The Way of Iron by Azeez Aregbesola
Synopsis
Exiled to his late father’s abandoned farmland on the outskirts of ancient Ile‑Ife, Aremu has spent years hiding from the world—and from the shame of Ogundele, the once‑legendary Ologun battle leader whose fall paved the way for Okan’s brutal reign. Under the tyrant’s serpent throne, silence is survival, and Aremu intends to live out his days unseen.
But on the eve of the catastrophic failure of the Egba Awon Iya’s rebellion, Ife’s last hope shifts to the Ologun—the warrior cult that once defended the kingdom in its golden age. Scattered, hunted, and nearly erased by Okan, the Ologun have begun to regroup under their aging commander, Ogundi. Their mission is simple and impossible: strike one final blow to topple Okan before the tyrant tightens his grip forever.
To stand any chance, they need every fighter who still remembers the old ways. Even the son of a disgraced war hero.
Dragged from obscurity and thrust into a conflict he never asked for, Aremu must confront the legacy he abandoned and the kingdom he thought he’d lost. As the Ologun prepare for their last stand, ancient loyalties resurface, old wounds reopen, and Aremu discovers that the fate of Ife may rest on the courage he has spent a lifetime avoiding.
In a land where myth bleeds into memory and rebellion is paid for in blood, the final battle will decide whether the serpent throne falls—or whether Ile‑Ife is lost forever.
1
“When the sky remains silent to the cries of the living, the earth must learn to speak in the language of clashing iron.”
In the dawn of memory, Ife was not merely a kingdom of mud-brick walls and bustling marketplaces; it was the sacred heartbeat of the world. It was a land where the spiritual and the physical walked hand-in-hand along paths of glittering red clay. Beneath the sprawling canopy of the ancient Iroko trees, the air hummed with Àṣẹ, the primordial life-force that bound the living to the ancestors and the Orishas. The nights were guarded by the golden, protective barriers of the Egbe Awon Iya, the sacred sisterhood of magical matriarchs who wove the ancestral light to keep the dark at bay. For generations, Ife thrived in a delicate, beautiful harmony, its people sleeping soundly under skies that wept only sweet rain and blessings.
But peace, like the morning mist over the Niger, is a fragile thing.
Six years ago, the sky curdled.
From the shadowed, forgotten valleys of the west came Okan, a usurper whose heart was a void and whose ambition was a sickness. He did not march with standard armies. Instead, he brought a nightmare made flesh: the serpent horde. Millions of vipers, cobras, and black mambas poured over the borders of Ife like a living, writhing tide.
Worse still was the horror of Okan’s magic. He was bound to those beasts. Through a dark, suffocating hive-mind, the tyrant could see through every slithering eye and strike through every venomous fang.
Under Okan’s tyranny, Ife was remade in his horrific image.
No word could be whispered in private, for a serpent always lurked in the thatch of the roofs, sending the treasonous thoughts of the citizens directly into Okan’s mind. The youth of Ife were systematically drained, either pressed into the tyrant’s elite human vanguard or sacrificed to feed the insatiable hunger of the nesting pits beneath his palace. The ancient shrines were desecrated. The priests were hunted, and the names of the Orishas were outlawed, replaced by the mandatory worship of the great Serpent Crown.
Desperation became the very air the people breathed. Mothers wept in silence, fathers bowed their heads to the red dirt in forced obedience, and the once-vibrant kingdom fell into a hollow, terrified hush.
There were those who fought back.
In the secret shadows of the mountains, the Egbe Awon Iya attempted a grand, desperate gambit. They sought to smuggle the infant king, Emun, the last true heir of Ife’s royal bloodline, to the sanctuary of the Orishas of Stone. It was a mission of blood and sacrifice. The matriarch Iya Deh burned the very forests to ash with ancestral coal storms, and her daughters bled on the mountain trails to protect the sacred Iroko box containing the child.
But the sisterhood’s faith was shattered at the threshold of victory.
When the ancient stone seals were finally broken in the deepest caverns of the mountain, they did not find the future king. They found a decoy. Somewhere in the screaming chaos of the trail, the tyrant Okan had outmanoeuvred them, swapping the true heir and leaving the resistance with a hollow victory. Now, the sisterhood lies broken, scattered, and paralyzed by the toxic suspicion that a traitor sits at the very head of their sacred order.
The magic of the old world has failed. The ancestors have gone quiet.
