Michael didn't think of himself as an artist.
That word carried weight—expectation, maybe even entitlement. He didn't feel entitled to anything. What he did felt simpler than that. Necessary, maybe. Like breathing when things got too quiet inside his head.
He sketched because it helped him see.
The habit had started years ago, quietly, the way most important things in his life had. A cheap pencil. Scrap paper. Long stretches of silence broken only by the soft rasp of graphite moving back and forth. He didn't plan drawings. He let his hand move until something emerged that felt true.
After New Orleans, the urge came back sharper.
He noticed it one evening after work, sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at the blank wall across from him. The quiet pressed in too tightly. He reached for the sketchbook without thinking.
The first lines came fast.
Too fast.
His hand moved with confidence that surprised him, pencil gliding over the page as if the path were already mapped. He didn't stop to erase. Didn't correct. He trusted the motion.
What emerged wasn't an object so much as a moment.
A street corner at night. Light bleeding into shadow. A sense of waiting.
Michael stared at it when he finished, chest tight.
He didn't remember deciding to draw that.
The sketches multiplied.
Some nights he filled three, four pages in a row. Others he moved to canvas—large, rough-textured pieces he'd bought once on impulse and never touched. He liked the resistance of canvas, the way it forced him to commit.
He didn't paint in color.
He sketched in charcoal, graphite, ink—sometimes all three layered together. Lines thickened and thinned, crossed and repeated. Figures emerged half-formed, never fully defined. Faces suggested rather than shown.
People began to appear.
Not portraits. Presences.
A woman standing just out of frame, her posture tense with restraint.
A tall figure watching from the background, features indistinct.
A river again and again—always moving, never the same.
Michael didn't ask himself where they came from.
He didn't want to know.
He started bringing a sketchpad everywhere.
On his lunch breaks, he sat on park benches and drew without looking at the page, letting his eyes track movement while his hand followed instinct. People passed. Cars moved. Pigeons scattered.
Sometimes someone stopped to watch.
"You're good," a woman said once, leaning over his shoulder.
Michael startled slightly. "I'm just sketching."
"That's what being good looks like," she replied.
He didn't know how to respond to that, so he nodded and closed the pad.
The attention unsettled him—not because it was praise, but because it felt earned without effort. Like the lines had chosen him as much as he'd chosen them.
The first real consequence came quietly.
A coworker noticed the sketches one afternoon when Michael had left the pad open on his desk.
"Did you draw that?" she asked.
Michael glanced down. The page showed a half-finished figure leaning against a railing, city lights blurred behind them.
"Yeah."
She stared a moment longer than polite. "That's… intense."
He shrugged. "It's nothing."
"It's not," she said. "You should show these somewhere."
"I don't do that."
She smiled. "You will."
The certainty in her voice bothered him more than the suggestion.
That night, Michael dreamed again.
Not the river this time.
A room full of blank canvases. White. Endless. He stood in the center, holding a pencil worn down to the nub. No matter how fast he drew, the walls filled faster.
He woke with his heart racing and the sense that he was falling behind something he couldn't see.
He sat up, breathing hard, and reached for the sketchbook.
The image that came out startled him enough that he dropped the pencil.
A face.
Not detailed. Just structure and shadow. High cheekbones. Eyes deep-set and reflective. A mouth caught somewhere between sorrow and restraint.
He didn't recognize the person.
But the familiarity was undeniable.
Over the next weeks, Michael's routines shifted subtly.
He walked different routes home. He lingered in places with good light. He noticed how people carried themselves—where tension lived in shoulders, how grief bent spines, how joy loosened hands.
His sketches changed with him.
They became sharper. More intentional. Less about capturing what he saw and more about revealing what was already there.
Once, while sketching in a café, he felt that familiar pressure—the sense of being watched. He looked up.
A man sat across the room, nursing a drink he hadn't touched. His gaze met Michael's briefly, then slid away.
Michael's hand faltered.
When he looked back at the page, the sketch had changed. The figure's posture mirrored the man's exactly.
Michael closed the book and left.
Far from Michael's apartment, far from Earth, Varaek observed the shift with careful attention.
This was the dangerous phase.
Not power. Not wealth. Not fame.
Expression.
Art, more than any other human construct, acted as a door. Not because it summoned—but because it translated. It gave shape to what most could not perceive.
Michael's sensitivity had found a language.
That meant others would hear it.
Varaek did not intervene. Not yet.
Interference too early would blunt the edge.
Instead, he watched as Michael O'Garra sketched lines that refused to stay contained—lines that bent toward meaning, toward memory, toward futures not yet chosen.
This was how mortals were changed forever.
Not by gifts.
By recognition.