Ink of Ages Fiction Prize

The Weaver of Faces

Mask-Maker and the Child

Long before the sea went silent, it sang to Ayotunde. 

It sang when she soaked the wood in saltwater and palm ash, when she scraped it smooth with knotted stone, when she whispered the Oriki of each ancestor as her knife cut grain from breath. The masks she carved were not decorations, never decorations. They were vessels. Faces the spirits could wear when they wished to be seen by mortals. 

Tonight her fingers trembled. Not from age. From knowledge. 

Around her, the village prepared for the Festival of River Mouths. Small fires flickered like lost stars between clay houses. Children rehearsed dances, their feet clumsy with fear. No one said it aloud, but the slavers were close. Too close. Smoke from a neighboring village had risen two days ago and still clung in the air like a warning. 

Ayotunde sat in the shadow of the hut, the half-finished masking lingering in her lap. Not one for any Orisha she knew. This one bore a blank center ringed by many eyes, each carved from different wood. One smiled. One wept. One screamed. The rest waited. “You should not carve that one,” came a voice behind her. 

She did not turn. “And yet I do.” 

The speaker was the boy, Kola. Nine or ten, with silent feet and long-lashed eyes that saw more than they should. Since the raid, he had lived amongst the priestesses, eating only sparingly, speaking sparer still. But Ayontunde had caught him watching. Watching the way her fingers passed over the wood. Watching how her blade paused when the spirit shifted inside the grain. 

“They say you hear the masks,” he said.

“I do not need ears. The wood speaks through my hands.” 

“Then what does that one say?” 

Ayotunde placed the knife down. “It says that the gods are tired of being known.” Kola did not respond to that. He only looked at the mask, his own face mirroring the blankness at its center. He lingered for some time before departing, saying nothing the whole while. 

That night, the festival was a ghost of itself. No masquerade. No drumming. Only prayer and firelight and the shiver of fear dressed in silence. Still, Ayotunde set her masks outside her hut, as always. The wind danced amongst them, lifting their cowrie-lined braids, rustling their feathers like wings. 

She did not sleep. 

When the screams began, she was already awake. The slavers came with torches and dogs and chains that clanked like cruel laughter. She saw the priestesses run. Saw the elder’s house burn. Heard the sob of drums played not in rhythm, but in warning. Her hut was last. By then, she had locked eyes with Kola.

“You know what to do,” she said. He nodded once. 

She gave him the mask. Not the beautiful ones. Not the honored Orisha with painted cheeks and polished lips. The one with no face. He took it without question and disappeared through the reed curtains. 

Ayotunde stood alone when they came. She did not raise a blade. She did not cry. When they demanded to know where the boy had gone, she lifted her chin and said, “He has already become more than you could ever carry in chains.”

They struck her then. And when she did not fall, they struck her again. The masks behind her swayed in the firelight. One smiled. One wept. One screamed. 

Kola fled into the forest with the mask clutched against his chest like a heartbeat. He did not allow himself to look back. The trees welcomed him, or at least they did not turn him away. He wandered for three days, never eating, never sleeping. The mask grew heavier each night, though it never changed shape. On the fourth morning, he held it up to his face. 

And the wind went still. A cicada chirped. Then another. Then finally … a voice. Not his voice. Whispered in his ear, ‘Walk with me.’ 

He did. He walked with the mask until his feet no longer remembered what dirt felt like. He spoke with tongues he had never learned. He wept with voices he had never heard. He forgot his name. 

But the forest remembered. 

The slavers searched, of course. They sent dogs and hunters and lit the underbrush ablaze. They found nothing. Only stories. 

A scout returned mumbling about a child with the eyes of a hundred faces. Another claimed he had seen the boy standing still as a tree, then vanishing as the light shifted. Soon the village ruins were abandoned, left to the rot of endless silences. But the legend did not rot. Instead it grew. In nearby villages, mothers told children not to lie, lest the boy with the borrowed voices hear. Traders swore they heard laughter in the woods when they passed too close to the old paths. A king’s horse spooked at the sight of a mask hung on a branch … blank, grinning, watching.

