The World Before You Save It

The list appeared the same way it always did.

Folded. Crisp. Waiting on the nightstand like a quiet accusation.

Names written in ink that never smudged, never faded. People in danger. People the world expected him to save.

Elijah scanned the page with practiced calm—fires, floods, collapsing bridges, the familiar choreography of catastrophe. He was already calculating routes, weighing time against distance, deciding who lived first.

Then his breath stopped.

Elijah Rowan.

Third from the bottom.

No details. No coordinates. Just a single line beneath his name:

Rescue required before midnight.

He laughed. A tired sound, more reflex than amusement.

“This is new,” he muttered.

For twelve years, the list had never been wrong. Not once. It had guided him through burning cities and sinking coasts, through the screams of strangers and the grateful silence after. It had made him indispensable. Necessary. Useful.

It had never asked him to save himself.

Elijah checked the time. 6:43 p.m.

Plenty of time. That’s what he told himself—what he always told himself. There were still seven names above his. Seven people who needed him more.

He folded the list and went to work.

By 9:15 p.m., he had saved five lives and lost count of how many bones protested with every step. His powers—if that’s what they were—had begun to sputter like a dying engine. The air felt heavier. Each rescue took more out of him than the last.

He didn’t stop.

He never did.

At 10:02 p.m., he stood alone on a rooftop, the city spread beneath him like a living thing, pulsing and indifferent. His hands were shaking now.

The list burned in his pocket.

He pulled it out again, hoping—ridiculously—that his name would be gone.

It wasn’t.

Only two names remained.

The second-to-last rescue was a child trapped in an abandoned apartment, too afraid to move, too quiet to cry. Elijah carried her out, soot-stained and trembling, and handed her to medics who barely looked at him before rushing away.

No one ever did.

By the time he reached the final name, his vision was swimming.

11:41 p.m.

The last rescue was small. Almost insultingly so.

An old man had collapsed on a park bench, heart faltering under the weight of years and loneliness. Elijah knelt beside him, coaxed his breathing back, waited until the ambulance came.

“Thank you,” the man whispered, gripping Elijah’s wrist with surprising strength. “You saved me.”

Elijah nodded, too tired to answer.

When the sirens faded, the park fell silent.

Only one name left.

His.

He sat on the bench where the old man had been, staring at the list like it might explain itself.

“How?” he asked the empty air. “From what?”

The world didn’t answer.

The truth settled slowly, like a bruise you don’t notice until you touch it.

There was no villain. No disaster. No dramatic moment waiting to be stopped.

The danger was quieter than that.

Elijah was exhausted. Hollowed out. Running on obligation instead of hope. He had turned himself into a tool so completely that there was nothing left underneath.

And tools, when overused, break.

11:57 p.m.

His chest tightened—not with pain, but with something worse. The realization that if he disappeared tomorrow, the world would simply hand the list to someone else.

That it always had.

That it always would.

He had saved the world countless times.

But he had never chosen himself.

At 11:59 p.m., Elijah did the unthinkable.

He folded the list carefully and placed it on the bench.

Then he walked away.

No sirens. No collapse. No cosmic punishment.

Midnight came.

The city kept breathing.

Elijah sat on the edge of a bridge, not to jump—but to rest. To feel the cold air in his lungs. To exist without being needed for once.

For the first time in years, the silence didn’t feel like failure.

It felt like permission.

Somewhere, a list rewrote itself.

And for the first time, Elijah wasn’t on it.