Will Power Edward Aubanel [2026 Edition]

Will understood then. His father hadn’t been mocking him. He’d been naming a prophecy: a person whose entire existence was a verb. To will power into being, for things that had none.

“What grows in the dark does not ask for a witness.”

He had power. And he knew exactly what to do with it.

Here’s a short story built around the name . Title: The Last Syllable Will Power Edward Aubanel

Will Power Edward Aubanel had always hated his name. It was a cruel joke his late father, a classics professor with a flair for the absurd, had left him. “Will Power” as a first name, “Edward” as a fig leaf of normalcy, and “Aubanel” as the surname that guaranteed no one would forget the punchline.

He published Sabine’s poems under a small press he founded called No Witness Press . The first run was thirty copies, hand-bound by Will. One found its way to a poet in Montreal, who read it on public radio. Then a scholar in Lyon. Then a filmmaker.

Months passed. He catalogued, de-acidified, resewed bindings. He learned obsolete dialect words. He wrote to rare-book dealers, begged for microfilm access, argued with a dean who said Sabine wasn’t “marketable.” His name, Will Power, became a quiet joke among grant committees—but also a promise. He wouldn’t stop. Will understood then

That night, unable to sleep, Will returned to the library. He began to translate the journal by flashlight. Sabine’s poems weren’t minor at all. They were devastating—about a woman who built a garden in a prison yard, who taught illiterate factory girls to read using smuggled newspapers, who loved another woman and wrote about it as if the sky were a held breath.

Two years later, Sabine Durand’s garden poem was read at a UN climate rally. A high school in Vermont named a library after her. And Will Power Edward Aubanel, standing in the back of a crowded auditorium, watched a ghost take a bow.

Will smiled. “Because someone had to will her back into the world. And I had the right name for it.” To will power into being, for things that had none

Afterward, a young archivist approached him. “Why did you spend five years on a poet no one remembered?”

By thirty-five, Will had become a man of quiet, stubborn decency—not because of his name, but in spite of it. He worked as a restoration archivist at a failing municipal library, repairing books no one else wanted to read. His coworkers called him Ed.

The breakthrough came when he found a letter Sabine had hidden in a false spine: a plea to her sister to burn the poems. “They are too fragile for a world that sharpens its teeth on soft things.”

By dawn, Will had decided: he would restore the entire journal. Not as a job. As an act of will.