Thwack. Swish. Thwack.
The sound of sharpened iron biting into thick stalks and unforgiving earth was a relentless, hypnotic metronome in the suffocating heat of the lowlands. The sun was still two hand-spans above the western horizon, casting a heavy, amber glare over the sprawling wheat fields of the outer provinces, but the air already felt baked dry.
At the centre of this golden expanse stood Aremu.
At twenty-four, he possessed the lean, coiled musculature of a man who had never known the luxury of idleness. Stripped to the waist, his dark skin was slick with a heavy sheen of sweat, coated in a fine layer of the red clay dust that defined the lands of ancient Ife. His hands, rough as dried tree bark, gripped the hilt of a heavy, curved agricultural cutlass. It was a crude, well-worn tool, but in his grip, it moved with the devastating precision of a dancer’s ribbon.
Thwack. Swish. Thwack.
He stepped forward, his shoulders rolling as he brought the blade down in a wide, sweeping arc. The invasive, thorny weeds that threatened to choke the wheat crops were severed at the root in a single, brutal motion. He didn’t pause to wipe the sweat stinging his eyes; he simply hooked his foot under the fallen brush, kicked it aside, and took another step forward.
To understand Aremu, one only needed to look at the ground he had already conquered.
Any ordinary farmer would have looked at the vast tract of untamed field that morning and resigned themselves to a week of back-breaking labour. But the swaths of cleared earth stretching out behind Aremu told a different story. It was not yet sunset, yet he had single-handedly carved a massive, meticulously weeded perimeter that would have exhausted three grown men.
The towering piles of discarded brush lining the edges of the field were a testament to his singular, unrelenting focus. Aremu worked like a man trying to outrun a demon. There was a quiet, burning intensity in his jaw, a refusal to let the oppressive heat or the ache in his lower back dictate the terms of his day.
His Stance: Rooted and perfectly balanced. Every swing of the cutlass originated from his hips, conserving energy while maximizing the striking force of the iron blade.
His Focus: His dark, narrow eyes never drifted to the shade of the distant baobab trees. They stayed locked on the soil, calculating the next strike, the next step, the next severed root.
He swung the cutlass again, the iron whistling sharply through the humid air.
He had to work this hard. Under the tyrannical reign of Okan, the grain taxes levied on the outer provinces were extortionate. To fall behind on the harvest meant starvation, or worse attracting the attention of the slithering tax collectors who demanded a toll of flesh when the silos were empty. Aremu poured his frustration, his silent rage, and his desperate will to survive into the iron in his hand.
As the late afternoon sun began to paint the sky in bruised shades of purple and gold, Aremu finally paused. He rested the flat of his cutlass against his thigh, his chest heaving as he looked back at the colossal expanse of cleared earth. He wiped his brow with the back of his forearm, his calloused fingers leaving a streak of clean skin through the dust. It was a brutal day’s work, but as he surveyed the golden stalks of wheat finally breathing free from the choking weeds, a flicker of hard-won satisfaction settled in his eyes.
Exhaustion finally caught up with Aremu as the sun dipped lower, casting long, skeletal shadows across the cleared field. He drove his agricultural cutlass firmly into the soft earth, leaving it upright, and walked toward the edge of the clearing where a massive, ancient baobab tree stood.
Around its sprawling trunk, Aremu had constructed a modest shelter, a simple roof of dried palm fronds and thick thatch supported by sturdy wooden poles. It was a sanctuary from the relentless heat, a place where the breeze managed to sneak through the open sides.
Collapsing onto a low wooden stool beneath the shade, Aremu let out a long, ragged breath. His muscles throbbed, but his immediate need was thirst. He leaned down and pushed aside a layer of loose earth near the base of the tree, revealing the heavy clay lid of a large àmù, a traditional water pot buried deep in the ground to keep its contents naturally insulated.
Lifting the clay cover, he lowered a hollowed-out gourd into the dark depths. The water came up crystal clear and biting cold. Aremu drank deeply, letting the refreshing liquid spill down his chin and chest, washing away the layers of red dust and sweat. He closed his eyes, savouring the momentary peace, listening to the distant, ominous hiss of the evening wind through the valley.
As he went to set the gourd down, his eyes strayed to the dark corner of the shelter. A chaotic heap of discarded farm tools, rusted hoes, broken sickles, and dried shafts of harvested wheat, lay piled against the baobab’s trunk.
