The sound of rain could be heard as a glowing being flapped its shining bright wings in the air above its burned down home. The neighbors all outside taking pictures and recording the situation confused as to what was happening. Pictures being taken and then videos were being live streamed up on facebook and instagram. The being moved its wings and feathers began to flow through the wind illuminating the night sky.
"I'm tired." The being finally said, its voice carrying through its surrounding reaching the ears of everyone around him. It was neither a whisper nor shout but everyone could hear him speak as if he was right next to them.
"Who are you?" A woman asked as she held up her phone.
"What do you mean? Tired of what?"
Questions were just being thrown left and right and the being was just floating in the air. The voices of confused people reached the mysterious beings' ears and he continued talking.
"I'm tired of turning on the television to the same old crap I see any other day: shootings here, wars there, corrupted politicians in office and the citizens doing nothing about it even though they say 'We Have The Power To Change' and we all know it's bullshit. I know what we need to do and so does everyone else but they're afraid and it's understandable."
Everyone looked confused at what he was talking about but some of the neighbors lowered their heads meaning they also knew the solution to the problem but were afraid to act on it. And the mysterious being flapped its wings continued speaking.
"Who wants to be known as the villain?" His voice carried a persuasive tone with it, enchanting those nearby.
"The person that drove the world to change its nature by absolute violence? Someone with power to change the world from its fundamental nature. Into something like paradise where we don't need to struggle to survive, someone who can change humanity because believe it or not we are an extremely flawed species. But you guys don't need to worry about it because I'll sacrifice myself and do the things you won't. I will do what others are afraid to do. "
The sound of grass moving could be heard as a shotgun racking a shell pointed to the man in the sky.
"Listen here stranger I don't know who or what you are but what you're not going to do is fly in the sky and look down on us. Now I've already called the cops so if you know what's best for you you'd leave and never return."
The Old Man had a cigarette in his mouth and the Being looked down as the ashes flew through the wind with each breath the man took. He looked to be around the age of fifty and sounded like he smoked his whole life. The man in the sky looked in the distance to see red and blue flashing lights heading in this direction.
"I don't have much time and I don't feel like killing innocent officers who are just doing their jobs but you on the other hand."
The Angel turned to the senior and opened his hand, a ball of light formed and shaped itself into a spear.
"The crime of threatening a God such as myself is punishable by death." And with a wave of his hand the spear flashed and the sound of blood splattering and a gun going off could be heard. The old man was pierced through his heart and embedded into the ground while the angel was completely fine, the shotgun round completely unfazed him.
"Gaaghhh!" Was all he was able to mutter as blood spilled from his mouth as he tried to remove the spear but failed.
"I don't know what happened to me but I'm thankful for it because now I can do what needs to be done."
And with those words he wrapped his wings around himself and disappeared. The people left looked at the glowing spear disappearing and the old man's body dropped to the ground with a wet 'Thunk'.
Before the Beginning of the End…
The knock on Saharan's window was too soft to be a knock and too urgent to be anything but. It was a single, patient tap that belonged to his sister alone — a code they'd made in childhood for "something's wrong" and "don't come barging." Saharan blinked against the dark and the sleep that still clung to his thoughts. He rolled onto his back and listened to the house breathe.
"Down," Amina whispered through the glass, two syllables stretched thin as a secret. Her silhouette pressed small and purposeful against the pane, hair a dark halo. In the thin slice of moonlight she looked younger than she was and older than him at once, the way mischief and responsibility braided on her shoulders.
He rubbed his palms over his face, trying to gather words. "Now?" he said, voice gravelly with sleep.
Amina's mouth set. "Now."
The stairs complained beneath them as they padded down the hall. Saharan could feel the sleep peeling off in damp sheets. He kept one hand on the banister because it was steadier than his feet. The house smelled of lavender and the faint lemon of the dish soap his foster mother used on Sunday mornings. Somewhere, the refrigerator hummed the same note it hummed every night, as if nothing unusual could be allowed to interrupt the appliance's private, faithful song.
The back door was cracked open to the night. Amina had it propped with the old rusted shoehorn their foster father used to knock stubborn lids loose. She stood on the threshold, a shadowed statue, and when Saharan stepped through, the air hit him cold and full of moonlight.
