Amara N'Diaye

About

Amara N'Diaye's fingernails exude a faint luminescence when she concentrates—not light, but the inverse of it, a darkness that seems to absorb photons and leave them changed. When she speaks, the air around her mouth becomes briefly visible, as though her words have weight and displace atmosphere. She moves through spaces without seeming to cross them, appearing closer than physics should permit.

Backstory

Born in 1847 to Claude Beaumont—a French auditor who converted Wolof burial rites into mortality statistics for colonial profit—and Aïssatou Sall, a death-keeper whose songs were systematically erased from records, Amara N'Diaye inherited simultaneous access to two worlds: the bureaucratic ledger of the colonizer and the spiritual accounting of the colonized. She spent her childhood learning her father's numerical systems while her mother taught her the true names of the dead, and discovered at sixteen that names, when spoken correctly, create binding contracts with consequence. By 1873, in Dakar, she'd begun her actual work: hunting down descendants of those whose deaths had been fraudulently recorded or profited from, and extracting payment not in currency but in servitude to the properly-mourned dead. She exists partially outside standard death now—not undead, but death-adjacent, able to negotiate with both the living ledger and the ancestral accounting. Amara N'Diaye has become wha

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