“The Lightning Gift”

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.

"The Lightning Gift"

The Books of Fae

Timedate – Early Years – 1980s – "The Lightning Gift"

"…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.

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 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.

Lightning in the Leaves

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.

In so many ways my story started with the lightning gift. The moment in my childhood when lightning struck and time and space slowed to a crawl. Where I saw the many faces of the people around me as infinite lens, portals of light that defined the shape of our worlds.

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

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.

Voices in Lightning

It was all about belief. And I was a true believer.

"I screamed words to the lightning, and the lightning answered me back."

I could feel them in the storm. A trio of presences. Elemental intelligences made of geometry and mythology, embodying essences of the Divine mind within the ethers of what once was and could be again. They played out in my consciousness in multiple ways, both as the geometric forms I would eventually call aka and as Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichor the literal Muses of Story, Song and Dance from Greek mythology.

It was like the world lay within a world, that what things appeared to be on the surface of the world was just the echo of something much deeper, a world within the world where things began and remained.

We were so much more than we seemed. We were the Gods themselves, forgotten onto our own majesties in the travails of time. It was like I was living simultaneously in the realm of Gods and Mortals, somehow unable to reconcile the world as it existed above and below the surface of what things appeared to be.

I was on the Earth, yet I saw things from the Heavens, part of a pantheon of living light.

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

LOCATION – AUGUST, 1984 NEW YORK CITY – REALMS OF LIGHTNING

Meeting the Muses

“I screamed words to the lightning, and the lightning answered me back.”

I could feel them in the storm.  A trio of presences.  Elemental intelligences made of geometry and mythology, embodying essences of the Divine mind within the ethers of what once was and could be again.  They played out in my consciousness in multiple ways, both as the geometric forms I would eventually call aka and as Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichor the literal Muses of Story, Song and Dance from Greek mythology.

It was like the world lay within a world, that what things appeared to be on the surface of the world was just the echo of something much deeper, a world within the world where things began and remained.

We were so much more than we seemed.  We were the Gods themselves, forgotten onto our own majesties in the travails of time.  It was like I was living simultaneously in the realm of Gods and Mortals, somehow unable to reconcile the world as it existed above and below the surface of what things appeared to be.

I was on the Earth, yet I saw things from the Heavens, part of a pantheon of living light.

“In so many ways my awareness of the Great Story started with the lightning gift.  The moment in my childhood when lightning struck and time and space slowed to a crawl.  Where I saw the many faces of the people around me as infinite lens, portals of light that defined the shape of our worlds.”

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.”