Fiction: The Divergent, a short story

The Divergent⌛

A short story, by Erik Engström, 2026-06-01

Midnight had long since passed when the two figures passed by the alley.

A city is a living organism and the pulse had slowed down after the break of night. Cars and people that makes up the artificial bloodstream had vanished like every other night in the city.

It took only a few seconds before the two silhouettes came back after having seen something strange further down the road and instead made the unwise decision to take a shortcut through the alley in order to reach the subway faster.

Huron Yetao and Thema Reno had just performed a mission as contractors for The Time Council, in which they had been tasked with an assassination. The time council usually avoids interfering with the timeline directly, as they believe the unaltered timeline is the most pure and correct. So, when the order had reached them, they could at first not believe the mission or who the target was.

Further into the alley, a slumped-up shadow in a filthy doorway barely caught the attention of the two agents who were visibly agitated and walking rapidly to the other end.

Joanney Sutton was used to be unseen by fellow people, to the two people jogging past he was no one, but even a nobody can become a somebody, those who are not seen are sometimes the ones that see the most.

The two agents hadn't made it very far when yet another person stepped into the alley from the other end. A metallic sound, the familiar noise of a slide being racked on a gun was heard coming from the other end of the alley. The hooded figure aimed at the two agents and fired several shots in rapid succession. Debris fell from the concrete wall and landed on Joanney, who froze from the shock and surprise. Seeing both Thema and Huron being immobilized on the ground the assassin retreated out of the alley and into the street.

For a moment everything was quiet. It had all happened so fast, but Joanney came to and brushed the concrete crumbles out of his hair and from his clothes. After a few seconds a coughing was heard from one of the agents. It was Thema who tried to get up, failed and fell back to the ground with a loud splutter.

Joanney who was just mere meters away, crawled out of the shallow doorway and over to the pair. Thema turned her head to him and with eyes that pleaded, she spoke "my watch, take it, stop them" with her final words, as her body gave up and became one with the ground. Had he been anyone else then he might have ran off in fear, but something about the way she spoke her last words made him act.

Her wrist was still warm as he pried the strange wristwatch off from her arm. A green and blue light was dimly lighting up his face as he held it up. The assassin was gone and so were the agents, so he quickly decided to go back the way the agents had come from.

He rounded the corner as he came out to the street, on the other side was an empty parking lot and a few dark corners to hide in. Joanney stealthily made it over to one of the hiding spots and looked closer at the watch. It had a few buttons, one of which was labelled "home". The watch face displayed a set of coordinates and unlike a regular wristwatch it displayed not just hours, minutes and seconds, but also the year and another number he couldn't figure out the meaning off. The backside of the watch was engraved with TTC and the initials T.R.

Having no place to call home since the incident, he pressed the home button in curiosity.

The display changed to a black screen, and strange code in green now covered the monitor.

"Confirming user... status... failed"
"Confirming timeline ID.... success"
"Checking vitals... success"
"Wielder will be temporally relocated in 10 seconds"

It had managed to count to seven before Joanney reacted, hastily strapping the wristwatch to his arm, in all his hurry he even managed to put it on the wrong way, leaving the watch face upside down.

Being transported in spacetime is an unpleasant feeling, not because it feels strange, but because you don't feel it.

As both the waves of light and the molecules touching you are affected, your mind simply cannot comprehend the experience.

For him it was no different, when he arrived all the senses returned at the same time, just as light returns after a blackout, leaving him disorientated.

He arrived, suffering from acute time travel sickness, but he was in relatively good shape.

Looking around himself, he noticed that he was in what almost looked like a reception area of an office.

Two receptionists looked over at him from a desk, almost apathetically, as if they barely registered his arrival. Then they continued with the paperwork that they had in front of them.

He sat down on a bench, fiddling with the device which display now had returned to normal. The coordinates had changed and so had the time, not only was he not in the same time zone, he was in a completely different timeline now.
An hour went by when one of the large doors on the side opened up and a man in a suit walked out, locking his eyes onto Joanney.

