They say the ocean never forgives. She is memory incarnate—keeper of old songs, older wounds, the endless chains that have crossed her waters like scars. Time means nothing to her; she remembers every heartbeat lost, every spirit thrown overboard, every rhythm interrupted. Whether you are captain or captive, strong or broken, when Amadioha—the god of thunder, draws his thunderous breath, the great waters will consume you. The ocean does not discriminate. She simply remembers, and in remembering, she devours.

Onwuka learned this truth as the ship disintegrated beneath him, shattering like a clay pot dropped from ancestral heights—wood and human voices carried on wind, mingling with the whispers of those who had gone before.

The storm arrived with the suddenness of a striking cobra, its violence faster than the slavers' calculations, faster than their strange metal instruments could predict. One moment, the horizon was a smear of grey like aged palm oil; the next, the heavens split open, and the Atlantic roared with the collective fury of a thousand unsilenced spirits.

He didn't remember falling into the water, only the bite of cold that pierced him like ritual scarification and the salt that scraped his eyes raw. The iron chains around his wrists and ankles—foreign metal that had no place in his people's traditions—dragged him down, down into the black where ancient things slumbered.

He thrashed against the weight, his heart drumming a desperate rhythm in the cavity of his chest, and for a fleeting moment, he thought of his mother. Her face had always been sharp—eyes like freshly honed machetes, lips that curled in disdain at the world's cruelties. What would she say, watching her son sink like this, bound in the chains of strangers' gods, his body becoming yet another offering to waters already thick with ancestral bones?

But then—as sometimes happens in stories where the spirits remember their children—he didn't drown.

A piece of the ship's wooden skin floated by, marked with symbols he didn't recognize, white men's magic scratched into dead trees. His fingers latched onto it like a diviner grasping his last throwing bone, like his grandfather had once gripped his sacred items before the raiders came.

Above him, the ship's ghost-pale shape crumbled into chaos, its masts splintering like young bamboo in a storm, its sails catching fire despite the rain—perhaps Amadioha's own judgment on this vessel of horrors. But Onwuka couldn't help but wonder why they, too, were condemned to the same fate as the white men who had fastened these iron chains to their wrists. Why did liberation always taste of blood?

But who was he to question the gods and their peculiar sense of justice?

The cries of the enslaved—his people, taken from different villages but now bound in the same terrible fate—pierced the air like funeral songs. They were voices that should have been raised in harvest celebrations, in naming ceremonies, in lovers' whispers, not these desperate prayers that the thunder swallowed whole. Each crack of lightning illuminated faces twisted in terror, bodies suspended between sky and sea like spirits caught between worlds.

Onwuka had never been skilled in the ways of water—he was a child of the red earth, his feet had always known the embrace of soil, not salt—but on this night, his body refused to sink into the ocean's embrace.

The iron that bound him, though, sang its own dark song, pulling him toward the depths where water spirits stripped the flesh from drowning men and kept their bones as terrible trophies, a collection of stories never to be told.

Through the storm's fury, he glimpsed smaller boats cutting through the waves like hollow gourds, their occupants clinging to wood and prayer. Some vanished beneath towers of angry water, swallowed whole by the Atlantic's endless hunger, their screams joining the chorus of all those who had come before.

A sound split the sky then—not thunder, but something raw and human that turned to bubbles and blood, a death song no elder had ever taught. Through the curtain of rain, Onwuka watched as death claimed another soul. The creatures that hunted them were like nothing in all the stories his grandmother had woven around evening fires, no spirit-tales passed down through generations could have prepared him for these demons.

They moved like shadows given flesh, their bodies smooth as fresh palm oil, with fins that cut through water like the sharpened machetes of warriors. Their mouths—Heavens!—their mouths were endless things, rows of teeth arranged like a chief's arsenal, designed by some dark god for the singular purpose of returning flesh to water. These grey demons of the deep claimed slaver and slave alike, turning the storm-churned sea a deeper red, as though the ocean itself was bleeding out its ancient wounds.

Onwuka's legs kicked with the desperate rhythm of a talking drum at a warrior's funeral, each stroke a prayer to gods both old and new, each splash a plea to spirits who might have forgotten his name. Direction meant nothing now—there was only away, away from death's infinite jaws, away from waters that had tasted too much suffering. His eyes burned with salt and tears as he called out to his ancestors in his mother tongue, words carried away by wind and wave like smoke from ritual fires.

"My fathers, my mothers, I beg you!" he sobbed. "Let me not end in these foreign waters, these waters that do not know the taste of my village dust. If I must return to the earth, let it be earth that remembers my first steps, earth that knows the songs of my people!"

A shadow moved beneath the waves—another of the grey demons, its fin cutting through the water like a curse spoken by a jealous rival, aimed straight for his thrashing legs. Onwuka's heart stumbled in its beating like a poorly tuned drum as he turned to flee, only to collide with one of the white men. The slave trader's pale face appeared ghostly in the storm's light, his strange words spilling like poisoned honey as he raised a small pistol. The crack of gunpowder competed with Amadioha's thunder as he fired again and again at the approaching beast, each flash illuminating the terror that made all men brothers in death's presence.

Onwuka seized the moment like a diviner grasping at scattered cowries, kicking away with frantic strokes. Behind him, the scream tore through the storm—a sound that mingled with the wind, rain, and death until it became part of the ocean's terrible memory.

The image of his mother's face emerged, sharp as the blade of a hunter's machete after first blood: "My son," she had said on the morning of his birth, while rain blessed the earth with promise, "you were born in rain, you cannot die in water. The spirits themselves would rise up in shame."

