Anna Banai
Something in him told him to run. It had been a day since he’d done it, but he knew something had shifted. He felt it in his very bones, in the way the air felt more charged—more electric. He speed-walked past the other pedestrians, offering a tight polite smile before he reached the outskirts of the forest. Only when he heard their footsteps fade into the distance did he break into a run.
As his footsteps crunched through the leaf-littered forest floor, he prayed under his breath to all the gods he didn’t believe in. Please let it work. Please let it work.
Until yesterday, he hadn’t used his powers since that day nearly two decades earlier. He’d been six years old then, nothing more than a curious boy, playing just outside his cottage. His mother, the coven leader, had been inside, working on a new potion with her apprentice to help bring back prosperity to the lands. Ever since the plague had started, food had been scarce. Countless villagers had died, many of whom had also been witches. Their lands and crops had rotted and decayed as they had, leaving nothing behind but more death. He remembered the frantic council meetings of the remaining coven leaders. The panicked scramble to find a solution. To save the people. The distress in his mother’s eyes as she’d admitted to the elders she wasn’t sure the village would be able to get through the winter with so little food and kindling.
He vividly recalled the moment he’d found a rabbit lying on its side on the dirt, just beside the brush; like it had tried to reach home, but death had reached it first. It wasn’t an uncommon sight. If anything, it was uncommon to see a living animal in the wild those days. Still, there had been something about this one rabbit that had called to him. It was ordinary with grey-brown fur and long ears flopped to one side. It was unmoving, its eyes shut, like it was in a deep slumber. A small mercy. Victor hated it when animals died with their eyes open. It felt wrong. Morbid.
He’d reached out with a small hand and touched it. He knew he shouldn’t. His mother had scolded him about touching things with his bare hands in the wild several times before. ‘You can contract the plague from them; never touch an animal or a human or even a plant outside of the cottage.’
When his finger made contact with the rabbit’s belly, a spark zapped him, making him retract his hand to his chest. He’d seen the spark light up like a tiny bolt of lightning. He’d never seen anything like it. It had burnt his finger, but when he looked down at it, there was no mark left. Nothing to indicate the zap had happened at all.
He’d frowned down at the rabbit. Maybe he’d imagined it? His mother did always tell him he had a strong imagination after all.
But he was sure it had really happened. He’d felt it all the way down to his wrist.
Frowning, he reached again, palm out, making contact with the rabbit’s belly. This time, the zap was stronger, but somehow it didn’t hurt as much. He pushed through the light sting, forcing himself to keep it on the rabbit as long as possible. He watched the mesmerising jagged lines of the bright white lightning as they streamed from his palm to the rabbit’s body, until his hand got too hot and he let go.
Another look at his palm revealed nothing out of the ordinary but this time, he knew for sure that he hadn’t been imagining it.
He was a witch, just like his mother!
As if his thought had summoned her, his mother walked out, her pumpkin-orange cloak and long dark hair billowing in the wind as she approached his squatted form in the dirt.
‘Victor, what are you up to?’ she’d called out to him the way she so often did.
He’d turned rounded eyes up to her beautiful yet tired looking face and answered. ‘I made lightning bolts, mama!’ he smiled wide, revealing all his baby teeth.
She’d paused, taking him in for a beat. Two. Her blue eyes narrowed.
‘What do you mean you made lightning bolts?’
A movement caught Victor’s attention from his peripheral vision. His mother turned her eyes onto the movement before he did.
Victor’s jaw fell slack. The rabbit’s legs were twitching as it tried and failed to stand.
It was… alive?
The rabbit was alive!
It had been dead before. Victor had seen it. And now it was alive. Had it been a result of his lightning?
Victor reached forward once more to touch the twitching animal, but his mother’s hand gripped his forearm before he could. A thin bolt of his lightning still managed to shoot out of his hand and into the rabbit.
His mother gasped, but Victor barely heard it as the two of them watched the rabbit finally stand up and hop away a few feet.
Victor beamed, excited to have the rabbit move. It had been far too long since he’d seen one alive.
Still gripping Victor’s arm, his mother’s free hand shot out, willing her invisible powers to grab hold of the rabbit. For a split second, Victor wondered if she would allow him to keep it, even though he knew rabbit meat was so rare these days that it was worth far more on a dinner table than as a pet. His hopes were short-lived as she lifted it in the air and cracked its neck. The life left its small body and the rabbit thumped to the floor, limp and lifeless once more.
‘No!’ Victor screamed, lunging toward it, but his mother’s grip tightened around his arm, stopping him once more. She squatted down, turning his body to face her. Her grip on his arms was bruising, her eyes wild with a look he’d never seen before. She wasn’t just furious; there was something else there too. Another emotion he couldn’t quite pinpoint.
‘Did you reanimate that thing?’ she’d whisper-shouted.
‘What?’ He didn’t know what that word meant.
His mother gritted her teeth. ‘Was it dead when you found it? Did you bring it back to life?’ she clarified.
Why was she so angry?
‘Y-yes, Mama.’ he’d stammered and watched the colour drain from her face. ‘Why?’
She’d stared at him then like she’d never seen him before. He’d never seen her eyes so wide. So afraid. And her fear scared him.
‘Never do that again, and do not ever speak of this to anyone. Do you understand?’ her eyes had flickered between both of his, her grip somehow even tighter than it had already been seconds ago.
