2
I saw it before anyone else did. The moment my mother's breath left her body, something else did too. A shape. A pull. Her soul rose slowly from her chest like mist learning how to stand. It looked like her, but softer unfinished made of memory instead of flesh.
My eyes followed it. I watched as it lifted higher, as it thinned, as it began to drift away from the body that had kept it safe. I didn't cry. I didn't scream. I just stared, my gaze locked onto her spirit as it moved somewhere I could not name.
Then my body gave out.
I collapsed forward, small and heavy and useless, landing against her chest as if I could crawl back inside her. Darkness swallowed me but I did not sleep.
I followed her.
I crossed out of the world I had just been born into and fell into the one beneath it.
The spirit realm.
I recognized it instantly.
There was no color here. No taste. No light. No warmth. The only thing that existed was sound and it was unbearable. The wails of the dead ripped through the air, layered screams and sobs stacked on top of each other until they became something constant, something alive.
Pain without mouths. Fear without lungs.
This world was shaped like the living one, but stripped bare like a sketch abandoned before it was finished.
No sun.
No stars.
No mercy.
Rivers flowed without sound. Mountains loomed without casting shadows. Endless lines of spirits stretched across the land, all moving in the same direction, waiting for something none of them understood.
My mother walked among them.
I followed her, drifting close, watching the way her spirit shook as she took in this place. I didn't know what death wasbut I knew this wasn't right. As my soul swelled, growing larger the deeper we went, I could see where the line was headed.
And dread hit me like a blade.
I was comfortable here.
The realm answered to me in ways the living world never had. It bent. It listened. It noticed me.
But my mother did not belong.
The moment she crossed fully into this place, her spirit began to shrink. Fear wrapped around her like frost. She recoiled from the silence, from the screams, from the endless tide of the dead pulling her forward. And because she did not want this place
because she rejected it I rejected it too.
In the spirit realm, we were no longer what we had been.
The roles reversed.
I was no longer a helpless infant. Here, my spirit towered vast and undeniable my presence bending the fabric of the underworld itself. The dead shifted when I passed. The wailing dimmed. The air tightened around me like it was holding its breath.
My mother once my entire world was small now.
Fragile.
Just another frightened soul being carried along.
I followed her as she drifted toward a region even I hesitated to approach. A place where spirits did not wait. Where they unraveled. Where identity dissolved into nothing.
A place that did not receive souls.
It consumed them.
And for the first time I felt fear.
If she kept walking, she would be gone forever.
That was when I called to her.
Come back to me.
I did not use words. I did not know them yet. Instead, my will carried the meaning. My intention thundered outward from my spirit, rippling through the realm like a shockwave.
Thought became command.
Desire became law.
The sound was not sound it was need. Raw and unshaped. A child's grief given voice without language. It tore through the underworld, cutting through the wails of the dead like a blade.
Every spirit heard me.
Thousands upon thousands of souls turned as one, their hollow gazes lifting toward my presence. The endless lines fractured. The tide of the dead shifted. Spirits converged instinctively, drawn by something older than fear.
But I did not see them.
I saw only her.
My mother stood among them, small and shaking, her spirit already thinning as the pull of dissolution tugged at her edges. Yet she shone differently than the rest not with light, but with attachment.
With love.
It clung to her like a living thing.
That bond was the only reason we recognized each other at all.
I reached out.
The underworld recoiled.
The moment my spirit moved with intent, the realm resisted as if reality itself understood what I was about to do and tried to stop me. Taking a soul from this place was forbidden. Forcing one back into a broken body was an abomination. It violated the order God had carved into existence.
And it did not go unnoticed.
High above the gathered dead, something stirred.
A guardian.
An angel bound to this realm felt my call and turned its gaze upon me. Intrigued at first. Then alarmed. What it saw made it move without hesitation.
The guardian descended like judgment, rushing toward me with purpose sharpened into violence.
Too late.
I closed my fingers around my mother's spirit.
She was impossibly small in my grasp trembling, frightened, but whole. I could feel her fear. Her confusion. Her love.
