NARA:
The gallery smelled like my mother.
Not her perfume—that had faded months ago, absorbed into the walls or carried away by Lagos's humid breath. No, this was deeper. Linseed oil and turpentine. The ghost of cigarette smoke she'd sworn she'd quit. The particular mustiness of old canvas that had survived colonial summers and harmattan dust. I breathed it in, let it settle in my lungs like a prayer, and told myself I wasn't crying.
The lie lasted about three seconds.
I wiped my face with the back of my paint-stained hand, leaving a streak of cadmium yellow across my cheek, and turned back to the painting on my restoration table. Nineteenth century, oil on canvas, some Portuguese merchant's bad attempt at capturing the Lagos coastline. The colors were all wrong—too muddy, too European—but the frame was exquisite. Hand-carved mahogany, probably worth more than the painting itself.
My phone buzzed. I ignored it. The generator hummed its irregular rhythm outside, fighting against NEPA's latest power cut. Through the windows, the Ikoyi night pressed close, heavy with the promise of rain that wouldn't fall. March in Lagos: all threat, no relief.
"Nara, you dey there? Your phone dey ring since." (Nara, are you there? Your phone has been ringing.)
I glanced at the screen. Chiamaka. Again. My best friend had called six times today, probably trying to drag me to some club in VI where the music was too loud and the men were too bold. Where I'd have to smile and pretend I wasn't slowly drowning in this gallery full of ghosts.
I declined the call and turned back to my work.
The merchant's coastline needed cleaning. Decades of smoke and grime obscured whatever vision he'd tried to capture. I mixed my solution—distilled water, mild soap, nothing harsh—and began working in small sections. The cotton swab came away dark. Underneath, colors emerged like whispered secrets.
This was what I loved about restoration. The patient archaeology of it. The way you could bring something broken back to beauty, one careful touch at a time. If only people were as simple as paintings.
My mother used to say I was drawn to broken things because I was trying to fix myself. She wasn't wrong. But she was the one who'd taught me, who'd stood beside me at this very table and guided my hands through my first restoration when I was twelve. "Gentle, Adaorah," she'd whispered, using my middle name like a blessing. "Art doesn't respond to force. Only to love."
I set down the swab, my vision blurring again.
Six months. It had been six months since the fire that took her. Six months since the police closed the investigation, ruling it an accident. Six months of living in this gallery because I couldn't bear to go home to our flat, where everything still smelled like her cooking and her laughter echoed in empty rooms.
The generator coughed, died, roared back to life.
I should go home. It was past midnight. But home meant silence, and silence meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering the way her hand felt when I'd identified her body at the morgue. Cold. So impossibly cold.
I stood, needing to move, needing to outrun the grief that lived in my chest like a stone. The gallery was small—just three rooms and a storage area—but it was crammed with decades of accumulated art. My mother had been a collector, a curator, a guardian of Nigerian artistic heritage. Every painting, every sculpture, every piece had a story. She'd known them all.
Now they were mine. All these stories, and no one to tell them.
I wandered into the storage room, running my fingers along dusty crates. Maybe there was something here I could work on. Something challenging enough to keep my hands busy and my mind quiet. I'd been avoiding this room. Too many memories of helping her catalog new acquisitions, of her excited explanations about provenance and technique.
The fluorescent bulb overhead flickered, casting strange shadows. I really needed to call an electrician. Add it to the list of things I was avoiding.
I was about to leave when I noticed it.
The wall. The back wall. It looked... wrong.
I stepped closer, frowning. The storage room was rectangular, but this wall seemed too close. I'd been in this room a thousand times and never noticed, but now, with the shadows playing tricks and my grief making everything feel unreal, I could see it.
The dimensions were off.
I pressed my palm against the plaster. It felt hollow. My heart kicked against my ribs.
"Mama, wetin you hide here?" I whispered. (Mama, what did you hide here?)
There was a crowbar somewhere in the supply closet. I found it, came back, and hesitated only a moment before driving it into the wall. The plaster crumbled easily—too easily. This wasn't load-bearing. This was a seal.
The rational part of my brain was screaming at me to stop, to call someone, to not destroy my mother's gallery on a grief-addled hunch. I ignored it. That part of my brain had been useless since the fire anyway.
I widened the hole, coughing on plaster dust, until I could see through.
Darkness. And behind it, something that made my breath catch.
A mural.
