OLAMILEKAN
The road stretched out before me, yet I couldn't get across. Cars stood still, stopped in time, their drivers standing motionless as if frozen in time. It wasn't traffic—it was an unnatural, out-of-this-world stop. Something had stopped them. Something unknown.
I bent my head against the skies. What was a vast emptiness of darkness had now become drenched in a mysterious light. There was no sun, no moon resplendent enough to cast such illumination—merely an invisible power coming from above. Suspended in mid-air were countless drops of color, each of which sparkled like tiny, uncanny stars. They moved in slow, calculated lines, as if they were carried on a secret brook.
It was beautiful. Stunning, even.
But my fingers were trembling. My heart was hammering inside my head. Because beauty has no right to hurt so.
I blinked madly, attempting to convince myself that it was a hallucination. A product of the mind. But when I stepped to the side, reality ended that thought.
The street was lined with people, dozens of them, all of whom were staring up at the sky just as I was. Their faces were twisted into a mixture of horror and awe, their mouths open, their bodies immobile. Some spoke in murmurs barely above a whisper, others clung to friends and loved ones. It was not a dream. We all witnessed it.
And then my eyes rested on him.
A youth—no more than fifteen years old—was among the throng. His round face bore the look of stark astonishment. He was thin, his height close to that of a normal adult. His wide-set brown eyes stared in awe at the lights above.
And then, before my eyes, they altered.
I felt a chill down my spine when his pupils contracted, and the warm brown color in his irises vanished, to be usurped by the cold, hard ice-blue.
A change. An awakening.
I stepped forward, towards him, but before I could take another step, something else caught my attention.
To my right stood a man standing upright, attired in a traditional Yoruba outfit—a slightly loose deep green agbada considering the stillness of the air. His hands were stretched out before him, and within them, fire burned. A perfect sphere of orange and red flames suspended barely above his palms.
Gasps of the crowd filled the air. A woman screamed. They stumbled back in terror, retreating from the man as though he were a living threat. But he did not turn and run. He did not even seem surprised. If anything, there was a sense of calm around him, as though he had merely chosen to summon the fire.
Fear spread through the streets as more and more people saw the impossible. A man lifted a car with his bare hands, his face twisted in confusion at his own strength. A woman stood frozen in shock as water coalesced around her fingers, curling like snakes of liquid glass. Another wept as their own shadow moved independently, stretching and twisting as if it had a life of its own.
Panic broke out. The previously entranced mass was chaos. People ran, screamed, stumbled. Others collapsed where they were, bodies too weak to deal with whatever had taken hold of them.
I looked back at the boy.
And what I saw chilled me to my very core.
Every person within three meters of him was stiff as a board.
Men. Women. Children. All encased in crystalline ice, their bodies twisted into frozen positions of fear, their last moments etched in a frozen hell. Their skin blue, their lips cracked, their eyes dead.
And at the heart of it was the boy.
His hands trembled. His face was streaked with tears. Horror and bewilderment were etched across every feature of his face. He had no idea what he had done. He was ill. But the atmosphere around him was thick with a cold, strangling chill, and the aura that clung to him—thick, heavy, and appalling—kept others at arm's length.
Including me.
I wanted to run. Everything in me screamed for me to move, to run while I still could. But my body wouldn't cooperate. My legs were like bricks, a thousand pounds heavy, my breathing weak. I was trapped in my own terror.
Then the boy moved forward.
His lips shook. "Please… help me," he whispered. His voice cracked with desperation.
I panicked.
"Back off!" I shouted, my raw throat hoarse with fear, dripping with fear. "Get back!"
He didn't. He edged forward, his cold, blue eyes wide with sorrow, with confusion.
And then—
Fire seared through me. Light, gold and blinding, flared from my frame, illuminating the street like the sunrise. It was too much, consuming. I shut my eyes against it, could not handle its radiance.
And when I opened them—
The boy was no longer.
There was nothing left but ash. Pieces of charred bones, turned to ash.
I stepped back, my breath trapped in my throat. My heart thudding in my chest, every beat a sledgehammer against my ribs. My mind screamed for answers, but none came.
I had killed him.
A child.
Tears ran down my face. My stomach churned horribly, and I collapsed to the ground, gagging onto the sidewalk. My hands trembled wildly as I stared at what was left of him.
My own strength had destroyed him.
I had destroyed him.
I fought to move, to leave the horror behind. But however much I walked, the nightmare pursued me. The streets were filled with the dying and the transformed. People screamed as the unimaginable came to be. Some were engulfed by shadows. Others dissolved into dust. It was as if the world had cracked, splintering into something unnatural, something. inhuman.
I went home, step by step by heavier step. The sky above remained bright, but the atmosphere was thick with fear, with confusion, with death.
And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the light in the sky started to blink and fade away. The world was dark again. The stars reappeared. The crescent moon hung over us, as if nothing at all had ever happened.
The streets became still.
The sound, the crying—it all stopped.
A few steps away from my home, my arms and legs became terribly weighed down. My vision became blurry, my breaths shallowed.
Then, there was darkness.
I collapsed.
And the world vanished.