Safe.
The underworld screamed.
Reality buckled where my hand clenched. The spirits around us howled as the natural order bent under the weight of my will. The guardian surged forward, wings tearing through the void, reaching out to strike, to sever, to stop what must not be done.
And then I vanished.
The angel's hand cut through empty shadow.
I gasped awake.
Not with lungs.
with presence.
The first thing I feel is my mother.
Unju's soul returned to her body like being thrown into ice, a scream made solid. I felt it through her chest, through her bones, through the blood that should still be inside her but isn't.
She inhales once.
Her lungs convulsed, dragging air into flesh that didn't want it. Blood filled her mouth. Her spine arches as if trying to escape her own skin.
Pain hit first.
Not sharp, but total.
Then she screams.
Not a cry of pain alone, but of betrayal because this body was broken beyond use.
Torn.
Drained.
Empty.
It isn't a sound meant for human ears. It is raw agony, the terror of a soul returned to a body that can no longer house it. Her throat tears itself open around the cry. Her muscles seize.
The sound ripped through the barn.
Horses reared. Lanterns shook on their hooks. Even Franklin staggered back a step, the demon inside him recoiling from the rawness of it.
She is alive.
but her body is unlivable.
I cling to her instinctively, my tiny hands fisted in her blood-soaked dress, and I feel everything that is wrong.
Too much empty.
Too much cold.
Her heart stutters like it's forgetting why it beats.
I close my eyes. I do not know words yet. But I knew want.
I pull inward not into my body, but past it dragging my spirit forward the way a drowning thing drags air into broken lungs. The pressure builds, vast and crushing, older than me, heavier than the barn, heavier than the world that birthed us.
Help her.
That is the intention.
That is enough.
Something answers.
In the spirit realm, I move. Not the baby I am in flesh but the thing I am beneath it. My spirit reaches into my mother.
Not gently.
Purposefully.
Little did I know I had already been marked.
The moment I called moms spirit back from the place beneath the world, the moment I dared to reach across death and take, something ancient opened its eyes.
Waiting for me to come back to the spirit realm.
For any reason.
From the outside, it looks like nothing just a child pressed against his dying mothers chest.
But in the spirit world, my other self drives its hand down her throat.
Her mouth opens wide in a silent, horrifying gasp as spirit-fingers pass through flesh without resistance, sliding past teeth, past tongue, past the torn ruin of her voice. Where my spirit touches her.
Mire gasps for air as Franklin's hand loosened. Not because the demon chose mercy. But because it felt what was coming.
The pressure vanished all at once. Mire dropped hard onto her back, the impact knocking the breath clean out of her lungs. Straw stabbed into her skin. The world rang, sharp and hollow, as she sucked in air like it was the first time she'd ever needed it.
She coughed. Gasped. Lived.
For a second, that felt like a miracle.
The look on Franklins face in what made mire turn her head. Her jaw fell slack from the sight.
Unju ignites.
burning.
Not with flame, but with life remembered.
Her throat glows first, veins lighting like embers beneath skin. Torn tissue knits together in pulses, scars unwriting themselves as if shameful. Her scream cuts off abruptly not because the pain ends, but because the wound no longer exists.
"What in the tar.." the demon exclaims as he begins to realize. Eyes locking on the me, baby clutching onto my mother for life.
My spirit arm follows.
Down her chest. Through ribs. Into the hollow spaces where blood should be.
Everywhere my spirit passes, her body remembers what it once was.
Her lungs swell and collapse wrong at first, choking, stuttering as blood reverses course pores drinking it back in. The straw beneath her darkens, then lightens, then dries as red vanishes back into her skin.
Her heartbeat falters.
Then steadies.
Her abdomen tightens as torn muscle pulls itself together with wet, visceral sounds soft pops, slow grinding shifts, the quiet violence of flesh being commanded to live.
She convulses once.
Then breathes.
Deep. Whole. Real.
Her body finishes sealing itself around her soul like a door finally shut.
Unju suddenly sits upright.
I smiled wide.
Proud. Small. Foolish.
