Sunday Short: The Saviour
For as long as anyone in the village could remember, the siren sounded every Friday.
Nobody knew who had built it.
Nobody knew how old it was.
And nobody knew exactly why it worked.
The siren stood on a tall metal tower at the center of the village, its rusted body rising above the rooftops and trees. During the rest of the week, it remained silent.
But every Friday, at exactly the same hour, it screamed.
The sound was impossible to ignore.
A long, metallic wail that rolled through the village and disappeared into the forest.
Whenever it sounded, everyone went inside.
Farmers abandoned their fields.
Children were called home.
Shopkeepers closed their doors.
Even the animals seemed to recognize the sound. Dogs crawled beneath houses. Chickens disappeared into their coops. Goats became restless until their owners pulled them indoors.
Nobody was allowed outside.
Not until the siren stopped.
The reason was always the same.
The forest was dangerous.
That was all anyone knew.
There were stories about people disappearing.
A hunter who never returned.
Two brothers who went looking for firewood and vanished.
A woman who had gone searching for her missing goat and was never seen again.
Nobody knew what had happened to them.
Nobody had ever found a body.
And nobody had ever seen whatever had taken them.
That was what made the story so frustrating to Aira.
She had grown up listening to the same warnings her entire life.
When the siren sounds, go home.
When the siren sounds, lock the doors.
When the siren sounds, do not go outside.
But whenever she asked why, nobody could give her an answer.
“Because the forest is dangerous,” the elders always said.
“But what's in the forest?”
“We don't know.”
That answer had never satisfied her.
Aira was twenty-one when she finally decided she had enough.
It happened after another Friday evening when she watched her father abandon his work halfway through repairing their roof because the siren had begun to sound.
He dropped his tools.
Closed the shutters.
Locked the door.
And sat silently inside while the forest disappeared beneath the darkness outside.
Aira watched him through the window.
“You're not even scared,” she said.
Her father looked at her.
“No.”
“Then why do we keep doing this?”
He didn't answer immediately.
Finally, he said, “Because our parents did.”
Aira looked toward the forest.
“That isn't a reason.”
The following weeks, she began talking to the others.
She spoke to farmers.
Shopkeepers.
Young couples.
Families with children.
She asked them the same question.
What if they simply left?
What if they built a new village somewhere farther away from the forest?
Somewhere they could live without waiting for a siren every Friday.
At first, people laughed.
Then they listened.
Aira found a large clearing on the other side of the forest, close to the edge of a cliff. The land was wide enough for houses and farmland, and the forest stood several hundred metres behind it.
The location seemed perfect.
The forest would be behind them.
The cliff would keep them away from the other side.
And most importantly, they would no longer have to live beside the thing they had feared for generations.
“We don't even know what we're afraid of,” Aira told them during one of the village meetings.
“We only know we're supposed to hide.”
She looked around at the villagers.
“Maybe it's time we stopped hiding.”
That was enough.
By Saturday morning, the village had begun moving.
They carried furniture through the forest.
They dismantled wooden walls and rebuilt them at the new settlement.
They moved livestock.
They cleared land.
By Sunday evening, the first houses were standing.
By Monday, most of the village had moved.
For the first time in generations, the siren tower was no longer part of their lives.
And nothing happened.
Monday passed.
Then Tuesday.
Then Wednesday.
Then Thursday.
No disappearances.
No strange sounds.
No mysterious attacks.
Nothing.
The villagers began to relax.
Some even began laughing about their old lives.
Children played outside until sunset.
Farmers worked late.
People sat outside their houses after dark without constantly looking toward the forest.
Aira watched all of it with quiet satisfaction.
She had been right.
Whatever had once lived in the forest had no reason to bother them anymore.
On Friday morning, nobody even mentioned the siren.
There was no siren in the new village.
And that afternoon, people were still outside.
Some were working.
Some were cooking.
Children were playing near the edge of the clearing.
The sky was clear.
The mountain in the distance was partially hidden behind clouds.
Then a little boy stopped playing.
He pointed upward.
“What's that?”
Nobody answered.
Aira followed his finger.
At first, she thought it was a bird.
Then she saw another.