But something was different.
The shifting afternoon sun had pierced a small gap in the thatched roof, casting a narrow beam of golden light directly onto the pile. There, half-hidden beneath a bundle of dried wheat, a brilliant spark reflected back at him.
Aremu’s gaze sharpened. He stood up, his fatigue instantly forgotten. He approached the pile and carefully cleared away the brittle wheat stalks and heavy iron hoes.
From the debris emerged the polished iron hilt of a weapon. It was wrapped meticulously in dark, oiled leather, contoured perfectly to fit a warrior’s grip.
Aremu wrapped his calloused fingers around the leather hilt. With a slow, deliberate pull, he drew the weapon from its hiding place. The remaining wheat shafts scattered as the blade emerged into the light.
It was not a farmer’s tool. It was a masterpiece of the forge.
The sword was finely crafted from a heavy, dense iron ore, its edges honed to a lethal, razor-sharp perfection. Unlike the dull, rusted iron of his farming implements, this blade was immaculate, glistening fiercely under the penetrating rays of the sun. The fuller of the blade caught the light, radiating a cold, silver brilliance that seemed to challenge the dark shadow hanging over Ife.
Instead of returning to the fields to finish the remaining rows of weeds, Aremu stood in the centre of the shelter, his eyes locked on the glistening iron. A strange, fluid energy seemed to pass from the hilt into his arm. The heavy, exhausted posture of the daily labourer melted away, replaced by the rigid, coiled tension of a predator.
He stepped out from beneath the thatch, entering the open clearing of the farm.
With a sudden, explosive burst of motion, Aremu sliced the air. The iron sword whistled a sharp, lethal note as he executed a flawless diagonal strike. He didn’t stumble; his bare feet gripped the red clay, completely balanced.
Shifting his weight, he spun inward, parrying an imaginary spear thrust before launching into a rapid succession of combat gestures. A swift, downward vertical slash that cut the air with terrifying velocity. A low, sweeping horizontal arc designed to clear the legs of multiple attackers. A sudden, rigid defensive stance, the blade held diagonally across his torso, perfectly shielding his vitals.
His movements were a far cry from the clumsy swings of a disgruntled peasant. They were precise, lethal, and born from years of secret, tireless training in the dark. Every roll of his shoulders and shift of his hips maximized the heavy momentum of the iron sword.
Aremu snapped the blade to a halt, holding it perfectly still just inches above the ground, his chest rising and falling in rhythmic breaths. He looked along the flawless, unyielding edge of the weapon.
A slow, hard-won smirk played at the corner of his lips. He was thoroughly impressed with his own movement. The speed was there. The weight was perfect.
As he wiped the blade with a clean cloth and prepared to conceal it once more, the truth hung silently in the hot lowland air: Aremu was no ordinary farmer.
Aremu let the tip of the blade rest against the red earth, his chest still rising and falling from the exertion of the combat forms. The hard, confident smirk that had touched his lips slowly vanished, replaced by a profound, heavy solemnity.
He looked down at the leather-wrapped hilt. His calloused fingers traced the intricate brass engraving of a diving falcon at the pommel, the personal mark of Ogundele, his late father.
This sword was a fragment of a lost epoch. It was a living piece of a man who had once stood like a mountain against the storms of the world.
Whenever Aremu held it, the scent of the wheat field faded, replaced by the vivid, phantom memories of his childhood: the deafening roar of the grand royal smithies, the blinding brightness of white-hot iron being hammered into shields, and the sight of his father standing at the head of a thousand armoured men.
Before Okan’s serpents slithered out of the dark, the Ologun were not a desperate, hidden militia hiding in abandoned mines. They were the revered guardians of Ife’s physical realm. They were the iron wall that complemented the spiritual tapestry of the Egbe Awon Iya.
And Ogundele had been their beating heart.
Ogundele was a giant of a man, possessed of a tactical mind as sharp as his blade. It was said that during the Border Wars, foreign kings would surrender the moment they saw Ogundele’s falcon-standard tearing across the hills. Yet, to the citizens of Ife, he was a shield. He was the man who ensured that no farmer’s grain was stolen, no child was taken, and no tyrant ever dared to seat himself on the sacred throne.
Aremu closed his eyes, remembering his father’s voice, a deep, resonant rumble that could carry over the din of a battlefield. “Iron does not lie, Aremu,” Ogundele had told him, standing right here in these very lowlands before the world broke. “A spell can be miscast, a spirit can be fickle, but a well-forged blade will always cut where you direct it. Keep your iron sharp, and your heart sharper.”