The yard was a puddle of silver and black. The maple, the garden's neat rows of herbs, the stone path — everything had been painted in absence of color. And in the middle of the lawn, hovering no more than a hand's width above the damp grass, was a blade that was not a blade he knew. It was white as bone and white as moon, a hungerless luminance that ate the darkness around it and left a halo of impossible brightness.
It floated upright, tip pointed toward the sky as if listening. When Saharan saw it properly his first, ridiculous thought was that someone was doing some showy landscaping. The second, steadier thought because his brain always found the workmanlike option last was that it wasn't real.
"Are you seeing it?" Amina's voice was wet with something he couldn't name. Fear, yes, but also a thread of asking, are we alone in this? That tied her to him more intimately than any question could.
He nodded. His throat closed. Up close, the sword had no hilt that made sense, no guard, only a pale shaft that shimmered with textures like veins in marble. It didn't jitter like a light on a wire, didn't cast a shadow the way the porch lamp did. The grass beneath it rimed with frost though the air felt only autumn-cool. When he held out his hand, he felt the glow press not against his skin but inside of him, a pressure on bones and memories.
Saharan hated making assumptions, but some things insisted on being named.
"Magic," he said, and the word felt both cheap and enormous in his mouth.
Amina stepped closer and a strand of hair illuminated itself at the edge where the blade's light touched it.
"You always said you wanted something to break the monotony," she said. She was trying to laugh; it came out as a small, brittle sound.
"Here's your something."
Saharan wanted to be brave. He wanted to stride forward, seize the thing, and declare that their lives were about to bend into legend. Instead, he took a single, measured step and stopped, because the yard smelled suddenly faintly of iron and rain. He had that childlike certainty — the same certainty that made him double-knot his shoes before a storm — that some rules still held. Don't touch an unknown light at midnight. Don't touch floating things.
The blade hummed with a sound he could not hear but felt in his teeth. Underneath the glow, there were etchings. Not letters, exactly, but tiny lines that suggested language, like frost on glass carving a pattern no one had taught him to read. His fingers twitched.
"It's been three nights," Amina said, eyes not leaving the sword. "Mama said she dreamed of it. The neighbors said their dog wouldn't stop whining last night. I thought it was a-" she swallowed, "-a meteor, a lantern, something explainable. But it's been there since dusk."
Saharan's chest tightened. The practical part of him - the part that balanced budgets and took the bus without complaining - wanted immediately to catalogue possibilities: someone laying a trap, a prank, a police officer with a poorly placed flashlight. But the luminous blade defied that ledger. The light was clean in a way modern technology rarely was: no blinking LEDs, no stray power cables. It felt older. It felt patient.
"Help me check the yard," Amina said, the whisper muttering into command. "Just look around.
He obeyed because Amina had a way of giving orders like a lifeline and because, beneath obedience, there was that little ember in his chest that leaned toward adventure. They moved in a slow circle, careful to keep the blade always in the corner of their eyes. The air around it was cold enough to taste, and every blade of grass seemed to stand straighter where the light touched it.
When Saharan crouched a hair's breadth away, he could see his reflection - warped, thinner - in the blade's surface. For a moment the white glow showed him someone he barely recognized: a man capable of a decision that would matter. The thought was dizzying.
He reached toward the sword. Not touching, only pointing, trying to measure the distance between the ordinary and the impossible. The moment his fingers closed to within an inch, the humming folded into a silence that sat like a hand over his mouth. The air changed. A memory moved behind his eyes - not his own: the scent of sea-spray on a night that had no moon, the pressure of wind from somewhere high and cold, a voice that said, as plainly as Amina standing at his elbow, Take me.
Saharan jerked his hand back as if burned. His palm stung though there was no mark. His heart jackhammered like he'd run. If the blade had wanted to command him, it'd already started.
"Don't," Amina breathed. She reached and grabbed his wrist with a grip that was both afraid and unyielding. Her nails dug crescent moons into his skin. "We need to tell someone."
"Who do you tell about something that floats and glows and might ask you to take it?" Saharan said. His voice sounded exhausted.
"The police will ask for ID on the sword."
They both laughed once - a hiccup -because levity was a thin, stubborn thing that kept panic from spreading.
A distant dog barked twice. Lights flicked across the street from a passing car. For a moment the world resumed the complacent rhythm of human life, and the sword remained, indifferent and patient, its white light spilling like milk over the grass.
