Rain’s gray, sad eyes meet mine. He gives me a small, muted smile.
I want to tell him it’s going to be all right, but small talk isn’t my style. So I just lift the harmonica to my lips and play, tuning it to his aura, shaping the notes to soothe and smooth its jagged edges.
My brother closes his eyes and visibly relaxes.
"Nice tune, Snow. You’ve got talent, man," he murmurs suddenly.
I take the compliment. If he only knew I’d been playing with his fate, with the currents of his life, maybe he wouldn’t be so casual about it.
Then the exhaustion hits me. Wrestling with the energetic currents of the universe is draining.
With some disappointment, I glance toward Storm and Skye.
Their suffering is closest on the timeline. Could I use it? Not yet… unfortunately.
Only when it grows strong enough to envelop them fully.
It’s a little tragic, waiting for their circumstances to crumble just so I can harness that power to draw the shimmering rainbow threads of their happiness closer their thin threads still far, far away, and I’m not yet able to touch the ends of their destinies.
You’ll have to wait a little longer, brothers… but I promise I’ll help you too, I whisper to myself.
Just when I’m about to step back from this whole demiurge game of connecting people’s fates, something flickers at the edge of my perception.
A flash, like a glint of a mirror turned toward me.
And suddenly I understand, in a heartbeat.
There’s someone else.
Someone watching me from afar, observing what I’m doing, or at least that’s how it feels. Someone with a gift like mine.
Some eyes are reaching toward me through the void. I try to reach back, to understand who they are, but all I see is two small moons, one gold and one silver, spinning around each other. Strange. I can’t interpret it yet.
I’m almost certain it’s tied to my own future, something far off, still beyond the horizon line, a vast front moving slowly toward my life.
But for now it’s too distant for me to grasp even a fragment.
Still, I promise myself that over the next year, I’ll spend every day trying to read that trembling landscape of uncertain scenarios and possibilities, working to help my brothers, andmaybe even to draw that front of light closer to myself, the faint glimmer of it I see shimmering just beyond the curve of time.
THEO
A month and a half ago.
I stop in the driveway of the Nolans’ estate, my stomach twisting with nerves as I grip the steering wheel and stare at the bright glow of the house’s windows.
Hard to believe, but this is the very first time I’ve ever come here, even though I’ve been involved with one of them for nearly twelve years.
He was always the one to come to me, until two weeks ago, when he simply stopped. All I got was a short text saying something in his life had changed and that our relationship had to end.
I asked him if there was someone else, and he replied, "Not yet," whatever the hell that meant.
After that, nothing. No more texts. And those two weeks that followed were brutal. I tried to keep living as I always had, tried to be a good dad and a good husband. With five kids, that meant I was busy ninety percent of the time.
What surprised me was that Tim didn’t take the news well either. I got the sense he had gotten used to me being with Snow. Our marriage had been open for years, but he preferredme having one steady lover to switching partners every so often. Snow’s personality suited him, too. Discreet, quiet, never intrusive. That was exactly the kind of man Tim could accept as my lover.
So this news hit him too. Every so often, in conversation, he’d circle back to the question of whether I was planning to find someone new. But I didn’t have an answer for him, at least for now. My thoughts were still chained to Snow.
So.
