Author’s Note:
I’ve always been drawn to the characters who stand at the edge of things — the ones watching the party from the tree line, the ones who show up to do a necessary job and then stay a little longer than they should. Probably because that’s me, too.
Aron has been one of those characters since the moment he appeared in the Angels of Sojourn world. He’s the Angel of Death, and somehow one of the gentlest souls I’ve written. He tends to fall into that beta-male space I’m drawn to writing. He feeds a dead woman’s dog. He quotes Dostoyevsky. He sits on a park bench after Lily drives away and just… stays there.
I got thinking about what it would cost to be him. To spend fifty years taking things away from people — and then one completely ordinary day, a child in a waiting room looks directly at you and holds out half a graham cracker.
That’s where this story was born. What happens when the Angel of Death is offered something freely for the first time, by someone who simply sees him and hands over her snack, and what it costs him to understand what that means.
The rules say don’t. He reaches out anyway.
And it changes everything.
Here is the little flash fiction story. Keep scrolling for information on the Angels and the entire Angels of Sojourn world.
The Graham Cracker – A flash fiction piece set in the Angels of Sojourn world
The waiting room smelled like burned coffee and hand sanitizer, and Aron had been sitting in it for forty minutes longer than he needed to be.
Gerald Marsh wasn’t going anywhere. Seventy-one years old, heart giving out quietly in room six, soul already settling into that particular stillness Aron had come to recognize. Gerald was ready. Aron had only to wait.
So he sat in a plastic chair and watched the room.
A girl, four or five years old, swung her feet across from him with a dinosaur on her shirt. She was working through a packet of graham crackers with great seriousness. She’d take one out, snap it in half along the perforation, eat one half, hold the other in her lap while she thought about something. Then she’d eat the second half and start again.
Her mother shifted beside her, staring at nothing. Someone she loved was behind one of those doors.
The girl looked up.
Aron went still. He was in the Shadows of Sojourn, the angel realm that ran invisible alongside the human world. Most humans couldn’t sense him at all. Children, occasionally, were different.
She looked directly at him.
Not through him. At him.
She considered him the way small children considered things — no hurry, no pretense. Then she held out half a graham cracker.
He should step back into the deeper Shadows. Leave until Gerald was ready. He had rules. Not Sojourn’s rules — his own, built quietly over fifty years. Don’t interfere. Don’t participate. Observe, collect, move on.
He reached out and took the cracker. The mother didn’t notice.
The girl smiled, satisfied the way children smile when they’d been right about something, and went back to her packet.
Aron held the cracker in his palm. He wouldn’t eat it. Couldn’t eat it. But he sat with it anyway, turning it over in his hand, until the tattoos on his arms began to move and glow blue. Gerald Marsh’s soul came quietly loose in room six.
Fifty years as the Angel of Death and it still surprised him, how quietly people left.
He set the cracker on the chair beside him.
The girl glanced over, saw it, and ate it without any particular surprise.
He returned after Gerald was collected, which he never did.
There was a man in the corner — mid-forties, waiting alone the way people waited when nobody was coming to wait with them. Aron moved to the empty chair beside him. Close enough that a living person would have felt something. A presence. A change in the air.
The man stared at the floor.
Aron sat with him. He thought of the girl — how simply she’d looked at him. How little it had cost her to offer something. He wondered what it would be like. To sit beside someone and have it matter to them.
A nurse came through the double doors. Her expression said everything. The man’s shoulders dropped, and he pressed his hand flat against his knee like he needed something solid to push against.
He still couldn’t feel Aron at all.
Aron stood and left and took nothing with him.
Six months later, he stood at the edge of a wedding reception with his sword and watched a woman in a poofy pink floral dress teach a child werewolf how to dance.
She made it look easy. Participating. She spun the boy until he laughed. The laugh carried across the clearing. People turned toward it the way they turned toward something warm.
Aron understood, then, what taking the cracker had cost him.
Before it, he hadn’t known what he was missing. He’d observed humans for fifty years. Fascinating, yes — the way a foreign country was fascinating. But distant. Elsewhere. The girl in the waiting room had looked at him and held something out and for one moment he’d been there. Present. Received.
Now he knew what that was.
He watched Lily O’Brian spin the boy around and thought: could he ever be that person?
He knew that he couldn’t. Knew what he was.
He stayed at the tree line, sword in hand, and told himself it was enough to watch.
It wasn’t.
A note on the world:
The Angels of Sojourn aren’t a single kind of being with a single kind of purpose. They exist in ranks—some assigned, some earned, and some that are more consequence than title.
Aron is the Angel of Death. Second Order. His work falls outside Sojourn’s jurisdiction entirely, which means he doesn’t answer to the same rules most angels do. Black wings don’t mean he fell or was punished. They simply mean the nature of what he does has its own shape.
The Shadows of Sojourn are the invisible space layered over the human world. Angels move through it unseen, most humans never noticing anything has passed at all. Most humans can’t feel it.
Some children can.
The hierarchy, if you’re curious:
Superior
There is only one. The highest authority. Final word on all law, structure, and consequence. The architect and boss of Paradise.
Second Order
Angels of function and weight. Enforcers, punishers, and those tied to systems that don’t bend easily. The Angel of Death belongs here, as does the Unfortunate who governs the Underworld. Wing color varies by role—black, crimson, and other distinctions that reflect function, not morality.
Third Order
Guides who move through the worlds unseen, helping us humans. They are allowed close to humanity, but not too close. Getting too attached is how Third Order angels fall.
Fourth Order
Newly formed angels still proving themselves. Each is given fourteen attempts to complete a miracle correctly. Failure beyond that results in reassignment to eternal darkness.
Fallen angels
Those who broke the rules—most often for love, attachment, or interference. Their wings turn gray, and they are cast to earth. They retain some of their abilities, but not their place in Sojourn. It is considered a second chance.
The wingless
Fallen angels who have been judged beyond redemption. The Highest Order removes their wings entirely. After that, they are no longer angels in any functional sense—just human, aging and mortal, with bodies that no longer obey what they once were.
The Underworld
Not Paradise. Not Sojourn. A third destination for souls who are not yet ready for Paradise. It smells, inconveniently, like rotten milk and gasoline. Most who visit it note this with disappointment.
If you want to go further:
If this world caught your attention, the series begins with Blood & Holy Water—a vampire ER doctor, a Fourth Order angel with one miracle left, and a connection that breaks every rule they’re built on.
The series follows a timeline and is best read in order, but if Aron is what brought you here, you can also start with Souls & Shadows (Book 3) without getting lost.
Learn about both book’s availability HERE.
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