The couple flew.

The shouting grew.

The fever faded.

The crowd dispersed.

And then, eventually, everybody was gone.

Save one.

A blue-eyed boy, waiting as the world fell to twilight, sitting alone atop a stoop.

Though he made no sound, he was happy for them. These brief, fleeting moments, this togetherness, this joy. A connection neither knew they wanted until the moment it fit together. Life was, on occasion, surprising like that. Or maybe it wasn’t. There was nothing like near death, he’d found, to make one blink and see new colours.

The child leant back on his hands, feeling the cool air against his skin, the stone beneath his legs, and allowed himself to indulge in this time. The quiet of it. The cold. The lack of immediate, pressing problems; of burning, consuming concern.

And yet.

Almost against his will the child glanced back over his shoulder. At the shadow lurking beyond.

One thing at a time, he tried to reassure himself: one thing at a time.

They had cleared the first hurdle. It had taken ten thousand efforts and cost half a million lives, but he’d threaded the star-silk pathway, found an “acceptable” solution, in the end. Hamstrung, bitterly, by the pins set in place, limited by harrowing conclusions he had to walk back from. From here, it was easy to see the end as the beginning. He knew what needed to happen; what should happen; what he wanted to happen from now. Hindsight was the vantage point of god.

And yet.

And yet.

Now it was no longer just his choices to contend with. Now, though she did not know it, a second will was loose.

Now, it was far harder to undo.

The boy glanced back again at the ever-present darkness, and again pushed the fear back down.

So far, her thread was steady. For now she remained divested, a toddler laying by the pool. The path was still clear in the steps to follow. But it was different, now she’d dipped her toes in – things unable to be undone. Reaction had become probability; margins crinkled with mistake. Ripples feeding into ripples, until maybe – just maybe – the ocean would shift upon its surface, and the painted doors he’d dripped so carefully would cease to be the spaces she’d dive through.

Fear nibbled like a dormouse.

How long before she’d attempt it? How long before she took that unguided step, until she lay in bed, unable to sleep, and wondered what could have been? The pain, he knew, would dissuade her; the incomprehensible vertigo of standing at the precipice of time and space and thought. But eventually she’d surmount it. Once they had time to catch their breaths, once they cleared their way through more linear problems – well, they both had questions which lay unanswered. Even now, in celebration, they both wondered how they’d won.

They would know, eventually. The boy’s pieces were in place and they would – should – fall where he needed. But until then, he had to watch them. Had to guard for thoughts unseen. Be ready to interfere on the edge of an instant.

He would not let the Weave claim her, as it had claimed and annihilated him.

The child turned back to reality, to the soft blue world around. His eyes flew out, over the city streets and sweeping night, over the fate lines spreading bright across the endless sky. The countless paths, the life threads, pulsing ceaseless towards the horizon, twisting technicolour intertwined. He watched as they shone, as they flowed, as they drifted together, oblivious, towards what destiny had in store. Towards a future only he could see.

Towards the blackened pit that consumed everything in its yearning, voiceless maw.

They had cleared the first hurdle.

Soon, the boy whispered: Soon.

The darkness swirled.