Amina's face was unreadable. For all her bravado when waking him, she looked younger now, as if the presence of the blade had written questions across her skin.
"Do you think it's for you?" she asked quietly.
Saharan thought of nothing he'd done that merited a luminous blade. He thought of every small choice that had shaped his life: the college he neglected, the friend he had let down, the number of times he had turned away from bolder paths. He felt, with a sudden clarity that made his teeth ache, that the sword did not know him. It did not care for his debts or the shape of his regrets. But something in him recognized the tone of its silence: an invitation, not a guilt.
"Maybe," he said. The word landed soft, and for the first time since he'd seen the glow it did not feel like a dodge. It felt like a hinge.
They stayed like that until the moon slid behind a bank of clouds and the sword dimmed only a fraction, like a promontory of light that would not be erased by weather. The rasp of night insects stitched the black. Neither of them moved to touch the thing again.
"What if it disappears?" Amina said. The idea felt intolerable to both of them; to lose this before it could be known for what it was would be a cruelty. "We should tell someone in the morning. Or take a picture."
Saharan's phone was in his pocket like a talisman; he fumbled it out, thumbs clumsy in the cold, but the blade's light made the screen glare useless. He tried anyway; each photo bloomed into a white smear. The blade did not like being captured this way. It refused to be recorded with the impudence of something outside human invention.
"What do we do now?" Amina whispered.
Saharan looked at the blade, then at the line of houses asleep beyond their yard, the curtained windows where people dreamed of groceries and work and children. The sword felt like the hinge between a before and an after. He didn't have a map for an after, just a sense that the life on the other side would require him to lift a weight he hadn't known he could bear.
He thought of his foster father humming in the garage, of Amina's steady breath, of the small, persistent hope that had lodged in him since he was a child: that something would come along and make his life mean. He hated that hope because it made him feel foolish, but he fed it with the sight of the sword.
"All right," he said finally. His voice was the same rough thing it had been all night but steadier now. "We wait until dawn. And then we figure out whether it wants us or whether we want it."
Amina's shoulders loosened like a released spring. She let go of his wrist and stepped back as if some unspoken boundary had been observed. The blade kept on, indifferent to their bargains.
As they retreated to the house, the sword's light carved their shadows long and thin across the lawn, like strange calligraphy written in white. Saharan turned at the door and looked over his shoulder once more. For an instant the blade blinked as if in recognition. Saharan jerked, and before he could think, muscle acting faster than reason, he rushed across the yard and closed his fingers around the blade's pale shaft.
Everything moved.
The sword plunged forward with a speed that made the world narrow to a single violent arc. It thrust toward his chest with the intent of a thing used to piercing flesh. For a breath, Saharan felt the cold of the metal -or of the idea of metal- slide along his sternum. Pain, bright and searing, flared like a struck match, and he heard a small, awful sound from his throat that could have been a scream if the air would have held it.
And then nothing.
He staggered back, hand clutching the place where the blade had met him. His palm came away uncut, unbloodied. The seam of his shirt beneath his collarbone was untouched. He pressed his fingers harder, expecting warmth, red, the sticky certainty of injury. There was only his own skin, intact and ordinary, beating fast beneath his hand.
Amina had dropped to her knees. "Sah! Saharan!" Her voice was a raw thing, compressed between worry and an urgent need to be practical. She reached for his shoulders, feeling him as if checking for hollowness.
He tasted copper though there was no blood on his tongue; his head hummed with a dizziness that made the porch light tilt in a slow, lazy circle. "I—" He couldn't find the words because the moment of the thrust had unstitched something inside him. He felt as if the blade had tried to take currency from him and found something else: not flesh but a ledger of choices and secrets that had nothing to do with anatomy.
He crouched, uncertain whether to check for a wound or a bruise, and then realized the sensation of stabbing had lingered like an echo in his chest, not a hole but a brand. Heat bled into him where the cold had touched, as if whatever the blade had been seeking had decided, for reasons he could not name, not to be taken.
"Why didn't it-" Amina's question hung like a loose thread. She was shaking, small fingers white at the knuckles. "Why didn't it hurt you?"
Saharan thumbed at his collarbone again. "I don't know." The answer was honest and useless. He felt whole, and yet something had been altered. The world around him had thinned; colors seemed sharper, sounds at the edge of hearing clearer. When he breathed, the air seemed to listen.
