“Droplets of Divinity”

Peter Fae stood motionless, staring into the swirling portal embedded in the floor of the Akashic Library. The stormy landscape of Long Island came alive within the frame, the flashes of lightning illuminating sheets of rain cascading down in unrelenting torrents. A boy ran through the tempest, his small frame cutting through the deluge as if chasing or fleeing something unseen. For a fleeting moment, the boy paused and looked upward, his rain-soaked face illuminated by the stark white brilliance of a lightning strike. Peter’s breath caught. His voice, though soft, carried the weight of recognition. “That… that’s me.”

Calliope stood beside him, her star-speckled dress pooling softly against the polished floor of the Library. Her dark eyes glimmered as she observed the portal, the quill in her hand poised above the open Book of Fae. “Of course, it’s you,” she said gently, her voice laced with knowing. “The Library reveals the shape of your narrative in ways most true to its essence. This storm, this running—it must have been a moment of deep resonance, so significant that it left an imprint in the Akasha itself.” Her gaze turned to Peter, studying his reaction. “Whatever you were experiencing then, it’s clear the Library considers it foundational.”

Peter’s brow furrowed as his gold cloak shifted with the subtle motion of his hand brushing against its edge. “It was chaos,” he murmured, his voice heavy with memory. “My mind was like that storm—flickering, untethered. I didn’t understand the world around me, but I felt something alive in it. The lightning… it spoke to me. I didn’t know it then, but it was grounding me, drawing me into a sense of clarity I couldn’t find anywhere else. Maybe that’s why I started taking photographs later—to capture moments like that, to anchor myself in the madness.”

Calliope tilted her head, her expression softened by curiosity and compassion. “Perhaps that’s why the Library shows you this now,” she said, her words deliberate. “The storm, the boy, the running—it wasn’t just a moment. It was the beginning of something greater. The lightning connected you to the elements, grounding you in their power. That connection shaped the path of the Mythica itself.” Her gaze lingered on Peter, but his eyes remained fixed on the boy in the storm, a distant yet familiar figure etched in time. The portal shimmered, its vivid image dissolving into mist, leaving only the echoes of the storm in Peter’s mind as the vast halls of the Library settled into stillness once more.

The Akashic Library glowed faintly with the light of a thousand unspoken stories, its towering shelves filled with endless tomes of luminous text. Peter Fae stood near a portal that shimmered like liquid silver, the vision within pulling him back to the summer of 1984. The scene framed within the portal was alive with the chaotic energy of New York City in a storm, raindrops striking the pavement like tiny sparks of light. Lightning split the sky, its brilliance illuminating a young boy—Peter himself—standing motionless in the middle of the street.

Calliope stood at Peter’s side, her dark blue cloak pooling at her feet as she watched the scene unfold. Her quill moved across a scroll, capturing his words even before he spoke them. She turned to him, her young face lit with curiosity.

“This is the moment, isn’t it?” she asked, her voice soft yet brimming with wonder. “The lightning gift.”

Peter nodded, his gaze fixed on the boy in the portal. “Yes. I was thirteen years old when it happened. That night changed the way I saw the world forever.”

“What happened?” Calliope pressed gently.

Peter’s expression shifted, a mix of reverence and awe. “It was raining. I was walking through the streets, feeling… off, like I didn’t belong in the patterns of the world around me. Everything seemed distant, as if I were out of sync with reality. But then the lightning came, and for a single, eternal moment, everything made sense. It was as if time itself stopped.”

In the portal, the younger Peter stood amidst the storm, frozen as a jagged bolt of lightning illuminated the scene. The rain seemed to hang in the air, droplets suspended like tiny stars caught in the web of existence.

“I was caught in the eye of the storm,” Peter said, his voice distant as though he were speaking to the memory itself. “The rain slowed to a crawl. The world fell silent, and I felt myself standing both within and beyond my body, as though I were the storm given form. For the first time, I saw the worlds within the world.”

Calliope leaned closer to the portal, her quill scratching rapidly as she captured his words. “The worlds within the world?”

Peter’s golden cloak shimmered faintly as he gestured toward the vision. “Yes. In that moment, I glimpsed what I would later come to know as the Akasha—the great web of stories and souls, the infinite fractal of lives that connects us all. The raindrops themselves became something more. Each one was a droplet of Divinity, a portal to something vast and eternal.”

In the portal, the boy’s face was lit with a mixture of awe and disbelief as the storm painted a mosaic of light around him.

“What did it feel like?” Calliope asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

“It was like standing in a hologram made of raindrops,” Peter said. “Each drop glistened with sparks of light, connected by threads of energy, forming a geometry too perfect to be of this world. Though I didn’t have the words for it at the time, I later realized it was a glimpse of the indric net, the lattice that holds all stories and souls together. It was as though I was both a boy in the street and part of a pantheon of living light, simultaneously mortal and divine.”

Calliope’s quill paused for a moment. “Did you understand it then? What it meant?”