Opening his eyes to the harsh reality of the fading twilight, Aremu felt a cold, hollow ache in his chest.
He looked across his empty, quiet wheat farm. The Ologun banners had long been burned. Their grand armour had been melted down by Okan’s orders to forge chains for the populace. The names of the legendary iron leaders were whispered only in fear, under the threat of the slithering spies.
A profound, suffocating doubt crept into the young farmer’s mind.
Was it truly the end? Was the legacy of the Ologun nothing more than a story practiced by a lonely son in a hidden shelter?
From his isolated vantage point on the farm, it felt as though the flame his father had carried had been permanently extinguished, crushed beneath the absolute tyranny of the Serpent Crown. He wondered if he was merely delaying the inevitable, weeding a farm just to pay taxes to a monster, while wielding a sword that belonged to a dead world.
With a heavy sigh, Aremu carefully wrapped the blade back in its oiled cloth and buried it deep beneath the heap of tools and wheat shafts. As the shadows of the night finally claimed the lowlands, he picked up his crude agricultural cutlass, his heart caught between the glorious memory of what the Ologun used to be, and the terrifying, silent emptiness of the present.
To understand the tragedy of Ife’s current silence, one must understand the absolute, terrifying majesty of what the Ologun used to be. They were not merely soldiers hired to guard a wall, nor were they simple blacksmiths sweating over hot coals. The Ologun was a deeply complex, highly secretive cult of fraternity, a brotherhood where human flesh, divine metal, and supernatural protection were hammered together until they became indistinguishable.
To be Ologun was to walk a path of blood and iron, bound by sacred oaths to Ogun, the primordial Orisha of war, metallurgy, and the open road. They were the physical spine of the kingdom, operating in an intricate matrix of four distinct, devastating gifts.
Every man initiated into the inner circle of the Ologun was endowed with a combination of these sacred disciplines, though the spirits usually granted a mastery that leaned heavily toward one specific path:
The Priesthood of Ogun. These were the mystics of the forge. They did not pray with gentle herbs; they communed with the Orisha through the rhythmic, deafening ring of the anvil and the pouring of libations over raw ore. They understood the spiritual temper of metal, capable of breathing life into dormant iron and reading the omens hidden within the sparks of a furnace.
The Masters of the Forge. The supreme artisans of destruction. An Ologun blacksmith did not just forge a blade; they engineered nightmares. They possessed the secret knowledge of combining rare mountain ores with specialized charcoal to create weapons that were unnaturally light, completely unbreakable, and honed to edges so sharp they could cleave a shield, and the warrior behind it, in a single strike.
The Brutal Combatants. Warriors who transformed martial violence into a terrifying art form. Their training was merciless. They did not rely on flashy acrobatics; their style was rooted, heavy, and devastatingly efficient. They were trained to use the momentum of their heavy iron axes and broadswords to shatter bones through armour, utilizing every inch of their bodies as a weapon.
The Warded Ones. The Ologun were heavily fortified by defensive sorcery. Through deep scarification rituals, enchanted leather armbands (ìgbádì), and ingested charms, their skin was systematically hardened against physical harm. At the height of their power, a warded Ologun could walk through a hail of arrows and watch the iron tips shatter against his bare chest like brittle glass.
In the golden era, the fraternity was a beautiful, asymmetric machine. A master blacksmith might only be a decent swordsman; a fiercely warded warrior might not know how to whisper the secret incantations to wake the iron. They relied on each other’s imbalances to form an unbroken front.
But then, there was Ogundele.
Aremu’s father was a myth walk among men, one of the vanishingly few anomalies in the history of Ife who possessed all the gifts of the Ologun in equally terrifying, perfect measures. He did not specialize. He conquered every facet of the iron cult.
“When Ogundele spoke, the priests listened. When he struck the anvil, the smiths bowed. When he drew his sword, empires trembled.”
As a priest, his connection to Ogun was so profound that the fires of his personal forge burned with a strange, brilliant blue hue, requiring no bellows to keep them alive. It was whispered that he could look at a lump of raw earth and tell you exactly what kind of blood that iron would spill before it was even melted.