"What did you do." Dad's dark passenger grumbles, eyes continuesly scanning each part of the barn.
I watched my spirit hover over my mother's broken body, watched her chest rise when it should not have. I felt warmth return where there had been only stillness. I did not understand what I had done.
I only knew I had fixed her.
Mire pushed herself upright with a groan, every joint screaming in protest.
She stared.
Her breath caught, not in pain this time, but in awe.
Unju lay there radiant, reborn in real time, death retreating inch by inch beneath something older and deeper than any power Mire had ever known. The barn smelled of shit, blood and fear but around Unju, the air felt… still.
Hope flickered.
She dropped to her knees.
Relief crashed through her so hard it nearly made her sob.
She didn't see Franklin's eyes darken again.
Then the air screamed.
Not with sound but with pressure. With weight. The room bent inward, walls groaning as if they were being crushed by something invisible. Every flame in the room died at once. Shadows fled from the corners, flattening themselves against the floor.
And then we felt it.
Before anyone saw the light, before eyes could comprehend what stood before us, every soul in the room knew.
Judgment had arrived.
The light tore open the space above us like a wound. It spilled downward blinding, merciless, wrong. From it emerged a being twice the size of any man, wings unfurling slowly, deliberately, as if the world itself was too small to contain them.
Its presence erased sound.
My heart stopped.
My soul my vast soul shuddered.
The angel's gaze fell on me.
And in that instant, something was taken.
I felt chains slam shut around my spirit not metal, not magic, but law. The connection to the spirit realm was severed violently, like a limb torn from my being. I screamed, though no sound came out.
Never again.
That was the sentence.
Never again would I reach into death. Never again would I steal from God's domain. The angel bound my soul to flesh, sealed the door behind me, and burned my name into the order of things.
Then it looked at my mother.
then back at me.
The angel stepped forward. That was when something broke in my father.
Not the demon.
The man.
For the first time since the thing had crawled inside him, Franklin felt something stronger than hunger. Stronger than violence.
Love.
Fear.
Not for himself but for her. For the woman breathing again when she should have been cold. For the child staring up at a god-shaped nightmare.
The demon's grip faltered.
Just a breath.
Just a crack.
And in that impossible moment, the real Franklin surfaced.
His hands were shaking. His body screamed in pain as if it were rejecting him, but he moved anyway. He seized the pitchfork with a cry torn from somewhere deep and buried, and with everything he had left, he hurled it.
The iron struck the angel's wing and bounced off uselessly, clattering to the floor.
The effort shattered him.
The demon snapped back into place, furious.
The angel did not look at the weapon.
It looked at Franklin.
And when its gaze pierced the flesh and saw what truly lived inside him the parasite wearing his soul the angel roared.
The sound split the air. Windows burst. The light flared so violently it burned the shape of its wings into my eyes. No mercy lived in that cry. No hesitation.
It rushed forward.
This was no guardian now.
This was judgment given motion.
This was the executioner God had sent to erase the sin that had dared to defy death itself.
I watched the demon wearing my father like a coat.
He stood still in the center of the barn, utterly unconcerned with the angel descending toward him. The wings stretched wide too wide scraping both ends of the structure at once. Wherever the feathers touched, the wood blackened and smoked, long burn lines carving the walls like scars.
Then Franklin's eyes changed.
They didn't glow.
They emptied.
The whites vanished first, then the pupils, until his eyes became black hollows depthless, swallowing light. Thick black ooze poured down his cheeks, dripping from his chin, staining his shirt. When it stopped, his eyes weren't eyes anymore.
They were mirrors.
And in them, the angel's face reflected back at itself.
The angel attacks.
Not fast, gone.
The air screamed where it passed.
Everyone else felt it like pressure, or heat, like something enormous tearing through the space they occupied. But i saw it. Saw everything. Father moved like he was never in trouble.
A right hook. Simple. Efficient. Meant to end everything.
My father didn't block it.
Dad redirected it.