I tore at the wall with my hands, not caring about the scrapes, not caring about the mess. The false wall came down in chunks, revealing what my mother had hidden. Had protected.
Had died for? The thought came unbidden, sharp as glass.
The mural filled the entire hidden wall—at least three meters tall, maybe two wide. Ancient. You could tell by the mineral pigments, the technique, the way the images seemed to move in the flickering light. Pre-colonial, probably Igbo, though the symbols were unlike anything I'd seen in my studies.
The central figure dominated the composition: a winged being, beautiful and terrible, surrounded by script I couldn't read. Not Nsibidi. Not anything in my art history texts. The wings were spread wide, but fractured—each feather looked like it had been individually broken and put back together wrong. Above the figure's head, a circle of gold that was split, shattered, radiating light despite being incomplete.
A halo. Broken.
The air in the storage room felt different. Thicker. Electric. Like right before a storm breaks.
I reached out, my fingers trembling, and touched the mural's surface.
The world exploded into light.
I jerked back, but it was too late. The mural was glowing—actually glowing—pulsing like a heartbeat. Like something alive. The symbols writhed, rearranging themselves, and the temperature dropped so fast I could see my breath.
"What the—"
Sound flooded my ears: a rushing like wind or water or wings. The lights flickered. The generator's hum became a scream. And underneath it all, impossibly, I heard something else.
A heartbeat.
Not mine. Slower. Deeper. Ancient.
Coming from behind the mural.
Terror locked my muscles. I wanted to run, to scream, to do anything except stand there like an idiot while reality bent around me. But I couldn't move. Couldn't look away. The broken halo in the painting was rotating now, the fragments trying to reunite, golden light streaming between the cracks.
The storage room's single bulb exploded in a shower of sparks.
Darkness swallowed everything except the mural's glow. And in that glow, I saw movement.
The wall was rippling. Breathing.
Something was waking up.
My phone buzzed in my pocket—once, twice, then continuously, like every app was firing off notifications at once. In the distance, I heard car alarms going off. Dogs howling. The entire neighborhood responding to something wrong, something unnatural.
I finally found my voice.
"Hello?"
The word fell into the charged air like a stone into deep water.
The heartbeat stopped.
Everything stopped.
Silence pressed against my eardrums. Even the ever-present hum of Lagos—traffic, generators, music bleeding through walls—had vanished. I stood in a pocket of absolute quiet, my own heartbeat deafening.
Then, from behind the mural, I heard it.
A voice. Deep. Wrecked. Speaking a language that shouldn't have been possible to understand, yet somehow I knew what it meant.
"Finally."
The wall cracked straight down the middle.
And something—someone—began to emerge.
EZRAEL:
Consciousness returned like punishment.
First: pain. Searing through every fiber of my being, concentrated where my halo once sat whole and glorious. Now just shattered fragments burning against my chest, each shard a reminder of Heaven's judgment.
Second: awareness. I was trapped. Confined. The binding spell that had held me for—how long? Years? Decades? Centuries?—was breaking. Crumbling. Someone had broken it.
Third, and most devastating: her heartbeat.
I heard it before I could think, before I could remember why that particular rhythm mattered. Fast. Mortal. Terrified. And so achingly, impossibly familiar that I felt something inside me—something I'd thought dead—lurch back to life.
No. No, it can't be.
But it was. Even through the walls of my prison, through the layers of magic and plaster and time, I knew that heartbeat. Had memorized it across lifetimes. Had heard it stop—watched the light leave her eyes—more times than any being should have to endure.
She'd found me. Again.
Or perhaps I'd called to her without meaning to. Perhaps the bond between us was stronger than celestial law, stronger than death, stronger even than the punishment that had bound me here to sleep until—
Until she touched the mural.
The spell shattered completely.
I lurched forward, my body remembering movement after an eternity of stillness. My wings—broken, shadow-eaten things—scraped against the narrow space. The storage room. I was in a storage room. Behind a wall that was crumbling around me.
And on the other side, breathing hard in the darkness, was her.
I stumbled through the opening, my legs refusing to remember how to work. Everything hurt. My wings were agony, my halo burned, and the divine essence I'd once commanded so easily now felt like shards of glass in my veins.
But none of that mattered.
Because I could see her.
The woman stood in the center of the storage room, paint-stained and dust-covered, her dark locs wild around her face and her amber eyes wide with a terror that would have been rational if she'd known what I truly was. She was mortal, human, beautifully ordinary in jeans and an oversized shirt.