As a smith, he hand-forged his own legendary falcon-crested blades, tempering the hot iron in secret, sacred mixtures that rendered them permanently immune to rust, dullness, or the corrosive venom of Okan’s beasts. The very sword Aremu had just hidden beneath the wheat shafts was born from Ogundele’s singular genius.
In combat, he was a force of nature. Despite his massive size, he moved with a terrifying, predictive speed. When he stood before his enemies his enemies, he dismantled them, his broadsword sweeping through battlefields like a scythe through ripe grain.
Ogundele’s influence within the Ologun was absolute. He was the gravity that held the fractured factions of the blacksmiths and hunters together. One could say without being second guessed that his demise marked the collapse of the Ologun’s golden age.
Without his terrifying, unifying presence, the brotherhood was systematically hunted into the shadows, leaving behind a broken kingdom that forgot the sound of the anvil, and a lonely son weeding a field with a tool that pale in comparison to the legacy buried beneath his feet.
Ten years ago, long before the sky blackened and the first viper slithered over the horizon, Ife was already bleeding. The current generation remembered the kingdom before Okan as a golden paradise, but those who held the iron knew the truth: the rot had started from the top, inside the gilded walls of the royal court.
The crown was then worn by Ooni Akaande, a ruler whose name became synonymous with soft hands and a hardened heart. Akaande did not possess the vision of the ancestors; he possessed only an insatiable hunger for luxury. Under his decree, the ancient laws of fairness were dismantled. The royal treasury was transformed into a private vault for his bloodline, while his favoured friends and sycophants were granted vast tracts of land, enriching themselves unfairly while the common farmers in the outer provinces starved under rising grain taxes.
But it was two specific sins that finally drove the iron brotherhood past the point of endurance.
First, Ooni Akaande looked upon the Ologun not as protectors, but as a threat to his absolute authority. Fearing their collective might, the King initiated a strategic, silent war against the fraternity. He starved the Ologun of cash, cutting off their access to royal metal reserves, defunding the grand smithies, and refusing to pay the warrior stipends.
Ogundele had seen right through the strategy. He recognized it as a fatal, short-sighted castration of Ife’s defences.
“A king who starves his own swords because he fears their edge is a fool,” Ogundele had roared at the council fires. “He leaves the gates wide open. When the rival kingdoms look upon our borders and see no iron to greet them, they will not offer peace, they will offer slaughter.”
Second, and perhaps most grievous to the moral fabric of the sacred city, Akaande had legalized prostitution. What had always been a deep, sacred taboo in Ife was suddenly transformed into a commercial enterprise. The consequence was devastating. Young girls from impoverished families, driven by desperate hunger, were systematically stripped of their dignity, enticed by the glittering gold and shameless promises of the wealthy merchants and nobles who cohorted with the King. The moral shield of Ife was cracking, and the palace had become a playground of exploitation.
Ogundele refused to watch the kingdom break from within. Gathering a fierce, loyal faction of the Ologun who still remembered the oaths of Ogun, he made the ultimate decision: the Ooni had to be removed.
On the moonless night of the coup, Ogundele did not ride alone. Flanking him on the trail to the palace were his two sons.
There was Ayanju, seventeen years old, a young man who breathed with the fiery, untamed energy of a furnace. At seventeen, Ayanju was already a terrifying prodigy, fast taking after his father in the martial arts of combat and the deep mysteries of the warded skin. He wielded a dual-pronged iron spear that he had helped forge himself, his eyes burning with the righteous fury of the brotherhood.
Beside him rode Aremu, just fourteen years old. Though younger, Aremu already possessed the broad, heavy shoulders of his lineage and a quiet, terrifying focus that mirrored Ogundele’s own. He was a silent sponge, absorbing the chants of the Ogun priesthood and the rhythm of the blade faster than any initiate in the history of the cult. He carried a short iron broadsword, his knuckles white against the leather wrap.
Ogundele brought them not out of cruelty, but out of necessity. In the Ologun, a leader’s sons were his vanguard. They had to see the price of freedom, and they had to learn how to strike the rot before it spread.
The assault on the palace was a tempest of cold iron and shattered stone. Ogundele led the charge through the outer gates, his massive form warded so heavily by ancient charms that the palace guards’ arrows turned to splinters against his chest.
“For the blood of the common man!” Ogundele’s voice echoed through the high-walled courtyards. “For the dignity of our daughters!”