The suit didn’t present himself, just said “come with me, we know everything”.
Joanney who was still dazed from his first journey through time didn’t put up a fight and just played along. They walked through the same door that the man had arrived from and continued through a long corridor. Judging by the sound of their footsteps and the structure of the bright walls, they were in a corridor made of cheap metal.

He looked around as they continued on and noticed a woman with short red hair who was packing a bag inside of a room. Their eyes met and there was something familiar with her face and she looked at him and her facial expression revealed a similar instinct.

They turned around a corner and arrived in a room. He didn’t have time to connect the dots before the suit finally spoke again. “I know you witnessed something you shouldn’t have. I am going to make the choice simple for you. Either you cooperate with us or you will expire here today.”

Intimidated Joanney spoke hesitantly, “what do you need me to do exactly?” and shifted uncomfortably.

“I need you to finish the job next time, one of the agents survived the ambush, your ambush”, said the suit calmly but with a voice that commanded respect.

“Wait, that was me?” Joanney replied confused and shocked, “how is that possible?”

“The timeline is broken thanks to the three of you and this is the way to set it straight again. The council does not approve of any divergence. You will be provided with the equipment that you will need and you leave shortly again. In the meantime, make peace with yourself.” The suit ended the discussion and left the room.

Half a minute later Joanney stood with his back against the door, still confused about the past conversation, when he heard a faint voice.

“Hello Joanney”, spoke the voice from the door. He turned around and saw the red-haired woman from earlier. “I believe you have my watch”, she said with a voice that hid sadness not nearly well enough. It was at that moment he recognized her eyes. She was one of the agents. She knew that he knew and cut him off before the words had even left his mouth.

“I know what he asked of you. I am here to ask the same. Listen, the integrity of the timeline is more important than our lives, your life. I know he wants us dead, but if you save us, you will break the timeline. You don’t have much time, you must choose quickly, I need to leave before they see me talk to you”, and as fast as she said it, she had already turned around and started going back to her room.

He knew better than to call out for her, instead the tall figure of the man in the suit stood in the opening to the room a while later. “You are ready, it is time”, he said imperatively.
He helped Joanney enter the spacetime coordinates into the device and as he looked the man into the eyes the man had already pressed the activation button.

It would have been a lie to say that he was prepared this time around, even the most experienced time travelers never fully get used to it, but it was done, he was once again in the neighborhood where it had started. The dark parking lot looked the same.

Down one end of the street he saw two figures sneaking around in the darkness, “Huron and Thema”, he whispered to himself. Turning to the other end of the street he a saw the hooded figure waiting under a streetlight. Dressed just like himself.

Joanney knew he had to make it into the alley before the others, so he dashed across the street from the parking lot. He peaked out and saw the hooded figure disappear around a corner in his attempt to ambush the agents. Joanney hurried to the safety of the doorway.

Once again something startled the two agents, who broke away from their intended path and headed towards the alley as well.

He hunkered down in the place where he first had witnessed the attack, but this time he was armed. The observer was now a participant in a game greater than he himself could understand at this point, but he had made his decision. Whether it was made on false premises or not, he knew what he had to do.

Hiding in the darkness of the doorway he aimed the gun at the end of the alley and waited.

Fiction: The Reunion, a short story

The Reunion 📡

A short story, by Erik Engström, 2026-05-22

In pitch perfect silence the vessel cut through the vast darkness.

It left no ripples behind. The stars made almost no reflections upon the hull and the eyes that once had seen its creation had since long been closed forever.

Had it not been for the marking on one of the wings, then the name would also have been forgotten.

It was a generational spaceship, assumed to be the last of its kind. Where the crew was born, where they lived and where they died.

Every person onboard had their allotted number of resources. There was an equilibrium of sorts were nothing went to waste and everything was recycled somehow.

The food was distributed through a simple algorithm, invented before anyone currently living in the ship had been born. They sometimes referred to that era as the old days.

In the evenings the older generations would tell the young ones stories of the old days, as their predecessors in turn had told them the stories throughout the millennia.

