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The passing mall shoppers spoke of mundane topics, unable to sense what he could sense.

The local sports team was losing like usual. Elections were around the corner, riling everyone up. Fake celebrity gossip. The economy was hard. A new pair of shoes from a popular brand cost as much as a paycheck, but people bought them anyway.

There were more banal topics than Zarian cared for. His focus was on something vitally important.

Magic. Actual magic.

It hummed, rippled, and pulsated from the center of the koi pond near the elevators across from him. Everyone kept walking past it without recognizing they were in the presence of the supernatural.

Between him and the koi pond was an open floor where promoters had set up a stand for a popular rum drink. He was tempted to steal a bottle and have a big swig or two. He could use a little liquid courage while attempting something that should be impossible.

Zarian grimaced. I’ve been doing the impossible for a year.

It was a good thing the Marines had kicked him out when they did. He would’ve preferred not having a bad discharge, but it was around then the magic powers showed up.

Instead of being poked and prodded in a sterile laboratory, Zarian was out in the open, dressed in wet, ratty clothes, with duct tape keeping his shoes together. He smelled like the Miami streets on a heavy rain day.

He wasn’t a fan of the literal down-to-earth living. But he had a lot to do the past year instead of finding a job and living under a roof.

He’d focused on practicing his magic powers. And he’d done so without the government knowing they had a superhuman on the streets.

He’d also worked on being a good older brother to the ghost who was claiming to be his sister.

“You got this, Big Bro. Just like in the dreams. Go touch that magic thingy and see what happens!” Ariana cheered, sitting on the bench beside him.

“Dreams are dreams for a reason. I’ll get thrown into jail again if it’s really just a dream.” Zarian didn’t want to raise his hopes too high.

Ariana was too bubbly to put up with that. “Don’t let it be a dream. You have magic. Make it a reality!”

Zarian chuckled at her cheesy motivational words.

Ariana was way more put-together than him while she acted like a perpetual four-year-old child. She had on pearly white shoes. A flowery skirt covered in sparkles. And she had her hair tied into braided pigtails.

She was like a doll always dressed in her Sunday best, while Zarian looked like a public menace who crawled out of the sewers. At the very least, she was a good little sister who kept him from being lonely, even if she was the primary source of his problems.

She’d manifested into his life when Zarian was eight years old and learning to make friends at school. The friends faded fast, but Ariana had always stayed nearby, except for when he needed his obvious privacy.

Zarian had long practiced speaking to her without looking at her. He would speak from the side of his mouth in a low tone, which he’d thought was sneaky enough.

The sharp looks from passing mall shoppers suggested otherwise. He’d received the same looks when he started making too many mistakes in the Marines.

He’d always tried being considerate to people around him. His little sister understood that nobody other than him could see or hear her. She understood he should ignore her, especially in public.

Yet Zarian had a hard time doing that. She was adorable and sweet, after all.

He could, however, acknowledge she was probably an untreated issue with his psyche. Drugs and therapy could make her go away. Then Zarian might become a functional member of society.

Zarian shook his head, putting aside what was logical and safe. He turned to his little sister fully. “Alright, fine, let’s go all out. I’ll hate myself if we miss what could be the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Zarian ignored the many concerned looks or dirty glares from mall shoppers. He squinted toward the humming magic in the center of the koi pond. “The dreams from the past couple of nights kept pointing to this. It all has to mean something, or my psychotic breakdown is imminent.”

The nearest mall shoppers hurried away after overhearing Zarian.

From the corner of his vision, he noticed a squad of cops positioned from two angles on the floor with him. A few other authorities covered the nearest escalators and the elevator.

Wow, the mall didn’t even bother with in-house security. They went with the local police directly.

Ariana balled her little fists and puffed her cheeks, angered by the show of force drawing a net around Zarian. Since she was perpetually four years old, the act didn’t lose its cuteness factor over the years.

He was tempted to send her away before the potential violence started, but the determinedly cute expression on her face suggested she wouldn’t be easily swayed.

“You got this, Big Bro!” Ariana shouted, pumping her arms up and down, little fists held tight. “You practiced for a whole year. You’re the strongest, and nobody can beat the strongest! Not these mundane weaklings!”

Zarian nodded to her cheers, ignoring the strange phrasing toward the end. He looked up and noticed the mall shoppers clearing out faster, sensing danger on the horizon. Retail workers looked out from the entrances of their stores. The rum promoters looked around in concern.

One of their young show girls started to put away the rum bottles.

Zarian sighed, disgruntled. “This is going to be so embarrassing if all of this was made up in my head.”