Ayanju moved like a wildfire through the left flank. His spear was a blur of silver, parrying three royal guards at once, his movements perfectly balanced, displaying the brutal, efficient martial art his father had beaten into him during long nights in the forge. To the right, fourteen-year-old Aremu held the defensive line. When a veteran royal champion attempted to bypass Ogundele’s flank, Aremu stepped into the shadow, dropped low, and executed a perfect falcon’s dive strike, severing the champion’s shield arm in a single, precise movement that left the older Ologun warriors shouting in awe.
Together, the father and his two brilliant sons cut a bloody, unyielding path directly into the heart of the palace, fighting their way to the very steps of the throne room.
The heavy oak doors of the inner throne room were within their grasp. Fourteen-year-old Aremu could see the shimmering gold trim of Ooni Akaande’s robes through the courtyard archway, the corrupt king trembling behind his remaining guard. Ogundele’s falcon-crested blade was raised high, ready to strike the definitive blow that would cleanse Ife’s crown.
But the final blow never fell.
The air in the grand courtyard suddenly thickened, turning freezing cold before igniting into a chaotic, suffocating maelstrom of conflicting spiritual currents. Stepping through the shattered southern gates came Ogundi, the ultimate leader of the Ologun, backed by an unprecedented, terrifying alliance: the loyalist iron warriors, the blinding golden Àṣẹ of the Egbe Awon Iya, and the blood-manipulating mystics of the Omi Eje.
“Lower your steel, Ogundele!” Ogundi’s voice boomed across the square. “You breach the sacred covenant of the ancestors!”
“The crown is rotten, Ogundi!” Ogundele roared back, his blue-flamed aura flaring to life. “You protect a parasite while the body dies!”
What followed was not a trial, but a slaughterhouse of brawn and charms. Ogundele’s small faction was instantly surrounded, fighting a desperate, losing war against the combined weight of Ife’s elite.
Seventeen-year-old Ayanju fought like a wildfire on the left flank. His dual-pronged iron spear was a blur of silver, parrying the heavy axes of three loyalist Ologun while trying to shield his fourteen-year-old brother. But the coalition was relentless. A matriarch of the Awon Iya fractured the stone beneath Ayanju’s feet, trapping his ankles, while the unseen, constricting weight of the Omi Eje blood-weavers seized the air in his lungs.
“Aremu, move!” Ayanju choked out, his eyes bloodshot as he forced his stiffening limbs to swing the spear one last time.
A loyalist Ologun executioner, his skin warded to stone and his blade heavy with merciless intent, seized the vulnerability. The heavy iron axe came down in a brutal, crushing arc.
Aremu screamed, the sound tearing from his throat as Ayanju’s spear shattered into splinters. The fiery prodigy of the iron cult collapsed into the red dirt, his life-force bleeding out into the palace stones before his younger brother’s eyes. Ayanju, the brilliant vanguard, was dead.
Seeing his eldest son fall, a primal, terrifying roar erupted from Ogundele. The anomaly of the forge unleashed the absolute limit of his power. His blue-flamed aura exploded outward, temporarily shattering the stone runes binding him and sending a wave of loyalist warriors crashing into the courtyard walls.
Pinned by a dozen new spiritual chains seconds later, his body turning to lead under the combined curses of the cults, Ogundele locked his tearing eyes onto his remaining son.
“Run, Aremu!” the father bellowed, using his final gasp of warded strength to slam his massive torso into the guards advancing on the boy. “Live! Keep the iron alive!”
Tears blinding his vision and his brother’s blood splattered across his chest, fourteen-year-old Aremu succumbed to the raw instinct of survival. He spun on his heel, ducking beneath the sweeping net of a golden Awon Iya energy grid. He didn’t look back at his father being forced to his knees. He didn’t look back at the broken corpse of his brother.
Aremu sprinted through a narrow service tunnel, scaling the outer palace wall just as the alarm horns began to wail. He leaped from the parapet and vanished into the pitch-black, suffocating embrace of the outer forest.
That night, the forest was a labyrinth of terror. Aremu ran until his lungs burned like hot coals and his bare feet were lacerated by thorns and jagged rocks. He hid in the hollow root of a massive baobab tree, curling into a ball, shaking violently as the phantom image of his brother’s fall replayed behind his eyelids.
The next morning, as he crouched in the underbrush miles away from the city, the deep, mournful thud of the palace execution drums echoed across the valley. Ooni Akaande had carried out the decree. Ogundele was gone.