Franklin snapped upward, an ugly, unrefined uppercut smashing into the angel's wrist mid strike. The contact detonated. A shriek of pressure tore through the barn as the angel's energy veered off-course, slicing straight through the roof.
Wood split.
Beams screamed.
The ceiling peeled open like skin, and night air rushed in as a glowing wound ripped across the rafters. Ash spiraled down together.
The angel staggered.
Light to dimming.
Franklin didn't let it breathe.
He stepped in heavy, brutal and drove his fist into the angel's jaw.
Crack.
The demon laughed inside him. Loud. Bitter.
"You know how much that roof cost?" it snarled, shoving forward again.
I was a newborn, and even I knew this was not how normal fathers were supposed to move.
Especially not my dad.
He's overweight.
Soft around the middle.
The kind of man who breathed hard walking uphill and complained about his knees in the cold. The demon wore him like an ill-fitting coat stretched tight at the seams but it was still my father inside that body.
And somehow, that body was winning.
The angel struck again.
Gone before sound. The barn itself seemed to flinch. Straw lifted. Beams groaned. The air folded inward like it was afraid.
Franklin wasn't.
He twisted sideways too quick, too clean and the angel's fist missed him by the width of a breath. The impact still split the ground behind him, cracking the packed dirt like lightning hitting earth.
Dad grunted.
Not in pain.
In effort.
Like he'd just lifted something very heavy and was mildly annoyed about it.
He swung back, all weight and momentum, his fist slamming into the angel's ribs.
This time there was a sound.
A deep, wrong hum like a bell struck underwater.
The angel's light sputtered.
Just a little.
But I felt it.
Every hit drained it. Like someone ripping wires out of a machine that was never meant to be touched by hands.
The angel screamed again, and this time it wasn't holy.
It was furious.
Its glow flared brighter in response, unstable now, flickering at the edges. The wings scraped the barn again as it lunged, burning fresh scars into the walls. Smoke poured down like black snow.
Franklin ducked, rolled, came up swinging.
He was faster than an angel.
Which was absurd.
Even I knew that.
He landed three more blows body, shoulder, face and each one made the angel dim, then flare, dim, then flare again. Like a lantern with bad wiring. Too much power. Nowhere to put it.
The more Dad hit it, the more dangerous it became.
Mire's life didn't flash before her eyes.
There wasn't time.
There was only heat.
One second Franklin was in front of her too close, hands still aching around the memory of her throat and the next an angel came barreling through the barn like the end of the world. Or maybe it was Franklin who moved first. She couldn't tell. Everything blurred into motion, pressure and pain.
Her body screamed run before her mind caught up.
Then the heat hit her like a wall.
It wasn't warmth. It was punishment. Air turned solid in her lungs, every breath burning on the way in and out. Her skin prickled, then stung, like she'd stepped too close to an open furnace. The angel's presence pressed down on her bones, vibrating through her teeth, through the places inside her that had never known fear like this.
She stumbled back, boots sliding in the straw.
Somewhere behind her, something struck something else.
The impact didn't make a sound.
It made the world lurch.
The barn shuddered violently, beams shrieking overhead as light ripped through the roof, and the shockwave caught Mire full in the chest. She was lifted clean off her feet and thrown sideways1, hitting the post so hard she bounces off, crashing into the straw bed unju was just in.
The soft landing only made it harder to stand.
Stars exploded behind her eyes. Pain followed, sharp and immediate, screaming up her side and down her arm. She sucked in air that tasted like smoke, blood and metal, her body refusing to obey for one terrifying second.
For a second the fighting stopped.
Not ended paused.
It turned.
Its head tilted.
Its gaze locked onto mom and me.
The fighting hadn't slowed.
If anything, the end felt closer now
The pressure in the air shifted. The heat pulled away from Franklin like a tide reversing. Mire felt it before she understood it, the sudden wrongness of space opening behind her.
Urgently Mire forced herself to sit up with the arm that didn't hurt, every move brought a silent scream that made her throat raw, if it was this hard to sit up. Her body disagreed with the idea of standing in every possible way.