One of the most popular stories spoke of a red planet. With dense forests in which the flora reached high, gatherings of clear water, tall mountains and large deserts with caves.

The young ones would look at the person telling this origin story as if they were enthralled. They had heard it a hundred times by now, knew it by heart even, and who knows how many times the story had been repeated.

Everyone knew the end of the story, for it was also the beginning. It carried a grave message. The destruction of the planet, weapons that generated the energy of a small star, the lingering radiation and the end of all that was good. Trees being atomized, lakes turned to steam and later into pure plasma and volcanic stones covering the surface. The once colorful dot in space was now a quiet graveyard with few traces of civilisation, as desolate as its celestial neighbors.

This extinction event did not put a full stop to civilisation, but it marked a new beginning for the select few that boarded the last of two ships that had managed to escape the planet. The first ship boarded was destined for a nearby planet, but for a long time it was believed to have been lost when communication ceased. The second ship took their chances in other regions of space, in search for a habitable planet.

Months without communication passed at first, then the years and eventually generations. A few attempts had been made to send out scouts. Vehicles harnessing the power of light made desperate patrols as long as the fuel lasted, but they always returned unsuccessful, if they returned at all.

Countless generations had passed when strange signals first reached the remaining generational ship. Electromagnetic waves, both long and short, barely noticeable at first. Rhythmic and to some degree resembling a pattern.

A few generations later a strange object had been caught by the advanced sensors. What looked like an unmanned spaceship was traveling through space and a golden disk that it carried was brought aboard after the vehicle was slowed down using a spacetime reverser. The crew aboard the ship knew they had found the traces of the descendants of the lost twin ship.

It was only some time later that the dark ship carved an elliptic path towards the blue, green and white planet. The resources would finally let them be free from their casket. They had also learned to decode the electromagnetic signals over the years. A simple, almost barbaric, method of communication but it was clear that they communicated with the ship now.

After simple decoding, enhancement and translation, the message simply read "Welcome to Earth".

Fiction: The Visitor, a short story

The Visitor

A short story, by Erik Engström, 2026-05-10

In the cosmic scale of things, a thousand years is nothing.

For mortals it is an eternity, a lifetime.

This universal fact had never been clearer to Eolia Nemertinth.

She stood before the council, accused of interfering with the cosmic order when she had refused to carry out adjustments of the official timeline, changes that she didn't believe in and was opposed to.

Working for the council normally meant avoiding interfering with the timelines and the human world. Though something had made the eldest members worried and they foresaw a future that they could not allow.

Eolia, being the perfect entity to carry out the mission, had flat out refused. Much to the anger of the council members.

For this disobedience she was sentenced to 50 years of mortality, to live a life amongst the people she so adamantly had defended, against her own superiors. They wanted to teach her a lesson while showing her the nature of mankind and why they once had sought the actions that they had needed her for.

After a brief hearing amongst the stars and interplanetary dust clouds they sent her essence to earth.

Nine months later she was born as a human baby somewhere in a big city.

The formative years were not easy, the human parents struggled to give her the essentials. Salaries were low, the costs of living seemed ever rising and society offered little help. Despite this they worked hard and did their best for young Eolia.

The school years that followed were shaped by the stress to perform, a feeling of being different from other children and the worship of obedience, as the teachers and adults demanded attention and the following of rules for the sake of following them.

Eventually Eolia entered the workforce and to her it seemed much like the previous years of school, manmade order and control held a higher standing than the principles of goodness. She saw abuse of power, wages being cut and the worst sides of people coming out. She would read news and get glimpses of videos depicting atrocities and misfortunes around the world. At this time she never felt more alone and she wondered why she was there, why the world looked like it did. While she had no clear memory of what came before, there was still a subtle echo that never left her. A feeling that she was not of this place and that she would leave one day again.

And as she left the middle age years, living decades among people had taken the best parts of her spirit and made her dull to the aches of the world. She had seen too much, experienced too much. Her human parents had since long passed on to their next destination and she was left alone in the world.

