This guitar had seen better days. My varnish was chipped, my strings frayed, but the moment Leon Drake touched me, I thrummed with life. Every note he played pulled at something deeper—beyond sound, beyond time. Together, we sat most nights in heavy silence, watching as he toyed with the fabric of existence like a man tuning an old song that no longer fit his voice.
Leon was tired. Sad. The empty whiskey bottle by his side said as much, but I knew it ran deeper than that. His weariness clung to the air like dust—pervasive, inescapable. He had mastered bending the world, bending time, but now he feared it. He'd shift the strings of reality like fine-tuning guitar strings—always in harmony, always in control—but never too far. Never enough to break anything.
Because once, he had broken something.
It had been a perfect night, one of those rare moments when his old fire returned. I felt it in his grip, in the way his hands danced along my neck. He wanted to give the crowd more than music. So he did. As he strummed, the sky transformed above the stage. The sunset swirled with impossible colors, hues that never existed in nature. The audience wept. They didn’t know why, but I did. Leon had twisted reality itself, plucking at the unseen threads that hold the universe together.
But far away, something broke. A ripple, barely a whisper, cascaded through the stars, and somewhere, a galaxy collapsed. He didn’t feel it at first. The consequences of playing with the cosmos take time to catch up. But when they did, they crushed him.
Since then, Leon became smaller. His world shrank to this porch, this worn chair, and me—a broken guitar in a life lived too cautiously. He never pulled too hard at the strings anymore. Just little things—just enough to stop the wind from blowing too strong, to keep the crickets' song soft and even. Small, invisible adjustments. Enough to feel in control, but never enough to stir the cosmos.
Inside the house, everything was precision. The clock’s hands never faltered. His shoes sat perfectly by the door, waiting, just as they always did. Even the air moved the way Leon wanted—soft, cool, comforting. But it wasn’t comfort that drove him. It was fear.
Once, he had dared to reshape the sky, and the universe had punished him. Now, he pulled at reality only in the smallest ways, as if he feared even one wrong note might unravel the world again.
And yet, every now and then, his fingers would hover over my strings, and I could feel it—the tug of his old ambition. The longing to stretch farther than this quiet life, to reach beyond the small adjustments that kept his world in place. But he never played that song.
I could sense the struggle in him. In the way his fingers brushed over me without strumming, in the way his eyes lingered on the horizon for too long. He wanted more—more than just a perfectly tuned room, more than just a world that ran on the smallest of corrections.
He wanted to feel alive again.
But then, as always, he’d stop. He’d let the moment pass, like a note left unplayed. I waited, knowing that one day, he might not be able to resist.
For now, though, he sat there on the porch, pulling the tiniest threads of existence into place. The sky darkened, but not too fast. The wind blew, but never harshly. The night was perfect, as perfect as he could make it without breaking anything else. But I could still feel the weight of that galaxy hanging over us—its collapse, his regret.
We sat in the stillness, Leon and I, waiting for something we both knew might never come. And yet, there was a part of him, the part that longed for more, that kept me tuned, ready for the moment he might finally reach beyond his fear.
Until then, I waited.