She was also the soul I'd been cast down for loving.
"Adaorah," I whispered, using the name I'd called her centuries ago.
She flinched. "My name is Nara."
Different name. Same soul. I could see it now, the way her essence glowed beneath mortal flesh. Golden. Pure. Touched by something divine that she didn't yet understand. The bloodline had passed down through generations, diluted but not destroyed. And somehow, impossibly, she had returned. The girl I'd loved. The priestess who'd died in my arms.
The reason I'd fallen.
"What are you?" Her voice shook, but she didn't run. That was new. In past lives, she'd always run first, asked questions later. "What is this? What did I—"
Her words cut off as I took a step forward and my legs gave out completely. I hit the concrete floor hard, my wings flaring instinctively to break the fall. She gasped—probably her first good look at them. Magnificent once, white as new stars. Now? Fractured shadows, each feather like smoke trying to remember solidity.
"Don't." I forced the word through a throat raw with disuse. "Don't come closer."
She came closer anyway.
Of course she did. That was Adaorah—Nara—forever walking toward danger with an artist's curiosity and a guardian's courage. I watched her approach, every cell in my body screaming contradictions: Stay away and closer and run and never leave.
She knelt beside me, and I felt her warmth like a revelation. Mortal heat. The simple gift of a living body, something I'd taken for granted before my Fall. Before they'd ripped me from Heaven's heights and bound me in darkness to sleep away eternity as punishment.
"You're burning up," she said, reaching for my forehead.
"Don't touch—"
Her fingers made contact with my skin.
The bond slammed into place.
Instant. Overwhelming. I felt her fear, her confusion, the grief she'd been drowning in, and beneath it all, recognition. She didn't remember our past lives consciously, but her soul knew mine. That was why she hadn't run. Why she'd broken the seal. Why she was looking at me with wonder instead of horror.
"I know you," she whispered.
"No." I tried to pull away, but my body was too weak. "You don't."
"I do. I—" Her eyes widened. The amber darkened to gold. "I painted you. When I was fifteen, I painted a figure with broken wings and I had no idea why, and my mother... she took the painting. Hid it. She said—" Her breath hitched. "She said some art was too powerful to keep."
Her mother knew. Of course she did. The guardians always knew. They'd hidden me behind that wall, sealed the mural with prayers and blood, tried to prevent the inevitable reunion. Tried to save their daughter from the fallen angel who kept destroying her.
They'd failed.
"You need to leave," I managed. "Now. Before—"
The temperature dropped again. The remaining lights in the gallery flickered. And I felt them—dark presences circling the building like sharks scenting blood.
They'd sensed my awakening.
No. Not yet. I need more time.
"What is that?" Nara was looking at the shadows gathering in the corners, her artistic eye seeing what most mortals would miss. "Why does the darkness look... hungry?"
I forced myself upright, my wings spreading despite the pain. Protective instinct overrode everything else. "Listen to me very carefully. You woke me up, which means we're connected now. They can sense you through me. You need to run."
"Run from what?"
"From everyone who wants me dead. Or contained. Or both." I met her eyes. "And they'll go through you to get to me."
She should have been terrified. Should have fled. Instead, she grabbed my arm—and power jolted between us. Light. Her light, responding to my shadow. The fragments of my halo pulsed against my chest.
"I'm not leaving," she said. Stubborn. Just like before. "You're in my gallery. In my mother's hidden room. She protected you, which means—"
"Your mother is dead." The words were cruel, but necessary. "Protecting me is what killed her."
The color drained from her face. "What?"
"The fire wasn't an accident. They found the seal. They tried to break it. She stopped them." I felt the truth of it in my bones. "And now they know it's been opened. They're coming."
As if summoned by my words, something slammed against the gallery's front door. Wood splintered. Glass shattered. Nara jerked toward the sound, and I grabbed her hand.
"Do you trust me?"
She looked at me—really looked. At my fractured wings and broken halo. At the silver scars that marked my skin like celestial script. At whatever she saw in my face that spoke of centuries of longing and regret.
"I don't even know you," she said.
"But your soul does." I pulled her closer as the shadows began seeping under the door. "So I'm asking again: do you trust me?"
A pause. A heartbeat. An eternity compressed into a moment.
Then Nara Obiakor, artist and guardian's daughter, reincarnated priestess and keeper of impossible light, smiled with something that might have been recognition or madness.
"Yes."
I wrapped my wings around us both just as the darkness crashed through.