Heart hammering, Zarian reached out with one arm, calloused fingers aimed at the rum promoters.

“He’s raising a weapon!” A police officer shouted.

The screaming started.

“Freeze or we will shoot!”

The screaming grew louder. Innocent bystanders threw themselves to the ground or ran for their lives.

The winding, inky darkness around his arm shifted forward. More darkness flowed out from the short sleeve of his pitted shirt and piled up onto his outstretched hand. More and more darkness gathered until it built up as a bulging dark orb surrounding his hand.

The police hesitated. The mall quieted. No more squeaky footwear scuffing across the shiny floors. No more pointless conversations circling around the same unimportant concerns.

No more mundane humanity.

For the first time since ever, people saw Zarian for what he truly was. They saw what he was doing with the inky darkness on his arm and the bulging dark ball growing from his hand. They saw something eerie, unbelievable, utterly impossible.

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Magic.

Then the melon sized dark orb shot out fast, like an arrow, while staying tethered to his hand, stretching. The dark magic caught the bottle a rum promoter girl was holding while staring like a deer caught in headlights.

She shrieked, letting go of the bottle, which was nice of her. The long tendril of pure darkness snapped back to Zarian with his prize.

He lost some of the dark material. He could feel it slipping away, getting vaporized by the mall lights.

It took a lot of concentration to gather and store quality darkness. Mere shadows wouldn’t work out well enough. Not when he needed to do magic quickly.

The shiny, industrial mall was not a good place to pull off these stunts.

Oh well.

Zarian bounced off the bench, twisted off the cap from his newly stolen drink, and took a big swig. He let out a loud whoop as he swaggered toward the koi pond, drawn by the humming, dreamy, pulsating magic at the center.

Random bystanders went back to screaming. The police maneuvered fast and aggressively, setting their sectors of fire while trying to avoid shooting their own or the civilians.

Zarian hoped he had enough time to get to his goal before they had a clear shot.

A roaring blast from a pistol going off dashed away his hopes. Even after his stint in the Marines, he nearly flinched from the sound.

Without ear protection, a pistol shooting indoors sounded louder than what the media depicted. It was also easy to miss a target while panicking or shooting on the move.

He felt the first bullet zip past his back. Then another shot zipped close to him. Then another and another.

Zarian wanted to duck for cover and avoid the open space around the koi pond. He went against his instincts for self-preservation when he felt the swirling magic from the pond thump with sudden urgency.

It felt unstable.

It felt like it was going to disappear if he didn’t reach it in time.

Poignant questions came to mind.

Should he risk getting shot for the chance of something impossible and dreamy?

Or should he collapse to the ground and hope for mercy from a bunch of panicky police?

If they didn’t kill him on the spot, he was destined for Area 51 or worse. He had no doubts about that.

Zarian picked up the pace while draining more from the rum bottle. He tossed the half-emptied bottle behind him as the liquor burned a trail to his gut.

Somehow, he kept everything inside. Even with his hammering heart and queasy stomach.

More gunfire blared, roared, and sent supersonic lead snapping through the air around Zarian. They kept missing, and he kept moving.

“Go, Big Bro! Go all out!” Ariana frolicked behind him, completely fine.

Bullets snapped into her and phased out the other side with nothing to show for it. Nothing mundane could harm her.

Zarian’s annoyance boiled up anyway. Being the big brother came with a protective attitude, regardless of his little sister being an untouchable ghost.

When he reached the koi pond, instead of hopping in with a forward lunge, he twisted around and dove backwards.

He extended both arms and let the darkness gush out. Watching it go was extraordinary. But feeling it was something else.

The darkness he’d gathered had weight to it. Like the depths of their black, lightless substance went further than anything he could imagine.

They also felt homey to him, as if they were family.

And they shot out with a lot of force.

The darkness flew as blunt javelins from his arms. A dozen of them. When they passed by mall lights, the illumination dimmed and curved.

The dense, dark conjurations seemed to have an effect against the lights, which was another weird quirk among many that Zarian was still trying to understand.

It didn’t matter at this point. All his answers were on the other side of the strange magic humming from the center of the koi pond.

Shooting out all of those dark javelins sent him skipping across the koi pond like a well-thrown stone. His javelins landed in a bursting barrage on contact with the police.

Each hit struck like getting tackled by a three-hundred pound American lineman, who was sprinting at full speed.

Zarian gawked, mouth hanging open, as his dark magic sent grown men with guns flying off their feet. Then he lost momentum and hit the water with a big splash, koi fish scurrying away from his dirty body and the ruckus surrounding him.

