the beginning

Tomelo returned from the village just as the sky was turning the color of burnt clay. The evening wind carried the smell of cooking fires and crushed grass, but she barely noticed. Her steps slowed as she reached the edge of her homestead, her brows drawn together, her face tight with a confusion she could not shake.

The elders had spoken to her kindly that day. The women at the well had laughed as usual. Everything had been normal. And yet, something inside her felt wrong—misaligned, as if her spirit had taken a different path from her body and had not yet returned.

It was the dream again.

For many nights now, it had visited her without mercy, repeating itself like an old song whose meaning had been forgotten. Each time she closed her eyes, she was no longer in her small hut or on her sleeping mat. Instead, she stood barefoot on red earth beneath a sky crowded with unfamiliar stars.

In the dream, she was always walking toward the forest.

The forest was older than memory, its trees tall and thick, their roots twisting like ancient fingers gripping the soil. Somewhere deep within it flowed a river—one that no longer existed in the waking world. The elders said it had dried up before Tomelo was born, yet in her dream it moved freely, its waters dark and alive.

The river called to her.

She could hear it whisper her name, not with sound but with feeling, as though the water itself remembered her. When she reached the bank, she would see her reflection shimmer and break apart, revealing another face beneath her own—older, wiser, watching her with knowing eyes.

Behind her, footsteps would approach.

Slow. Careful. Familiar.

She never turned around. Fear rooted her feet to the ground. Just as a hand almost touched her shoulder, she would wake up, her heart racing, her skin cold with sweat, her name still echoing in her ears.

Tomelo tried to forget the dream, but it followed her into daylight.

As she stirred nshima over the fire, she caught herself listening for whispers. When she fetched water, the reflection in the calabash sometimes seemed to move on its own. Even the drums at night—played for celebrations or ceremonies—felt as though they were beating in rhythm with something inside her chest.

Her grandmother noticed.

That evening, the old woman sat beside Tomelo, feeding the fire with dry sticks. Her eyes, clouded by age but sharp with understanding, lingered on Tomelo longer than usual.

“You are walking in two worlds,” her grandmother said quietly.

Tomelo froze. “What do you mean, Gogo?”

“Your spirit is being called,” the old woman replied. “Dreams do not repeat themselves without reason. When they do, it means something has been left unfinished.”

Tomelo swallowed hard. She had grown up hearing stories of ancestors who visited through dreams, of rivers that were gateways, of forests that remembered names long after voices had faded. She had laughed at those stories as a child.

Now they no longer felt like stories.

That night, Tomelo did not resist sleep.

When the dream came, she let it carry her fully. She walked into the forest without fear, her feet steady on the red earth. At the river’s edge, she finally turned around.

The figure behind her was no stranger.

It was a woman who looked like her, yet not—her face marked by time, her eyes deep with history. An ancestor. A memory made flesh.

“You have returned,” the woman said.

Tomelo understood then. The dream was not a warning. It was an invitation.

Some callings are inherited, passed down like names or scars. And some rivers, even when they dry, never truly disappear.

As the first light of dawn touched Tomelo’s face, she woke with calm in her chest. The confusion was gone. In its place was purpose.

Her journey, she now knew, had only just begun.

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