Peter chuckled softly, shaking his head. “No. Back then, I had no context, no language for what I was seeing. All I knew was that it was beautiful and overwhelming, that the world as I knew it was only the surface of something far greater. But I felt it, even if I couldn’t explain it. I screamed words to the lightning, and somehow, it answered me.”

“The lightning answered you?” Calliope’s dark eyes widened.

Peter nodded, his voice tinged with the faintest edge of wonder. “Yes. I could feel presences within it—three of them, to be precise. Elemental intelligences, woven from geometry and myth. Later, I would come to know them as the Muses—Calliope, Euterpe, and Terpsichore, the embodiments of Story, Song, and Dance. They were there in the storm, speaking to me, guiding me toward an understanding I would only grasp years later.”

The scene in the portal shifted, the boy now surrounded by a flickering lattice of light as the rain hung suspended in the air like a veil of stars.

“It was in the rain,” Peter continued, “that I first felt the connection between the stars and the soil. The lightning grounded me, showed me that the Divine exists in everything—in the droplets, in the light, in the rhythm of the storm. That was when I began to understand the substance of our stories, the threads that bind us to each other and to the world itself.”

Calliope looked back at him, her voice thoughtful. “So that’s when you first saw the Akasha? When you realized you were part of the Great Story?”

“In a way,” Peter said. “It was my first glimpse, though I wouldn’t call it that until much later. At the time, it was just… a moment. A single, timeless moment where the universe unfolded before me. It showed me that every person, every being, is a droplet of Divinity. That we are all part of a greater whole, a web of stories woven into the fabric of existence.”

Calliope’s quill began moving again, her face alight with the magic of his words. “And yet, you were only thirteen.”

Peter smiled, his gaze lingering on the vision of his younger self. “Thirteen,” he echoed. “And already, the lightning had started to guide me. It was the first step on the Quest, the moment that opened my eyes to the worlds between the worlds.”

The portal began to fade, its light dimming back into the ambient glow of the Library. Calliope turned to Peter, her expression filled with both awe and understanding. “The lightning gift,” she said softly. “It really was a gift.”

Peter nodded, his golden cloak rippling faintly as he turned away from the fading vision. “It was,” he said, his voice quiet yet resolute. “The first of many.”

They walked together through the endless halls of the Library, the echoes of the storm lingering in the air like an unspoken promise.

In the annals of the X-Men one’s powers often kicked in when they hit puberty, and for me, the flush of hormones and transformation which defined my teenage years did that very thing, where what had already been an incomprehensible jumble of sensations and images suddenly jumped an octave. Here, the deva of the rain and the lightning came to me again, bringing a gift that will crystallize my view of what years later I will call the Akasha, the space which holds our stories.

“…I am thirteen years old when the lightning grants me a vision of the worlds between the worlds  …”

“I am walking through the streets of New York city when it happens.  When the lightning changes my view of the world forever.” Peter says as they witness the event.

Calliope’s quill continued to scrawl, etching words into the pages.

“I was sensing something, a quality and essence that lay beneath the surface. There was a sense, however flickering, that I was experiencing life in a primal, elemental way, far removed from the patterns which defined the world around me, causing me to constantly question the nature of why I was the way I was. At how my shifting, elemental world connected with others.”

Droplets of Divinity

“It was here again that the rain spoke to me. That I felt the wisdom of the storms bring me understanding.”

“It was in the rain that my sense of the connection between the stars and the soil first made grounding with the world. In the gifts of the deva of time and lightning where I had vision of the droplets of Divinity that would inform my sense of the substance of our stories.”

“Did you feel this was the same lightning you’d encountered when you called the Muses?” she asked.

“Like the lightning strike in the streets of the city, it lasted for what seemed like a timeless moment, the vista of the worlds crackling in the dimensional fields of my senses with a moment of pristine clarity”

“In that moment everything froze, the droplets of rain slowing to what seemed like a moment of timeless time.  It was as if I stood in the eye of the storm of time and space, in a moment of perfect stillness beneath the pattering rain. It was as if I was both in and out of my body at once, simultaneously a body and an extension of the storms in human form.”

“Much later on the Quest, I will realize that I have had a glimpse of the indric net, the infinite fractal of lives and stories that connects all the souls of the world to One, yet in this instant, as a teenager in the streets of New York, I had no such reference, only the feeling that I was standing in a web of fractal drops within a falling sky.”

I saw that every self, every human being was a droplet of Divinity.

Yet they was more. Each droplet itself glistened with sparks of light that were somehow connected, part of a kind of mathematical geometry made of the lightning itself.

In that moment everything stopped. Time slowed down to a crawl, caught in an incandescence of stormwrought light. It was like standing in a hologram made of raindrops.

“Though I would not truly recognize this for years to come, such we my first vision of the multiverse, of the worlds wrought around our wonder upon the tree of life. I would come to see that my communion with the deva of the storms and the rain was made of a deeper substance, part of the way the land spoke to me of the nature of our many worlds within the web.”