When I was born the midwife said the room smelled of metal and honey — like coins and summer. They said I was a blessing: the key to fortune, a child who could summon wealth as easily as breathing. I learned quickly that the blessing had teeth. I could make a coin the size of a thumb or a cascade of bills worth more than a merchant's life; I could conjure a fortune with a snap. The first time I did it my mother cried. The second time my father stopped sleeping. By the third, their eyes had gone hollow with wanting.
Greed is a slow disease. It eats the corners of a person until they are all hunger. My family fed it until there was nothing left of them but appetite. Neighbors whispered. Merchants crossed the street. Pilgrims came with questions and lurid gazes, because miracles in our valley never came without asking for a price.
I was different, too — thinner than most boys, hair that fell like a curtain of sunlight to my shoulders, pale as riverfoam. People called me soft. They called me pretty. When I flicked my fingers and silver fell into the palm of some curious pilgrim, their eyes widened, and where wonder had lived fear quickly took root.
"She's a witch," someone said the first time. The word tasted like iron in the air and made the circle close around me. It didn't matter that I swore I was a boy; words have a way of folding truth until it becomes whatever the crowd needs it to be.
They called for torches and for justice. They called for the brand of old superstitions. They hit me because hit was what they knew to do when they were afraid; they struck me because a body is an easy place to put blame. I remember the first blow — a dull, hot shock that sang across my cheek — and then a blurry stacking of fists, the rope of a hand around my throat, the cold rattle of a cage being dragged across stone.
"Not a witch!" I gasped that first night until my voice was gone from my throat. Pleas became routine: morning, noon, midnight. Years folded over themselves. My bones learned the rhythm of suffering. They hammered me into silence and left me to the dark, bleeding, bruised, the edges of myself scraped away.
I dreamed in fragments: heroes with capes, bright and impossible, saving cities I could not name. In the dream I felt power as something kinder — a clean light that did not cost people their minds. I woke from it once with the taste of thunder on my tongue.
When I finally rose — not because they let me, but because I discovered I could not stay bent anymore — it was like being born again. I tasted electricity in the air and it answered me like an old friend. Light keened along my skin, nerves humming until my hands stung.
They crowded the cage as if to watch a trapped animal die. Faces blurred into a single wave of curiosity and malice. Someone spat. Someone laughed. I stepped forward until the iron bars pressed into my palms.
"You should not have done that," I said, and the voice that came out was low and strange to my own ears. It did not tremble. It did not plead.
They jeered. They pushed. A torch swung too close to my hair and I saw the reflection of flame in the pilgrims' eyes — hungry, greedy, small.
A fine, blue light crawled along my fingers. It threaded between my knuckles and cracked like glass. My breath came sharp and hot. For years I had been their coin-keeper, their living vault; for years they had eaten at each other's souls. I had thought I could be gentle. I had thought dying peace might come to me if I kept my hands soft.
I did not want to be gentle anymore.
The first bolt was not loud. It was a whisper of glass and wire that left their torch-bearer doubled over on the ground, twitching. Then the second struck the nearest guard in the throat and he fell with a wet gasp. Screams rose — sharp, thin, frantic — and for a moment I stood in the center of it all like a statue come to life.
"You should have left me alone," I said. My grin came out like a knife. Electricity licked my teeth and burned the air. "You're dead now," I told them, and somewhere in the words there was a promise that would not be broken.
I laughed — a long, hot braid of sound that felt like a fever. "Ha — ha — ha," it came out, ragged and too loud in the close air, until the sound filled the courtyard and bounced back at me from the pilgrims' stunned faces. I looked at him then, really looked: the way his hands trembled, the way his eyes searched for mercy that wasn't there. Something cold and bright settled behind my ribs. The world narrowed to him; everything else fell away like ash.
My fingers twitched. The electricity under my skin answered as if it had been waiting for the command. There was a thought — not thought, more like a white flash — that he belonged to me now, that his breath could be taken and the sound would be mine to shape. I felt a terrible pleasure then, pure and absolute, and I could not deny it. It tasted like metal and warm rain and the final click of a lock.
I stepped forward with slow, deliberate calm. Around us, the murmurs rose and choked into silence. He tried to raise his hands; they fell uselessly. The first strike of power was a whisper and then a snap, and his body collapsed in a soft, irrevocable shudder. He fell at my feet like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
A cold clarity followed the act — not regret, not fear, only the crisp knowledge of what I had done. I lifted my head and the pilgrims' faces were maps of shock and horror. My voice carried over their gasps, steady and cold.
"You wanted to know what I was," I said. "Now you know. You will all perish if you keep trying to take from what is mine."
It was not merely a threat. It was a verdict, and in the echoes of my laughter the world seemed to agree. I was a boy capable of it all.
I killed them all. Every last pilgrim.
It wasn't hard — it was effortless. The electricity moved like instinct, like breath, and I felt… pleasure. That word alone made my stomach twist. It wasn't justice; it wasn't mercy. It was hunger.
When the last body hit the ground, silence fell heavy over the field. The smell of ash and rain clung to my skin. My hands trembled as I looked down at what I'd done.
"This isn't what heroes do…" I whispered, my voice breaking.
Superheroes save lives. They protect. They don't destroy.
So what did that make me?
I dropped to my knees, staring at my feet as grief crawled up my throat. My heart felt too big for my chest. "What did I do?" I whispered again, barely audible. My powers hummed beneath my skin, still wild, still alive, and I wished I could turn them off — erase everything.
Sparks danced over my bruises, closing the wounds, sealing the blood. My body healed, but the sight around me didn't change. It hit me then — maybe, if my powers could heal me, they could heal them.
I ran to the nearest pilgrim, hands glowing, desperate. But when the light touched his skin, it faded into nothing.
"Come on… come on, work!"
Nothing.
The realization struck like a knife. My powers only worked on the living. And none of them were left alive.
"Dammit… Dammit all!" I screamed, punching the ground until sparks shot up around my fists.
(Time for a secret — better keep it. Kanoa is an ugly crier. He hates when people see him cry.)
That night, he cried anyway. Cried until his throat hurt and his eyes swelled shut.
And then it rained.
I'd always loved the rain — the way it cooled the world, the way it made everything smell clean again. But rain and my powers never mixed well. The water amplified everything, made the electricity crawl under my skin like lightning looking for a place to strike.
"DAMN IT!" I screamed again, voice cracking.
Then everything went black.
When I opened my eyes, I was in a hospital bed. The beeping of machines filled the silence. A nurse told me I'd been found unconscious in the ruins of that village.
Then came the news that broke me all over again — my parents were dead. Murdered while I'd been locked in that cage.
I had no one left. No family. No home.
They sent me to foster care — a cheerful place with an awful name: "Smile for a While! Foster Care." The walls were painted yellow and blue, trying to look happy. But the air was heavy with the kind of sadness only kids like me understood.
I was eleven. Small, quiet, and trying to pretend I was someone worth loving. I smiled when I was told to. I said "thank you" even when I didn't mean it. I wanted to be adopted — to be chosen — but every time new parents came to look, they passed right over me.
Too strange. Too quiet. Too much.
No one wanted the boy with lightning in his veins and a past drenched in ashes.
And even though my parents were cruel, greedy people… I missed them anyway. I missed someone calling my name. I missed belonging, even if it hurt.
Because being hated was still better than being forgotten.