Then another.
Dark shapes appeared above the mountain.
They were moving quickly.
Too quickly.
The villagers slowly stopped what they were doing.
More shapes emerged from behind the mountain.
Dozens.
Then hundreds.
They seemed to pour from the sky itself.
They were enormous.
Their wings stretched wider than the rooftops below them.
Their bodies were thin and dark, almost skeletal against the afternoon sky.
Their wings moved with a strange, effortless rhythm.
They weren't birds.
They weren't bats.
They were something else.
Something none of the villagers had ever imagined.
Aira couldn't breathe.
One of the creatures suddenly folded its wings.
It dropped like a stone.
Then opened them again.
It glided toward the forest.
Another followed.
Then another.
The entire flock began descending.
The villagers watched in silence as the creatures flew toward the forest.
Toward the old village.
Someone whispered, “What are those things?”
Nobody knew.
Because nobody had ever seen them before.
And the reason nobody had ever seen them was suddenly obvious.
Those who encountered them never came back.
Aira's heart began pounding.
The creatures reached the forest.
Then the old village.
And suddenly—
the siren sounded.
The distant noise was barely audible from where they stood.
A long, metallic scream carried across the forest.
The creatures reacted immediately.
They shrieked.
Not like birds.
Not like animals.
The sound was almost human, but far deeper.
The creatures twisted violently in the air.
Some dropped several metres before recovering.
Others flapped desperately away from the village.
Then, as if something had physically pushed them back, they turned toward the mountain.
They fled.
The villagers stood frozen.
Nobody understood.
Then the siren sounded again.
The creatures screamed again.
And once more, they retreated.
Aira stared at the old village.
At the tower.
At the creatures.
Something inside her shifted.
The siren hadn't been warning the villagers.
It had been driving the creatures away.
Her eyes widened.
“Oh my God.”
An elderly man beside her looked at her.
“What?”
Aira couldn't answer.
She was looking at the forest.
At the village they had abandoned.
The siren had never been telling them to hide from something coming.
It had been keeping something away.
The old villagers had never known.
Their ancestors had never known.
The warning had survived.
The meaning hadn't.
For generations, they had been told to stay inside when the siren sounded.
And somewhere along the way, everyone had assumed the siren was an alarm.
It wasn't.
It was protection.
Aira finally understood why nobody had ever been able to explain what lived in the forest.
The villagers had never been hiding from the creatures.
The siren had been keeping them away.
Anyone who wandered too far from its sound had been exposed.
Anyone who encountered the creatures had disappeared.
And nobody had lived long enough to tell the village what had taken them.
Aira looked toward the mountain.
The creatures were still retreating.
Then one stopped.
It turned its head.
And looked directly at the new settlement.
At the villagers.
At the hundreds of people standing outside their homes.
Aira's stomach dropped.
“No.”
The creature began circling.
The others continued toward the mountain.
The single creature remained.
It had seen them.
It had found them.
Then it folded its wings.
And dived.
“RUN!” Aira screamed.
The village exploded into panic.
People ran in every direction.
Some grabbed their children.
Some abandoned their belongings.
Some simply froze.
Aira pointed toward the forest.
“GET INTO THE FOREST!”
The villagers stared at her.
“The siren!” she shouted. “We need to get back to the siren!”
They finally understood.
The forest wasn't their enemy.
The siren was their protection.
They had moved themselves outside its reach.
The creature descended.
Its shadow swept across the ground.
People screamed.
A man running toward the forest was lifted from the ground before he could reach the trees.
Another creature suddenly appeared above the settlement.
Then another.
The sky filled with wings.
Aira ran.
Branches tore at her clothes as she pushed through the forest.
Behind her came screaming.
Wings.
Footsteps.
People calling for their families.
She didn't turn around.
The only thing in her mind was the siren.
She had to reach it.
The others had to reach it.
The creatures couldn't cross its sound.
At least, that was what she now believed.
But the forest was larger than she remembered.
The siren was still far away.
Some villagers ran in the wrong direction.
Others panicked and headed toward the cliff.
Aira heard someone scream.
Then silence.
She kept running.
A creature swooped between the trees.
