been buried beneath it.
In the moonlight, they chanted.
The water rose.
It carried bones.
But not human ones.
Teeth longer than a grown man's hand.
Horns curved like sickles.
The remains of what the first people had once called: the sky-eaters.
Before the gods fell. Before the empires swallowed the tribes.
Before even the name *Africa* had been spoken by tongues that did not belong.
Now, they had returned.
And they were hungry.
—