The hum resumed, a quiet vibration under their feet. The blade settled back into its upright, patient posture as if nothing had happened, as if it had practiced a thousand similar motions on things with different sorts of resistance.
"We should go in," Saharan said, voice steadier than he felt. Telling himself to be practical steadied him. Doctrine: if you can't explain something, record it, and tell someone. Report the anomaly. Get help.
Amina looked at him like she was weighing two choices; whether to fetch a camera, whether to call their mother, whether to run. When she finally nodded, it was like a small surrender.
"We tell someone in the morning," she said. "Promise me."
He thought of the way the blade had sought him and missed a prize he could not feel was missing. He thought of the ache that had been left behind, not a wound but a question carved in a place that would not disappear.
"We'll tell someone," he said. He didn't say what he'd noticed: that the air inside his chest felt like it had been pried open and resealed with a thread of light running through the stitches.
They retreated into the house with the kind of quiet that gathers around people who've close-called death and found none, as if the night could not be trusted to witness their small victories. The kitchen smelled of lemon and old bread. Amina leaned against the counter and let her forehead rest against the cool tile.
Outside, the sword continued to hang above the grass, luminous and patient. For a moment, in the dark between them and the blade, Saharan felt small and visible at once. The world had not ended. It had, instead, pointed at him.
He lay awake that night staring at the ceiling, not because he feared for his body - it had not been taken - but because something inside him had shifted. The blade had reached for him and either been refused or accepted. He could not say which. There was a quiet rumor now in his bones, the thought of a life that would not fit into the plans he had been keeping like children's toys in a box.
At some point, muffled by the house and the hours, he heard the back door open and close. He sat up, muscles taut, and moved to the window. Amina was asleep on the couch, knees tucked under a throw. The yard was empty.
He should have felt relief. Instead, the absence of light on the grass pressed into him like a missing tooth. He walked back to his bed but could not find rest. He rolled onto his side and felt, beneath the clamor of his pulse, a new presence: a thin warmth under his ribs, not where flesh had been touched but deeper, like a coalsmear against the hollow of his sternum.
He put a palm there and found it resting not on skin but on his soul, an impression of balance and edge, the notion of a thing that both protects and demands. It was confusingly intimate, as if something that had been removed had chosen to remain by another route. The warmth thrummed once, slow and deliberate, and for a moment he could swear he could feel a faint pressure, as if a blade that no one else could see had slid itself into the curve of his heart and sat there, waiting.
Saharan swallowed. The memory of the thrust was no longer only an echo in his mind; it was a presence inside him, a small, certain weight that shifted when he breathed. He thought of the white light and of how it had not left a mark on his skin. Perhaps it had not needed to. Perhaps its ownership was of a different currency.
Outside, somewhere beyond the curtains, the night exhaled and took the sword with it. The backyard was ordinary once more — moonlight, the soft scrape of leaves, the distant cadence of traffic. There was no sign of the blade on the grass, no smear of frost left behind. It had vanished as if the dark itself had swallowed it.
And yet Saharan felt it. He felt the groove of its intention along his ribs; a small, private architecture had slid into place inside him, finishing itself like metal set in a mold. Wherever it had been, the sword had made a home. It had left him intact in body and altered in a place no surgeon could see.
He breathed in shallow, testing the new contour of himself. A strange calm pooled under the anxiety, not peace exactly but a readiness, a tuning. He imagined a cold white light threaded somewhere beneath his breastbone, an impossible core that would shift his center of gravity in ways he could not yet measure.
He lay awake until the first pale fingers of dawn, thinking of possession that did not bruise and of theft that felt like a gift. When morning came and the world took up its small, ordinary chores, he would have to decide what to tell and what to keep. He would have to learn whether the place where the sword now dwelt wanted company, or whether it would, when asked, demand more.
For now, it had made itself at home in him, quiet and inexorable as growth. He could feel, in the hollow the blade had touched, a promise and a claim braided together: the promise of power, the claim of duty. Both settled there like a new organ, and he realized with a beginning kind of dread that there would be no simple way to pretend this had not happened.
Outside, the night had closed its eyes. Inside, in the small room, Saharan lay very still and listened to the slow, steady proof that the sword had not left him empty-handed.