Evening had settled over Ajibade Street, thick with its usual haze and relentless heat. Victry stood in her small kitchen, rinsing the last plate, her back damp with sweat. She had cooked a light meal—rice and stew—and eaten less than half, too tired and too hot for more. The air in her single room was heavy, unmoving, feeling less like air and more like a damp blanket pressed over everything.
The power blinked once—a brief flicker that made the fluorescent bulb hum in panic—then died completely. The old ceiling fan, fighting its losing battle against the heat, slowed to a defeated halt.
She sighed, wiping her hands on a dry towel. "Not again," she muttered.
She stepped to the window and peered out. The sky above the roofs shimmered under a deep, smoky orange. It was the hour when the harsh lines of the day softened: vendors packed up their trays of groundnuts and fruit; children chased one another through the settling dust in a final burst of energy. She saw her neighbor, Mama Sade, stirring something over her coal pot, her face glistening in the glow.
But the air was stifling inside, too thick to breathe easily. It felt like she was trapped in the heat she had been running from all day.
She decided to take a short walk—just to the junction where the hawker always had ice-cold sachet water, and back again. She needed the excuse to stretch her legs before the final, tedious task of grading the last few arithmetic books.
She slipped on her worn leather sandals, grabbed her small handbag, and locked the door behind her. The key clicked firmly in the lock, a familiar, comforting sound that always made her feel safe, even in the crowded anonymity of the city.
The street greeted her with its predictable evening noise: the low, vibrating hum of dozens of private generators outside the apartments and businesses, the rhythmic shout of hawkers, the smell of woodsmoke and kerosene rising from coal pots. She passed Mama Sade, who was fanning her stove with a piece of cardboard.
"Teacher Victry, you still marking?" Mama Sade called out.
"Not tonight," Victry replied with a weary laugh. "My brain's tired. Just getting some air before bed."
"Go well, my dear," the woman replied.
Victry continued toward the junction. A small boy chasing a chicken through the gutter water paused just long enough to shout "Mummy!" at his distracted mother, then resumed the chase. Further down, the old tailor next door had packed up his machine, but the faint scent of machine oil and starched cotton still clung to the air. It was all so ordinary, so predictable—the unchanging rhythm of life on Ajibade Street.
She reached the hawker, bought two ice-cold sachets of water, and pressed one gratefully against her forehead. The plastic was instantly beaded with moisture, and the sensation was a fleeting, luxurious relief. She was almost home again, feeling the simple satisfaction of the cold water in her hand, when the world exhaled.
At first, it was a sound—deep, low, like the groan of distant thunder, yet felt more in the chest than the ears. Then the asphalt beneath her feet murmured, a soundless vibration traveling up through her soles. The small plastic table the hawker used rattled violently.
Victry froze, the cold sachet forgotten in her hand. She stared up at the deep orange sky, but there were no clouds, no lightning.
The earth groaned again, longer this time, like something ancient and immense stirring in its sleep. The high-tension wires above the street began to hum, a rising, metallic whine. Cars froze mid-street as if time itself had hesitated. A strange, powerful vibration pressed at her chest, not loud, but vast, as if the planet itself had drawn a long, agonizing breath and was about to speak.
A few neighbors started to shout, but their fear was still confused, speculative. They checked their generators; they looked for a fight or an explosion.
But then, the atmosphere began to change. The air, which had been thick and heavy with humidity, suddenly became thin, sharp with the smell of ozone and something metallic. The final gold light of the sunset seemed to melt and intensify, bleeding into shades of molten orange and pulsing with an unnatural energy.
Julian had felt the vibration long before the first quake. It started as a subtle, aching hum in his bones—something pulling at him, the same way a strong gravitational field pulls at heavy objects. He was here in Lagos on urgent, discrete business, far from his base in Geneva, but instinct screamed run. He knew that sound. It was the precursor.
Sean, his driver, threw open the car door. "Sir, we need to move—the ground is splitting—"
The rest was lost in the deafening roar. The road bucked beneath the sleek black car. The vehicle rocked violently on its springs. A shockwave—not of air, but of pure force—lifted Julian off balance, hurling him against the pavement. He gasped, the metallic dust clawing at his throat, and for a single, terrible heartbeat, thought: Is this the end? Has it begun already?
Then something soft and warm fell against him—trembling, and fragrant with the clean scent of laundry detergent and lavender.
He opened his eyes, dust stinging them. A woman. She'd stumbled from the chaos, flung by the force straight into his arms.
His training demanded he push her away, secure his position, and retreat, but his body refused. Instinct—deeper than logic, deeper than military protocol—took over. He held her instead, drawing her close as if protecting her might somehow steady the fracturing world. The air screamed. Light fractured. This wasn't destruction. It was… creation.
The full tremor struck. The ground beneath Ajibade Street rippled like water. Glass shattered everywhere like crystalline rain. Streetlights flickered violently before bursting in silent plumes of white sparks. People screamed, but their voices were swallowed by the immense, mounting roar of shifting, cracking earth.
And then, the sound came—a voice too vast, too ancient to belong to any single being. It didn't come from the sky or the ground, but from the space between them, rolling across the collapsing city like thunder translated into meaning:
"Awakening shall begin."
The words reverberated through bone, through air, through everything alive. The ground erupted in sudden waves of molten orange light, washing over the city in immense, silent pulses. Every shadow glowed, every human soul resonated with the same electric hum. People cried out—not in fear now, but in blinding, reverent awe.
Victry's mind burned white. The light tunneled inward, condensing behind her eyes, and a cold, mechanical tone whispered through the core of her consciousness:
Awakening successful.
Talent: Child of Destiny.
Grade: God-tier.
She gasped, her fingers clutching Julian's shirt. The voice inside her was neither human nor machine, but something vast, something ancient enough to know her name and her worth.
Julian, still holding her tightly against the ground, felt his own mind split with the penetrating light.
Awakening successful.
Talent: Gravity Manipulation.
Grade: B.
Error — due to contact with Child of Destiny, recalibrating…
New grade: SSR.
The world stilled instantly. The colossal light dimmed. The sharp, ozone-scented air returned, trembling. Silence—deep and new, thick like a blanket of fresh snow—spread over the street like dawn after the storm.
Julian blinked through the haze, his vision swimming. The woman in his arms was small, her hair loose from the scarf, her face pale with shock but now radiant with a faint, steady inner glow. The lavender scent was stronger than the dust.
He drew one shaky breath, half in disbelief, half in desperate reverence.
"So it's you," he murmured, the words raw. "The Child of Destiny."
Her eyes fluttered open. They were wide, unfocused, and in their depths, something new and terrible shimmered—like the light of a million far-off stars, newly born.
And somewhere beneath the fractured crust of the earth, the new world began to breathe.