Both the stone and his heart pulsed violently within Jon as a shattering feeling, both sensation and sound, brought him to his knees. The last had died, and inside, he wept, though he was no longer capable of it.
Years ago, he'd made another vital wish. He'd realized that his very first wish had been a breaking point, a point which cracked time. From that crack, many pathways were born, of every single "first wish" he'd ever made and the outcome. They were not infinite as many temporal theories would suggest; he knew this first-hand, as he wished to be able to look left and right into time and see what had happened as if each divergent path were his own memory. It astonished him how many timelines resulted in himself or a male acquaintance becoming female in some form or fashion. Most disturbing were the things Mikey had done and which had been done to him. The sweetest boy Jon knew, capable of such strange and disgusting things through the power of the stone. At one point he, Jon, had even become magic itself, destined to travel through many different realities created by the stone at that point but presented as if they were there all along. A cruel fate, and one still resolving itself, though Jon had counted his alterself in that one as dead the moment he made the wish.
In each reality, there was a sort of cosmic force, guiding and focusing his attention. The focus of each had died, one by one, the timelines fading to grey and to obscurity, though he could still remember their past events. Now, the last had died, and Jon felt alone. But this story had not yet ended. Its focus would never die. It was with this thought that Jon walked resolutely onward, to the wisest people he knew, for guidance in his quest to find his killer.
