Chapter 5: Beneath the River Called Grief

From Echoes Beneath Ohio
by Esi Noire

Keira and Kojo had always known the river spoke.

Even when they were children digging bottle caps out of the Mad River’s edge, they could feel it humming beneath their feet. Not the noise of water – but something else. Something waiting.

Now grown, the twins worked as freelance archivists in what used to be East Springfield. Their project: digitize forgotten municipal maps and cemetery ledgers from beneath the old Civic Building before the state demolished it.

But Kojo wasn’t in it for the paycheck.

And Keira wasn’t in it for preservation.

They were searching for what had been erased.

It was Kojo who first noticed the red thread. It ran beneath the concrete like a vein, pulsing faintly just after dusk, exposed in a crack near the river’s drainage path.

He followed it with a hand-scanner. It disappeared beneath a rusted grate marked Water Department 1948 – a date that didn’t exist in their archival records.

Keira looked up from the blueprint scans, brow furrowed. “That year was wiped.”

Kojo nodded. “Exactly. Someone wanted it forgotten.”

They pulled the grate open.

What lay beneath was not a tunnel.

It was a chamber, built of stone not native to Ohio. The walls were lined with smooth ceramic inlays – and across every surface, symbols neither of them recognized.

At the center: a pool of unmoving water, perfectly circular, glowing faintly violet.

“Is it… digital?” Keira whispered, placing a hand near it.

“No,” Kojo replied. “It’s alive.”

From within the pool, a whisper rippled out – not with sound, but into memory.

“You have entered the Archive of the Forgotten Rain.”

Keira staggered back. Kojo closed his eyes. The glyphs began to shift around them – displaying names, sounds, voices long thought lost to burial and bureaucracy.

One by one, the voices began singing.

A chorus of those never recorded, rising from a river the city paved over decades ago.

And in that song, Keira heard something unmistakable:

“Zola’s voice,” she whispered. “She’s already been here.”

Above ground, the Mad River flowed on… quiet, brown, slow.

But beneath it, the grief of a buried people had begun to bloom into record.