Elsewhere

“No. No, no, no—this won’t do at all.” Chance flipped through the timelines woven by the Fates, brows knitting as his fingers skimmed the glowing threads. He dragged a hand through his curly hair, then clasped it on top of his head, squinting. “That’s new,” he muttered.

He would never say it aloud, but he’d had far too much fun playing along with this motley crew of characters. They’d surprised him more than he’d expected. He still couldn’t believe that out of all the remote spots in the Universe to hide the Scales of Balance, they chose to bring them to Earth. Left them in the custody of an ambitious vampire with dreams too big for his own good and his eyes fixed firmly on Los Angeles, of all places.

Chance snorted.

“At least it wasn’t Las Vegas,” he said to no one. That was where he drew the line. Ever since the old Wheel of Fortune slot machines had been stripped out and replaced with soulless algorithmic nonsense that didn’t even pretend to care about drama, he’d lost interest in Sin City altogether.

Earth, though.

Earth was endlessly peculiar. Humans asked for him constantly, and he was usually happy to oblige. What disappointed him—what always had—was how rarely they acted on the opportunities he gave them. But this crew? They’d acted. Not perfectly. Not safely. But honestly. And honesty, in his experience, was the rarest magic of all.

Chance’s gaze drifted to the azure waves of the Caribbean Sea, sunlight glinting off the surface. A good place for bodysurfing. A better place for thinking. He flipped a casual double bird at the sky and sprinted into the water, laughing as it swallowed him whole.

When he surfaced, still grinning, his mind was already racing ahead. Someone would need to document this timeline carefully. Not to force it into canon—it already was—but to understand how choice had threaded itself so neatly through fate without tearing the weave apart.

A reliable scribe, then. A writer with a steady hand. Someone who knew when to record—and when to leave the margins blank.

Chance smiled. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”