They gave the figure a name … Òjì Ayé. The face that Wanders the World. Some said it carried sorrow in one hand and joy in the other. Some said it only appeared before bloodshed. Some swore it had no body at all, only the memory of one. But the mask remained. Waiting. 

The Collector and the Myth 

From the field journal of Edmund Greaves, 1892 

Royal Society of Ethnology, West Africa Expedition 

“The locals call it Òjì Ayé, which roughly translates to The Face That Wanders the World. They speak of it in hushed and quiet tones, even the converted. A figure of many voices, all borrowed. They say it appears before war, famine, or fire. No one can agree on its form, but the word ‘mask’ recurs constantly.” 

“I have collected four ceremonial masks from ruins north of the Cape Coast, three of which correspond to known Orisha. The fourth is anomalous, unpainted, with a blank center surrounded by crude carvings of open eyes. Curiously, it is crafted of multiple woods, none native to a single region. Its age is unclear, but clearly ancient.” 

“Villagers refuse to touch it.” 

Greaves believed in two things: classification and control. 

He did not believe in ghosts.

He had spent years chasing stories through brush and heat, mapping the chaos of tribal memory into orderly boxes and footnotes. He knew how myth distorted grief. How people turned fear into fable and legend. But this one clung to him. 

The stories changed from village to village. In one, Òjì Ayé was a protector. In another, a thief of souls. Some described it as childlike, others as ancient beyond time. Others said it took the form of a mirror. Always the mask. Always the forest beyond. 

And always, the final warning. Do not go into the grove at dusk. 

Naturally, he did. 

It was his third week near the old trade road, in the remains of what had once been a coastal town. The grove lay behind a collapsed shrine swallowed by banyan roots. His guides refused to follow him. 

Greaves brought his notebook and a sketching pen. The mask was wrapped in cloth and tucked under his arm. The sun hung low, ablaze in golds and reds, color bleeding through the canopy in amber lines. Birds chirped. Leaves whispered quietly. 

Then he saw it. A figure. Human in shape. Still as bark. The face was blank. But not empty. It began to change. A flicker, then another. And a face slowly emerged. A young boy’s face. Then a woman’s weeping. Then a laughing man. A warrior’s scowl. A scream without breath. A silence so deep it roared. All at once. Everywhere. 

The figure stepped forward. He could not move. Not from fear. From recognition. The faces were his. One by one. Grief he had not let surface. Guilt he thought long buried. The voice that rose was not his own. Yet he understood it as it shook his core, his lungs trembling with the vibration.

“You came to name me.” 

Greaves opened his mouth. No sound came. 

“You cannot,” it continued. The figure raised a hand. Greaves saw the marks. Scrapes from carving tools. Calluses never healed. Sap-stained fingertips. And eyes … hundreds of them, etched into the skin and bark, something between amber and blood flowing from between the ridges. 

He dropped to his knees. Then the mask lifted itself from the ground. It hovered. Turned once, and vanished into the trees. 

His final journal entry read: 

“It sees me. It sees all. 

The face changes. The voice … my own? 

No. Not mine. Not anymore. A choir of memory, of things I buried in silences. The boy I mocked in the square. The woman who bled on my watch. The things I did in the name of knowledge and conquest. They speak now and I must listen. 

I felt them pressing through my skin like breath through wet paper. Their sorrow peels me open. It is not a monster. It is a mirror. A mirror that remembers what I chose to forget. The face … is wearing me. I cannot look away. 

Incomprehensible, intangible and yet … it completes me. It undoes me. It understands what I am, and still, it speaks. 

It guides.” 

No further pages followed. When his guides found the grove days later, there was no sign of Greaves. Only his sketchbook, open to a drawing of a mask with no face.

The edges were damp. Smudged with tears.