People scattered.
One man was grabbed before he could hide.
Aira kept going.
The siren grew louder.
WEEEEEEEEEEEE.
For the first time in her life, the sound wasn't frightening.
It was salvation.
She saw the old village.
The tower.
The houses.
The siren.
People began emerging from the forest.
One by one.
Some bleeding.
Some carrying children.
Some alone.
Aira crossed the invisible boundary of the siren's reach.
Above them, a creature descended.
It came closer.
Closer.
Then suddenly screamed and pulled away.
It couldn't cross.
The villagers who had made it stopped running.
They looked toward the sky.
The creature circled them once before returning toward the mountain.
Then there was silence.
Not the peaceful kind.
The kind that comes after something terrible has happened.
Aira slowly turned around.
She expected to see hundreds of people pouring out of the forest.
Instead, there were only a handful.
One man stumbled out carrying a little girl who wasn't his daughter.
A woman emerged alone, clutching a child's shoe against her chest.
An elderly father kept looking behind him.
“My son was right behind me,” he whispered.
Nobody answered.
He turned back toward the forest.
“Where is my son?”
Still nothing.
Then he began walking toward the trees.
Two men grabbed him before he could go any further.
“Don't.”
“He's still in there.”
“He's gone.”
“No.”
The old man fought against them.
“He's still in there.”
Aira looked away.
She couldn't bear it.
More survivors slowly emerged.
Some came without their spouses.
Some without their children.
Some without their parents.
One woman stood at the edge of the village for several minutes, staring into the forest as if she could somehow make the missing members of her family appear.
A little boy walked beside her.
“Where's Mama?”
The woman closed her eyes.
She couldn't answer.
The boy asked again.
“Where's Mama?”
The woman finally knelt down and pulled him into her arms.
Only then did she begin to cry.
Aira stood completely still.
She counted the survivors.
Once.
Then again.
She had to count twice because she couldn't believe the number.
Only about twenty percent of the village had returned.
The village that had once been filled with voices was suddenly almost silent.
There were empty houses everywhere.
Doors left open.
Cooking fires still burning.
Clothes hanging where people had left them.
A bowl of food sitting untouched on a table.
A child's toy lying in the dirt.
Someone had even left a pair of shoes outside their house.
As though their owner might return any moment.
Aira's legs weakened.
She sank onto the ground.
She had spent years believing the village was trapped.
She had believed the siren represented fear.
She had believed the forest was the danger.
She had convinced everyone to leave because she thought she was giving them freedom.
Instead, she had led them away from the only protection they had ever known.
An elderly woman slowly approached the siren tower.
She placed one trembling hand against the metal support.
Her eyes were wet.
“All these years…”
Everyone looked at her.
She stared at the tower.
“We thought it was telling us when to hide.”
Her voice broke.
“We never knew it was keeping them away.”
Aira lowered her head.
The old woman looked toward her.
There was no anger in her expression.
That somehow made it worse.
Aira wished she had been angry.
Wished someone would scream at her.
Blame her.
Tell her that this was her fault.
But the woman simply looked at her with the same grief everyone else carried.
Nobody blamed Aira.
Because they all believed her.
That was the worst part.
She hadn't forced them to leave.
They had followed her because they trusted her.
Aira looked toward the forest.
Somewhere beyond those trees was the new village.
Their new homes.
Their new lives.
Everything they had built.
And everyone they had lost.
She could still hear the creatures in the distance.
But they were no longer coming.
The siren was still screaming.
Protecting the village.
Protecting whoever remained.
Aira finally understood the cruelty of it.
The siren had never failed them.
Not once.
The villagers had.
They had remembered the sound.
They had remembered the fear.
They had remembered the rule.
But somewhere across generations, they had forgotten why.
Aira wiped the tears from her face.
The siren continued to wail above them.
For the first time, nobody complained about the noise.
Nobody wanted it to stop.
Nobody dared leave its sound.
They simply stood beneath it.
Twenty percent of a village that had once been whole.
And as the sun began to disappear behind the mountain, every survivor finally understood what the siren had been saying all along.
Stay within the sound.
Stay alive.
Comments