Some month after her 50:th birthday she stopped showing up at work, it took days before anyone came looking for her and they found her sitting peacefully in her favorite armchair. For the mortals her story was over, but for her this was a brief chapter in an eternal corpus. She had gone home and repented.

Having returned to her part of the universe, she once again found herself in familiar surroundings and she was brought before the council again, who in their high seats looked down upon the homecomer.

They fixed their radiant eyes upon her, and after a moment they spoke.

"You know more than anyone about the humans. You lived among them. You know how they treated you, each other and the planet we gave them. What is your judgment, do they deserve a second chance?"

She looked down on her hands, once again perfect in their own creation no longer worn by mortal hardship, her hair covering her face for a moment as it hung down.

She then looked up on the higher beings, delivering her verdict.

Fiction: The Sleepwalker, a short story

The Sleepwalker

A short story, by Erik Engström, 2026-05-08

The alarm went off, an energic sharp sound, it cut deeply into the subconscious. Pulling the man out of another night of disturbed sleep. 

He had had the dreams again. The forest. The stone. The runic carvings.

When he first moved out to the countryside it was not only to escape the stressful city life as he had told his family, but there was something else. An magnetic attraction guiding him just like a compass pointing in a specific direction.

At the time he did not know what it was, he explained it away with the regular reasons, that fresh air and the connection to nature is close at heart for any human being.

But things started happening almost after the first week. His belongings started going missing from the wooden cabin, everything from tools to food. Strange dreams would plague his nights. Voices low as a whisper would be carried by the breeze.

The area was supposed to be sparsely populated and the nearest neighbors were far away, at least a good fifteen minutes of walking. He had bought the simple home for a bargain not even a month ago from an old lady destined for a nursing home. A plaque with the name Eunice Crants stamped into it was still nailed to the wall next to the door. Apparently Mrs. Crants’ health had deteriorated rapidly the last year and the family could no longer take care of her in her remote residence falling deeper into a deteriorating state.

One day, in order to clear his foggy mind, he decided to have a walk though the forest as it was still early afternoon, and he told himself he would remove the plaque with her name later as well so he could put up one with his own name, Loris Stedman.

As he was walking in the forest his mind quieted down. He focused on the surroundings and let himself forget his troubles for a while. His boots threaded onwards seemingly carelessly, but as with anyone that doesn’t heed their next step he ended up on a path he hadn’t seen before. It led deeper into the forest. The change in the air was subtle, barely noticeable by the conscious mind, but rather something that the primal instincts would pick up on. The trees grew taller, the light grew dimmer and the air grew thicker as if it had stood still for some time.

When he realized his predicament he had already arrived at an opening in the forest, where the treetops almost weaved together, forming a ceiling of sorts. Roots, thorns and small rocks covered the path, but it was as if his feet knew every obstacle, guiding him towards a large stone rising up in the middle of the clearing. A runic stone that made Loris shudder as it towered above him as his stood in front of it. 

 

As if something pulled his arm, his hand moved towards the gray obelisk and touched the surface, which was colder than he expected. His finger traced the roughly carved runes and it was as if the stone itself slowly fed off of his body heat. He stood in the high grass around the stone and as he moved his feet he heard a crunching sound. Looking down he could see pale bones strewn around. Some had been there for a long time and others still had traces of dried blood, indicating that whatever was going on here, had been going on for a long time and still to this day.

Disturbed by this finding, Loris turned around and quickly headed back to his new home. Heartbeats deafening and his breathing almost burning. 

He got home before the evening and it was first as he stood on the porch that he spoke the first words out loud. “What the hell was that?”. Even as he tried to make himself busy with the new name sign outside the door, he could not shake the feeling that he had been in the presence of something dark and evil. Trying to smooth out a bit of the surface of the wall where the new plaque would hang, he looked for his chisel, but despite emptying the toolbox on the porch, it was nowhere to be found. Under normal circumstances he would have just gotten angry but eventually gotten a new one, but something about this felt unusual. Ever since he had moved here, things had disappeared. Just the other week a hammer got lost and before that his favorite knife. Once is misfortune, twice is coincidence but three times, at least? Something was at play and it made Loris feel uneasy, so much so that he begrudgingly accepted a slight tilt on the sign with his name and returned indoors for the evening.