A piece of wreckage bumped against his side, but it wasn't enough to hold him afloat, wasn't enough to bear the weight of his destiny. His legs burned with the effort, his chest a drumbeat of panic that echoed the rhythms of his childhood. Then, through the blur of salt and shadow, he saw it: a smaller boat, untouched by chaos. It bobbed like a restless spirit on the waves, defying the storm's wrath, as though the ancestors themselves had wrapped it in their protection, a final answer to desperate prayers.

The glow of moonlight on its smooth, foreign wood was a promise. But promises, like the words of slave traders, could wear many faces.

Onwuka swam to it.

Each stroke toward the vessel felt like grinding corn between ancient stones—endless, exhausting, necessary for survival in a world that had forgotten mercy. The chains that had threatened to drag him down to the ocean's graveyard now hung looser, as if the sea spirits themselves had picked their locks with fingers of foam and fury. They clinked against each other like bitter jewelry, marking his progress through the tempest. Salt found every cut the slavers had given him, every scratch from the ship's violent dissolution, but pain was a luxury reserved for those who had the privilege of tomorrow. Not now. Not yet.

When his trembling fingers finally grasped the boat's edge—smooth, foreign wood that bore no memory of African forests—he thought perhaps he had died after all, and this was some spirit vessel come to ferry him across the waters that separated the living from the ancestors. But then he saw the doctor.

The white man huddled at the far end like a cornered animal, clutching an oar as though it were the last thread of sanity in a world unraveled. His face was hollow, carved by terror into something that straddled the boundary between man and ghost, his eyes as wide and red as harvest moons hanging over cursed land. His lips moved in what must have been prayers to his distant god, though surely tonight had proved how far they all were from any divine protection, how thin the veil between salvation and damnation. The doctor didn't notice Onwuka until their eyes met across the divide of wood and water, culture and circumstance—a space wider than the ocean itself.

"Nyere m aka," Onwuka managed, his voice a raw whisper against the storm's roar, each syllable carrying the weight of generations. The words felt heavy in his mouth, unfamiliar after months of silence enforced by iron and fear. 'Help me.' Two words that should have been simple, yet here they balanced on the knife-edge between life and death, between what was human and what was monstrous.

The doctor flinched at the sound as though struck by lightning, his hands tightening on the oar until his knuckles were pale as the bones that littered the ocean floor. His eyes darted between Onwuka and the restless sea where shadows still hunted, his lips moving soundlessly—prayers or curses, mercy or damnation, the language of fear needed no translation.

For a moment, the doctor seemed frozen, caught between worlds.

The hesitation was long enough for Onwuka to feel his strength ebbing, the sea's hungry pull stronger than his mortal will. "Please," he choked out.

The word struck something ancient in the doctor, something deeper than the color of skin or the weight of chains. His jaw clenched like a trap closing, and with a sound like resignation, he lunged forward, hauling Onwuka onto the boat with hands that trembled like leaves in a harvest wind.

Onwuka collapsed onto the wet planks as the world spun like a masquerade dancer possessed by spirits, the stars and sea trading places in his vision until up and down lost all meaning. His chest heaved with the effort of survival, every muscle crying out like mourners at a chief's funeral. For the first time since the ship began to break apart, he allowed his eyes to close, feeling the rain on his face like tears from ancestors who had watched his struggle from above.

"Imela," he whispered—thank you—though whether to the doctor, to Amadioha's mighty presence, or to the ancestors who had refused to let him join their ranks in the spirit realm, even he wasn't sure. Some debts could never be measured, some gratitude never fully expressed.

The doctor sat frozen like a sacred statue in an abandoned shrine, his eyes fixed on Onwuka as if seeing both redemption and damnation written in the same flesh. Perhaps he was wondering if mercy, too, could be a kind of sin in a world built on cruelty.

No words passed between them—what language could bridge this gulf carved by centuries of wrong, this ocean of understanding deeper than the waters beneath?

Above, the storm that had swallowed a ship full of souls began to tire of its terrible feast. Lightning retreated like spears being withdrawn from a battlefield, thunder grew distant like drums from a village disappearing into memory. The wreckage—that floating graveyard of wood and iron and flesh—disappeared into the darkness as if it had never existed at all, taking with it the chorus of dying voices that would haunt both men's dreams until their last breaths. In their wake came a silence deeper than any Onwuka had known in his village's sacred groves, a silence that spoke of things too profound for human tongues.

The great waters calmed, though Onwuka knew better than to trust their sudden peace. The waves now lapped at their tiny vessel with an almost gentle rhythm, like a mother soothing a child to sleep after nightmares—but he remembered how those same waters had turned to teeth and fury mere moments before, how quickly comfort could become violence.

The night stretched around them, endless as a curse spoken by a vengeful deity, the horizon a smear where black sea met black sky, where all paths forward vanished into uncertainty.

In that moment, as their small boat drifted between the worlds of the living and the dead, Onwuka felt the truth settle into his bones like ancient wisdom: he would not die in these waters. His chi was too strong, his mother's prayers too powerful, his ancestors too watchful to let him slip away into this foreign deep. The ocean might not forgive—might never forget the cargo it had been forced to carry across its back for so many seasons—but tonight, perhaps it would grant passage to one soul who had looked into its darkness and refused to surrender.

The chains around his wrists clinked softly, a reminder that survival was not the same as freedom. But survival, Onwuka knew, was its own kind of defiance.

The Ocean never forgives.

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