‘Why?’ he’d asked again.
‘Promise me!’ she’d raised her voice. Then, looking around, she took a shaky breath. She lowered her voice and explained. ‘All males born to witch bloodlines are powerless. What you just did makes you an abomination of nature. If the others learn of this, they will banish you or worse, condemn you to the gallows. No one must ever know. Ever!’
He’d nodded then and had never spoken of it again. Never raised another living being from the dead. Never learnt how he’d come to possess such powers when no male before or after him ever had.
Even so, not a single day had gone by where he hadn’t thought about it. Felt it. This tireless buzzing just beneath the skin. His power could have saved so many, or rather returned them to their loved ones. So much heartache could have been saved. Entire villages restored.
But there was a reason his mother had forbade him from ever using it again. And as much as he wanted to help, he was selfish enough to prioritise his own life above theirs.
The crypt took shape deep in the woods, and his run turned into an outright sprint. The air surrounding the space was different now… quieter, as if the last living nocturnal creatures were collectively holding their breath. Not even crickets chirped as he approached the crypt. The door creaked open on rusty hinges, pitch dark, apart from the sliver of moonlight streaming through the arched windows, providing just enough light to see. He waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The crypt lay barren, except for the coffin that lay in its centre, the lid open. Victor approached it slowly, far too aware of his quickening pulse and the rush of blood in his ears. When he reached the lip of the coffin, he looked inside.
His beloved Josephine lay there. She was breathtakingly beautiful, even with her cheeks leached of their usual flush, and her hair a tangled mass of golden curls fanned around her head. Her lips were blue, blackened veins spidered beneath her pale pink dress, spanning from her heart all the way to the base of her jaw; the only evidence of the plague that had taken her from him.
He knelt beside the coffin on the ground, watching her serene face for long moments. The corners of her lips were ever so lightly upturned, making her look like she was lost in a deep, pleasant dream.
Please let it work. Please let it work. He chanted in his head again.
When he’d brought her here a day ago, he’d used his power, almost to the point of losing consciousness himself. He’d figured since she was far larger than that rabbit had been, she’d require far more of his electric current to return to the living.
Only if he knew the extent of his power. Only if his mother had allowed him to practice it and learn its limits. Alas, he did not know, and she had not allowed it. So, instead he’d sat beside her lifeless form for hours, holding his breath, waiting for a sign. A movement. Anything. But nothing had happened. Feeling lightheaded and unable to try again right away, he’d left.
Then he’d felt something just minutes earlier. An inexplicable certainty, urging him to return here. To her.
Her chest, however, remained unmoving.
Perhaps it hadn’t been enough. Perhaps she needed more of his lightning.
He reached over, lightly brushing a hair away from her temple, bristling at the icy coldness of her skin. She’d been so full of life merely two days ago, laughing as she’d playfully run from him through the only living flower field left in the village. They’d dined together that night, with both their mothers chaperoning them of course, until she’d excused herself to step outside and Victor, seeing their mothers distracted with conversation, had slipped away. He’d found her on the porch and kissed her like his life depended on it. That had been when she’d collapsed. A day later, she was… gone. Just like that.
‘Come back to me.’ Victor whispered, softly brushing away her hair again. He wasn’t sure how to live on without her. He wasn’t sure he could.
This had to work.
Lowering his hand to her chest, he shut his eyes, willing his dormant power to resurface. He felt the power surge through his arm into his palm. The crackle of electricity lit up the crypt behind his eyelids for all of a second before a hand wrapped around his wrist with a vice-like grip.
His power stopped flowing as his eyes snapped open.
Josephine’s hand tightened around his wrist, bone-crushingly tight. Her skin remained ice cold. Her chest didn’t rise and fall with breaths like he’d expected it to. Her eyes were open, looking straight at him… but he saw nothing of the Josephine he knew.
His heart sank.
There were no whites to her eyes. The beautiful blue of her irises had been replaced with two never-ending pits of black. Her face contorted into an unsettling smile devoid of any humanity.
‘Foolish boy. You should have listened to the witch.’ The voice that escaped her lips was not Josephine’s. It grated against Victor’s skin. It sounded neither male nor female, neither young nor old. It was an amalgamation of everything horrible within this world and beyond.
What had he done to her? Who had he brought back?
Victor yanked his wrist back to no avail. Her iron grip did not yield in the slightest.
Josephine’s smile widened further, revealing multiple rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
What had he done?
Victor didn’t even get the chance to scream, not as the creature inhabiting Josephine’s body leapt toward him. Not as she sank rows of teeth deep into his flesh.
The blinding pain was secondary to his shock, even as blood cascaded down his neck. He’d always known she’d be the end of him…but never like this.
His body slackened against hers as his world faded into black.
Perhaps his mother had been right. Perhaps some things were simply meant to stay dead.
Anna Banai is a writer of speculative fiction drawn to the collision of beauty and darkness, where suspense lingers beneath emotional uncertainty. Her work explores life’s complexity, where opposing forces define rather than dissolve one another.
She holds two degrees in creative writing and has spent years refining a long-form fantasy novel through continuous revision, searching for equilibrium between magic and meaning.
Outside of writing, she can be found at the gym, reading, attending concerts, cosplaying, or collecting artistic hobbies that fuel creative and narrative inspiration.
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