He lit a fire in the fireplace, washed his hands and headed for the sofa in the small living room. Facing the fire he felt calm return to his body, a sigh of satisfaction escaped and he leaned back eyes staring into the ever chaotic dancing of the flames. The flames that had brought protection and safety for humans since it’s first discovery, before the words to describe its comfort even came into existence, now kept him company.

He zoned out for a few seconds and found himself staring into the bright light, almost in a hypnotic state. For him there was no past, no future, not even the present. It was as if the fire spoke to him directly and he could only listen.

And at the edge of what is audible, a voice spoke, as if it was part of the background noise of the forest surrounding the cabin or coming from the walls themselves.

Shadows moved independent from the wild movements of the fire and he heard the voice of something ancient speak.

“I know you can hear me. You have bridged the abyss. They took her away from me before the work was complete and now you are chosen to fulfill the prophecy. You have done a good job so far. There is one last thing you need to finish before I can return from the other side.”

Hearing this Loris just nodded. Everything made sense to him now. The destination had revealed itself and so had the path leading there.

Night eventually came and this time he didn’t bother locking the door or setting the alarm.

Fiction: The Fall, a short story

The Fall

A short story, by Erik Engström, 2025-12-26

A light smog covered the top of the buildings as the red morning sun shone through the ghostlike mist. The rays barely reflected off of the grey concrete monoliths rising up from the urban jungle.

From one of the buildings a long line of people stood waiting for something, trailing across the otherwise empty street like a slithering snake.

His hand clutched a small device, not much bigger than a vintage USB-drive. It was his authentication device that would grant him the daily rations of oxygen and water. He had fetched his monthly licence for seven hours of ad free sleep earlier that day from the ministry of dreams.

Behind him he could still hear the hushed but audibly concerned voices of people talking about how their productivity credits were running low. How things used to be different. How people had started going missing.

He himself glanced at his port-a-thenicator to see his balance, it would barely cover the caloric purchase later.

A robotic voice spoke up from the panel located on the wall as he finally got to the front of the line. He scanned his device and the voice spoke. “Greetings, Bastian Mynscel. In the delivery compartment to your right your oxygen and water is available for pickup by the grace of the Council. 17 productivity credits have been withdrawn”.

He picked up his goods and as he was leaving he could hear the next person in line being declined due to insufficient funds. A scuffle broke out as a nearby guardbot attempted to arrest the citizen. He had seen this before and was sure the rumors of disappearances had something to do with it. Hardship and cybernetic implants had made his senses dulled, cold to what was happening at the supply shop. He was already on his way to the protein factory to make his purchase and he was running late.

He counted the blocks he was passing as he was walking along the street, it was easier to count the buildings than trying to recognize them as individual buildings as they were essentially looking the same. After a couple of blocks he arrived at the factory, where chimneys worked tirelessly to contribute to the unnatural clouds covering the top floors of the neighboring office buildings.

The line of waiting people was shorter than ever before and he joined the end of it. A scrawny man stood by the side, twitching slightly and he spoke with a slurred voice. “Do you never ask why the line keeps growing shorter for every day? They say that the workers that no longer are productive goes here. To feed the other workers.”

Bastian had already looked away, and his initial reaction was to ignore the man and consider him a fool.

But there was something about these words that gnawed at the back of his mind. Sometimes truth only needs to be spoken once. It made sense. The one thing they never ran out of in the city was meat. This was indeed where the Council would send the least productive workers.

In the old days this would cause an outrage. But greed changes a system, hunger changes a person and desperation triumphs over morals.

Fiction: The Descendant, a short story

The Descendant

A short story, by Erik Engström, 2025-09-17

A couple of pigeons were strutting around on the ground as a cool breeze swept across the plaza. It was early spring when I decided to have my coffee outdoors for the first time this year.

One of the birds stood out against the others, it was white and slightly spotted. They were living in the moment, scouring for crumbles that had been left on the ground from earlier guests.

