Mother Village Chapter 1 【NEWEST | 2024】

The old women of Lapazza said the village was born from a single tear. Not a tear of sorrow, but of exhaustion—dropped by the first mother, Yema, as she collapsed after walking for three moons with a child on her back and another in her belly. Where the tear hit the cracked earth, a spring burst forth. Where the spring flowed, the baobab grew. And where the baobab cast its shade, Lapazza took root.

The village healer, Old Man Tebo, had chewed kola nut and spat into the wind. “Her spirit is tether-snapped,” he said. “She walks the village, but she is not here. Ask the baobab. Ask the root.”

Koffi stood. He tucked the leaking gourd into the fold of his tunic. He did not tell his mother goodbye—she wouldn’t understand. He did not tell Tebo, who would chain him to the baobab. He simply walked. mother village chapter 1

Behind him, in the village, his mother stopped humming.

Now, at the edge of the Cassava Field, he held the leaking gourd—his mother’s favorite water gourd, the one with the gourd-bird carved into its side. It wasn’t leaking water. It was leaking a thin, silvery sap that smelled of milk and thunder. He had never seen sap like that. Neither had Tebo, who had crossed himself with ash when Koffi showed him. The old women of Lapazza said the village

Something was wrong. And every wrong thing pointed east.

Three days ago, those hands had stopped moving. They had been kneading dough for morning flatbread, the same way they had every day for as long as Koffi could remember. Then the pestle slipped. Then the fingers curled. Then the eyes—those warm, river-stone eyes—went somewhere else. Somewhere far behind them. Where the spring flowed, the baobab grew

The sun was a white blister in the sky. Koffi squatted at the edge of the Cassava Field, the one closest to the Old Wall—a crumbling spine of mud-and-stone that no one remembered building but everyone knew not to cross. Beyond it lay the Ashen Grove, where the red soil turned gray and the trees grew twisted, their branches pointing east like accusatory fingers. No one from Lapazza had gone into the Grove in three generations. Not since the Season of the Missing.