The medical assembly has finally arrested the last existing Power, one of the super-powered, nearly-immortal beings tasked with preserving the balance of the world. All too often, though, their battles have ravaged cities, so the capture of the last one delights everyone.
Everyone—except Rordan. He stands in the cold, snowy street, capturing the story for his local paper—sinking further and further into despair. A world robbed of magic? It hardly bears imagining.
Then a woman in the street catches his eye, a woman with hair of flame and eyes of fire. And Rordan realises: no one ever proved how many Powers existed. Maybe—just maybe—a bigger story waits to be told, one that might just save humanity, if he can expose it in time…
For anyone who values a sense of wonder, and believes that everyone is worth of love.
The Powers That Be
Rordan stood watching in the frosty street as the last Power, a man with eyes too old for his ancient body, was escorted through double steel doors that mirrored the coal-dusted snow of the footpath.
A doctor paused to address the crowd: the last of the Powers secured, found holed up in an old weatherboard lean-to in the railyards, old and frail, wasting away. He’d forgotten who he was, the doctor said. Lost himself in a fog of age and mental decline. But they had him now, and he was safe, and soon the world would be too.
And although Rordan held his head high and cheered with the rest of the crowd, he couldn’t pretend his chest didn’t writhe with anguish.
When Hunger had been defeated, Rordan had cheered along with everybody else and meant it. It seemed right and natural that Plenty should conquer. And no one had been disappointed when the twin powers of Pestilence and Pollution had followed; Purity was quite obviously a preferable ruler.
Even earlier that than, a decade again, right at the beginning, Peace had made an open bid for leadership, becoming the first Power in recorded history to be elected to an official human government—but it got Rordan to wondering: Peace had only seemed to triumph in the absence of War by teaming up with Innocence, an alliance itself only made possible by the capture of the golden-eyed Power called Understanding during Peace’s election campaign—and Rordan had felt like he was the only one to think that maybe Innocence had another, second name that also began with ‘i’ but was much, much uglier.
And then Innocence, too, had ‘disappeared,’ and riots began in every major city up and down the east coast as fear spread through the human population like lightning.
Rordan had covered some of the early skirmishes, and the stink of burnt-out storefronts skulking like death in the snowy streets, the way the wind shook the ash from blackened wall studs to powder down like transposed snowflakes, the way the acrid remains of melted plastic set his eyes watering and caught in the back of his throat… He wouldn’t forget that. Not as long as he lived.
Peace had been short-lived after that, the first official casualty of the campaign to rid the world of Powers, and it had spiralled down from there. Hundreds of scapegoats had been murdered as passionate lynch-mobs raged, until the government had stepped in with its formal Powers Removal Act.
Everyone had cheered. The world would be safer now.
But they missed the fundamental point, Rordan felt. He reached into his coat pocket for a cigarette and lit it, a small glow of warmth to fight the freeze of winter.
You needed a War to remind you the value of Peace—and to keep Peace accountable for the methods he chose to employ. Now there was no one, and no accountability at all.
Rordan sighed.
In front of him, a girl turned: a pretty girl, with eyes of flame and hair of burnished copper.
Something about that description made him look again, but no; she was just an ordinary girl, with brown eyes, brown hair, average height, average build.
Average. That’s what the world was condemned to be, now that the Powers had all gone forever. Ordinary.
Sometimes, he felt like everyone else forgot that ordinary was just a synonym for mediocre.
The crowd jostled him, and he shrugged away.
What good was it, standing here, anyway? He’d got the story, seen them cart old Simon into the ‘farewell wing’, hands cuffed behind his back and eyes covered with the now-traditional pitch-black cloth.
Silver eyes, if Rordan remembered correctly, which was more difficult these days. The silver sheen of age and wisdom, so appropriate for the Power whose name was Memory.
And now he’d heard the hospital’s official statement, and all the loose ends were tied up. Yes. He stomped his feet to wake them in the cold, and turned up the collar of his fawn-coloured overcoat. He had his story. Time to leave.
He tossed his cigarette into the slurried snow, not bothering to put it out—the trampling feet of the on-lookers would do that well enough.
He didn’t see the average woman turn and watch him go; nor did he see her pick up his cigarette butt, blow on it gently to keep it alight, and cradle it in her hands. If he had, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference.
She was a Power, after all.