After a while they took off flying towards another part of the city, and I was once again alone with myself and my thoughts.

Glancing at my wristwatch, I knew it was time, they would be here any minute so I took my cup and went inside and found a secluded corner in the café.

As expected, and as they usually are, they were on time. Temporal agents were coming through the door and gracefully coming over to my corner where they sat down, face to face with me. Apart from their wildly different clothes, they all shared the same face. My face. Or maybe I carried their face.

When you work for The Time Council you are sometimes provided a new identity. Instead of looking like a nobody, they make you look like everybody. Should one agent be caught, then the opposition would simply think that they have captured the only agent. Perhaps they would even dismiss the person as a regular time traveler as there would be photos of the same person in multiple points in time.

One of them handed me a letter addressed to Ramel Loveworth, which read:

“Mr. Loveworth, you have been permanently dismissed from the Council for interfering with the timeline. As an agent you are there to observe and not be observed. Your actions have costed us greatly. The rules are clear and despite this you intervened. Hand in your device to agent Sidney Bardlet and continue your civilian days in time alone from this point onwards.”

I stared at the paper, deep down I knew that I had broken the rules but even now I was also convinced that I did the right thing. Countless lives had been saved from a terrible fate no one knew about now. A brief moment followed and I removed the wristwatch and put it in the outstretched hand of agent Bardlet.

Without a word they got up and left as proudly as they had entered, leaving me alone in the corner again. My eyes drifted to my wrist, realizing what it all had costed me.

As we had been to every point in the past and the future, we also developed a near perfect understanding of cause and effect. What people sometimes attributed to random occurrences or accidents we always knew how to trace back to the source.

What is difficult with having access to any point in the timeline is not that you don't know what to change, because you will not run out of such things.

It is knowing that you are able to but shouldn't change it, and now I know the price for doing so.

 

Fiction: The Returned, a short story

The Returned ❄️

A short story, by Erik Engström, 2025-10-29

What is scarier than entering cryo sleep? Well, that would have to be waking up from it. That's at least what the scientist told herself when she was looking down at the cryo chamber laying before her in the subterranean vault. A plaque with the name Rose Monime was the only thing giving the metal box a purpose to the unknowing eye. 

To the scientist this was a purpose greater than herself, the box had been there before her, and it had originally been intended to be there after her. In fact, no one at the Ark facility alive today had personally seen Rose. She had been frozen in time since a previous era, when cryo sleep, cloning and factory made humans were illegal, and at best instantly deadly. A horrible fate awaited most brave souls participating in the early, secret, trials. Rose had been one of the first to successfully enter cryo sleep.

Every day the scientists painstakingly ran checks and documented the vital signs provided by the now dated technology. Every day also meant a world that became more different from the world that Rose had known, should she ever return. 

And the day eventually came when the union between cutting edge science and luck were put to the test. With specially crafted microwave instruments and state of the art quantum particle analysis the scientists brought her back from this undefined state of being, neither alive or dead.

The pain of thawing after decades or centuries was indescribable. Every cell waking up from deep slumber was making it clear that this was against the wishes of any creator and the laws of nature.

The scientist looked at Rose as she became conscious after an almost 24 hour long recovery process. Her old memories, being electric impulses, were gone and new impressions flooded an almost factory reset brain. No one really knew what to expect either. In the same room, cryo chambers stood empty like open caskets gathering dust, indicating that there once had been others. She was the first one to not only make the journey but to also make it back, but some journeys make the traveler a different person. 

Rose's bewildered gaze met the scientist's and for a moment it looked like the two women shared a silent understanding. She spoke to Rose, but the woman in the cryo chamber said nothing. Her eyes had lost their human quality and she was just blankly looking at the scientist as if there was no one inside. As if the human spirit had left the body, leaving only a primitive animal behind.

Fiction: The Exception, a short story

The Exception

A short story, by Erik Engström, 2025-10-05

A chaotic scene unfolded, the phones had been ringing nonstop for the past hours.

