Chapter 1: The Stranger Called Sango
The people of Abeokuta believed that the past never truly sleeps.
Old men sitting beneath the ancient trees often said that the spirits of the land still walk among the living. Most young people laughed at those stories. They called them myths meant to scare children and keep them from wandering at night.
But there was a season when the stories stopped sounding like myths.
It began during the rainy months, when the sky over Abeokuta turned dark earlier than usual and thunder rolled across the hills like the beating of giant drums.
On one strange evening, a man appeared in the town.
No one saw where he came from.
Some said he walked down from the rocky hills. Others swore he came out of the forest road that led to the old abandoned shrine outside the town.
He was tall, dark, and wrapped in a faded red cloth that looked older than time itself. Around his neck hung strange beads that clinked softly whenever he moved.
But the most frightening thing about the man was his eyes.
They burned like lightning trapped inside a human body.
When the market women first saw him standing silently near the entrance of the market square, whispers spread quickly.
“Who is that man?”
“Where did he come from?”
But the old woman who sold roasted corn suddenly dropped her tray when she saw him.
Her hands began to tremble.
She whispered only one name.
“Sango”
The name spread through the market like fire in dry grass.
Sango.
The ancient name of the god of thunder.
But this man was no god or at least that was what everyone wanted to believe.
Strange things began happening after his arrival.
Thunder struck places where the sky was clear.
A man who insulted the stranger was found the next morning unconscious beneath a tree that had been split in half by lightning.
And every night, when the wind became quiet, some people claimed they could hear the sound of distant drums coming from the hills surrounding Abeokuta.
Drums that no human hands were playing.
Soon the town realized something terrifying:
The mysterious stranger called Sango was not just a wandering man.
He had come for something.
And somewhere in Abeokuta, someone was hiding a secret powerful enough to wake the thunder.