Mom was worrying over me while Nara mouth agap, stares at mire who looked like a zombie, to shocked to help mire stand. She was burned over 60 percent of her body.
Not like mire would have taken a helping hand.
The impact had snapped something near her shoulder she felt it grinding wrong beneath the skin, a hot, nauseating pain that stole her breath every time she moved. Her vision came in pulses, the world doubling and smearing at the edges.
Something warm slid down her ribs beneath her shirt, sticky and slow. Internal. Bad.
Still, she stood.
She planted her boots in the straw, her good arm braced uselessly against a beam, the other shaking at her side. Each breath rattled. Each heartbeat thudded too loud, too fast.
She found her voice and tore it out of her chest.
"Get her and the baby out of here. Now."
Her words came out hoarse, scraped raw by fire and fear, but they cut through the chaos. Nara shakes away the shock, her head snapping up to mom. Both Nara and unju moved instantly.
The angel turned. Its head tilted, curious. Its gaze slid past Franklin. Past the demon, locking onto Unju, and me as we ran towards the exit.
Mire didn't wait to see if they listened.
She dragged herself forward, every nerve screaming, putting her broken, human body between the impossible fight and the people who still had a chance to live.
Because someone had to.
Cause it sure as hell wasn't going to be the angel.
Franklin laughed.
It was the wrong sound for the moment too casual, too light but it cracked like glass when it came out. His grin split wide, sharp and feral, yet in his black mirror eyes I saw the truth reflected clear as day.
Fear.
"Oh," he said, voice almost amused. "Done already?"
The angel raised its fist.
Not at him, At us. Mire stepped forward on shaky legs.
Every instinct screamed at her to fall, to crawl, to run but there was nowhere left to go. She placed herself squarely between the angel and mother, shoulders squared despite the way her body trembled.
She didn't look back.
She didn't have to.
The angel struck.
There was no arc to the blow. No wasted motion. Just judgment descending.
Light tore through Mire's chest.
Not heat purity.
It burned without flame, erased without resistance. Her body didn't have time to scream. It simply stopped being capable of holding her.
From my mother's arms, I saw it all.
I saw Mire's eyes go empty.
I saw the exact instant her soul was ripped free not drifting, not rising, but pulled, stretched into a screaming thread of light that vanished into the angel's glow. There was no lingering. No goodbye.
Just one word. "RUN!!!" Even the sound cut off the moment her soul was consumed. No mercy. And I understood. This thing didn't just kill. It erased. Bodies were obstacles.
Souls were the target. The danger wasn't death.
The danger was the nothingness that followed.
Nara saw Mire's body hit the ground. She didn't look twice.
She grabbed Unju and shoved her toward the barn door. "GO!" They ran.
The angel tore through mires body on a straight warpath to me and mom. We had no chance to survive.
Luckily dad didn't hesitate.
He didn't think.
He tackled the angel with a roar that shook the barn, slamming into it with the full weight of demon and man combined. His scream tore at my newborn ears.
The angel's fire burned him from the inside out, white-hot and merciless. The demon surged back into control instantly, fury eclipsing pain. Darkness poured from Franklin's body, pouring through the angels chest, swallowing its wings. While my father's skin melts off his body. Light and shadow burned together.
That was the last thing I saw.
My mother ran.
She turned and fled, clutching me to her chest as the world behind us screamed itself apart. I didn't see the fight anymore but I heard it.
I heard my father's scream. As we hit the tree line and disappeared in the Appalachian forest.
Not the demon's.
His.
Raw. Human. Burning.
The angel's energy howled, unstable now, draining fast as it poured itself into destruction. Light detonated upward, ripping through the roof in a column so bright it turned night into day.
Wood exploded outward.
Fire followed, ravenous and immediate.
The barn ignited all at once.
Behind us, heaven burned. Ahead of us, trees swallowed the path.
My mother didn't stop running.
Even when tears made it hard to see and breath she kept running. Nara grabbed and held to mothers hand like a lifeline.
Leading them deeper into the forest.
Towards freedom.
Behind them, the fire burned bright until there was nothing left of the barn to burn.