There was some kind of breach in the firewall, programs that weren't supposed to interact with one another had suddenly been interconnected.

Milvago Tintie was one of the latest workers that had been hired to upgrade the systems in the company some week ago. While waiting for the interview he had met Ella Rove, a girl that had been at the company for a year or so.

There was something about Ella that sparked a thought in Milvago, something he hadn't encountered before. A door deep within had opened and simple logic was not enough to explain this strange algorithm.

A few weeks passed by at the office and he recognized how different he was from the other colleagues working there. They never asked him to have coffee together and others thought that it was strange that he never ate lunch while sitting alone at the table in the lunch area.

It was not the first time he had experienced this kind of exclusion because of who he was. So it came as a great surprise when Ella one day sat down at this table. They had a lively conversation about everything and nothing, getting so caught up that they lost track of the allotted three quarter of an hour long lunch break. 

Getting back late from the lunch that day he was still focused on her and the regular work tasks soon received less attention. He looked forward to the next moment they would speak, and the next moment after that. 

And so the weeks kept churning, they would meet often and spend time talking and one day he simply came to the conclusion that he was in love with her. Caught up in these thoughts he decided he would visit her one day, bring a gift and ask her if she felt the same way.

It was a Thursday before a public holiday when he dressed in his best shirt and suitable clothes.
There was a bit of rain, so he brought an umbrella and got into the taxi.
It arrived just outside of the building and he stepped out, looking at the top floor.
"This is it" he said as he opened the door to the lobby and headed for the elevator.

He rang the bell at her apartment. He smiled wide and waited with anticipation.
This was the most important occasion in a long time, perhaps in his whole existence.

She opened the door carefully, smiled at first when she saw him. Her eyes moved towards the gift he carried and the smile faded somewhat as if she already knew his intentions. She looked him in the eye and a brief silence followed.

He started speaking but she cut him off gently but decisively.

"We can't be together Milvago" she said while the rain trickled down his face, "you know they would never allow it". 

A tear traveled down her cheek and she now smiled a broken smile as tears started forming.

This was an emotion he could never show. It was only reserved for humans. 

Fiction: The Castling, a short story

The Castling ♟️

A short story, by Erik Engström, 2025-09-17

Change was in the air. But there was a storm brewing far off in the distance as well. The days were shorter and the first falling leaves were a sign of the change of seasons. 

A man was walking along the seashore as the wind swept in over dried seagrass and crushed seashells.  

He stopped by the edge of the water, where the ocean met the grayish sand. His boots sank into the sand as he looked at a puddle to see his own reflection. He had not yet grown used to the face looking back at him. 

Somewhere out there he knew a stranger was in the same predicament. Someone looking into the reflection, perhaps as confused as himself. Maybe someone was trying to find out the truth at this very moment. Even if it was possible, would he want to transfer back to an aging body, stuck in a monotonous life? Whoever had taken his place surely wasn’t the winner.  

Judging by the name driver license in the wallet, he had somehow taken over the body of Anton Fossa, a young banker living in an expensive apartment in the city center. He himself was registered as Cody Poe Belmont, a reserved immigrant living a simple life as a priest without really leaving much of a paper trail. 

A distant sound at sea pulled Cody back from deep thought. Ever since the castling of souls had occurred, one thought had kept him awake at night, keeping him in fear. 

The life that he had ended up in had everything most people could ever dream of. He was young again; the gaze of people wandered toward him with attraction and his job paid well. Yet the question lingered echoing in the back of his head at all times.  

If the other person could find him, after all Anton was probably quite established, why did Anton never contact him? Had the stranger found hidden potential in his life that he himself had missed all these years? 

Later the same evening, as Cody was looking through the library in his new apartment, he pulled out a book that looked different from the other business, sociology and psychology books. A leather-bound book that gave him chills merely by touching it with his fingers. 

He realized that this was a book of great evil, and the illusion that he desperately had held onto that the whole situation was an accident was dispelled, as the title taunted him with jagged letters. 

“Satanic rituals, sacrifice and the transference of souls”