The gunfire died down. Police and bystanders shouted and screamed. He twisted around, rose to his knees, and hacked up some water.

Feeling woozy from the rush, the rum, and the lack of proper nutrition, Zarian needed a second to get his bearings. He muttered, “I’m really not crazy,” a few times before he recognized his position.

He landed in front of the magic thing that had beckoned him through his dreams the past couple of nights.

“It’s there, it’s there,” Ariana said in awe, standing on the water’s surface behind him.

Now that he was here, Zarian felt the pond magic more acutely. It was definitely weird. Like he was getting drawn by a weak riptide to somewhere unknown.

The full current of the pond magic was getting blocked off. He couldn’t see what the magic was composed of nor what kept it plugged up. He had no idea how any of this worked.

But his dreams had led him and Ariana here, making him act rashly, as if he was going to miss out if he didn’t take this chance.

Is it some sort of mythical ley line? Zarian thought of all the mystical mambo jumbo he’d read whenever he could get access to the internet.

He wished he wasn’t in such a rush or he would’ve enjoyed the moment.

An actual ley line sat patiently in the most modernized mall around. Nothing human or human-made could sense it but him.

I’m not crazy. Zarian smiled.

More gunfire roared, the shooting starting up again. Bullets snapped around him. He felt a sharp punch through his right back shoulder and got a concerning reality call.

Most people would’ve screamed or fallen down from the pain of getting shot.

Not Zarian.

As his back shoulder flared with pain and bled, he clenched his jaw and ducked down to make his body a smaller target.

He focused past the pain. He focused on his magic, connecting with the remaining darkness he kept stored.

He sent the inky darkness down his legs, through the koi pond’s bottom, and up into a crisscrossing cage of spikes.

He couldn’t form a dome. His dark magic liked to form into straight shapes with reach: tendrils, spears, spikes, stuff like that.

A cage of spikes was good enough.

Bullets from most pistols could rip through car doors, dry walls, plenty of furniture, and still kill humans. But against Zarian’s magic barrier of crisscrossing dark spikes, the bullets might as well be plastic pellets.

The killer rounds ricocheted away and endangered the shooters themselves or fell in crumpled drops into the water.

Zarian felt like a god.

A tired, wheezing, thoroughly soaked god with his blood draining out. But a god nonetheless.

He wasn’t crazy.

His magic could affect the physical world.

Of course, he’d seen it do so when he used it for tricks at the behest of his little sister. Or when he’d committed to the old school superhero training at a ghetto junkyard with nobody around.

He’d grown proficient at wielding darkness from the year of practice. He’d seen how it could plow through hard obstacles that would’ve stopped the strongest humans.

He had magic.

He had fucking magic! And he was the only one to have it.

Why? How? What was this all leading to?

The koi pond ley line could hold the answers to his questions. Because there was more to Zarian’s strangeness than his dark powers.

There was Ariana. There was his weird upbringing in foster care. There was his name, Darkrun, which felt branded to him in a way that no paperwork or mortal person could change.

He was Zarian Darkrun, brother to Ariana Darkrun, and he wanted answers to his weird-as-hell origins and impossible powers.

Feeling mighty awesome and ignoring his perilous injury, Zarian split his attention between maintaining the dark spike barrier and reaching out to the ley line. He pushed with a thought, which felt magical on its own even if nobody could see it.

Zarian was ready to fight tooth and nail to yank the ley line open and access what lurked behind it. That didn’t end up being necessary.

The moment he touched it with a press of his mystical will, Zarian felt no resistance. The koi pond ley line let his desires pass through, opening wide.

Zarian watched, jaw dropping, as a portal bloomed into existence. It was dark and strong. And it was sucking up everything into its howling depths like a miniature black hole.

Zarian was right in front of the portal. The only thing keeping him rooted was the darkness he tethered to his ankles and the spike barrier around him.

Everything else fell into the hungry maw of the portal. Gallons of water. Thrashing koi fish. And more, which kept surprising Zarian. He watched as a police officer whirled head-over-heels through the air and toward the portal.

“You can see it!?” Zarian blurted out at the screaming, blabbering man.

Zarian wanted to reconfirm again that this was all real.

Before he received an answer, the cop made contact with the dark portal. The man wasn’t simply flushed into its depths. He disappeared the moment his flailing body touched the hole to somewhere beyond.

That looks dangerous, Zarian thought. I might’ve unleashed something that’ll destroy the mall. Maybe even all of Florida and beyond.

Whoops.