“Before the Mind’s Eye chose him, Elijah Rozwell was dying.
Stage IV brain cancer….Glioblastoma.
The doctors gave him six months….that was four months ago.
He didn’t have superpowers. He had radiation burns, a pill case like a morgue drawer, and a head as bald as the moon. He wore thick glasses because the treatment blurred everything. The only things sharper than his migraines were his thoughts.
Because Elijah was brilliant.
MIT dropout. Quantum cognition theorist. Diagnosed too late. No insurance. No time. So he moved back to the city he swore he’d never return to, just half a man, living in the cluttered attic of a crumbling row house, tinkering with ideas that would never get published, solving equations that would probably die with him.
That is until….
…it found him.
The Mind’s Eye had traveled galaxies, searching for a vessel, yet every hero it had touched had cracked. Warriors, kings, queens and oracles… all fell to madness when their minds were flung open too wide.
but Elijah….?
His mind was already on fire.
The Eye watched him crawl out of bed to write a proof in the dark. Watched him cry through a nosebleed as he tried to crack the consciousness paradox; never for glory, but for meaning.
and when a tear-streaked Elijah whispered, “I just want… to understand it all before I go,”
The Eye answered.
It didn’t come with lightning. It came with silence.
The air bent above his cluttered desk. Reality folded like paper and hovering before him was a single, spiraling sphere. A living atom. An all-seeing pupil.
Elijah stared.
“You will die soon,” it said… “but not before you see.”
Then it entered him like light entering a prism.
Elijah collapsed.
When he awoke, he remembered everything.
Not just formulas, not just theory…. people. Their thoughts, their desires, the knots in their minds. He could see emotions in fractals. Lies became geometry. Truth became symphonies. He saw meaning, down to the bones of reality.
He also saw death…his own, written in his cells.
The Eye hadn’t cured him.
It had awakened him.
He was still dying.
Yet now he could see the world clearly for the first time and that made him dangerous.
The world would eventually call him Vigil.
A bald, hunched man in a gray hoodie with sunken eyes and a glow under his skin like colorful candlelight… a presence … terrifying in its calm.
He would show up where the pain lived: domestic abusers. Human traffickers. Corrupt officials. Mental manipulators.
Elijah didn’t use fists. He used truth.
He would walk into a room, touch your temple, and see you.
Your guilt. Your excuses. Your shame.
He would make you see it, too.
Some wept. Some collapsed. Some begged for arrest just to make the visions stop.
Vigil wasn’t a hero.
He was the consequence.
It wasn’t just villains…
He sat beside the suicidal and gave them back one reason. He helped schizophrenics sort the voices. He walked through the dream of a coma patient and guided her back.
Every time Vigil entered another mind… a little more of his own eroded.
The cancer didn’t stop. The visions worsened. Some nights he vomited blood and equations. Some days he screamed numbers in ancient tongues.
Yet… he never stopped.
Elijah’s final act wasn’t in battle.
It was in the mind of a child. A girl on the edge of madness, possessed by a psychic parasite that had fed on trauma for generations. No one could save her.
So Elijah went in….and never came back out.
The girl…? Well, she woke up… smiling and FREE.
They say somewhere in the world, a sign appears, sometimes it’s a shining light, other times it’s the reddest of cardinals, and every so often a glowing Eye still appears in moments of deep pain….on the train tracks, in dark bedrooms, outside the therapy offices where people sit holding the end of their rope.
They say it watches.
They say it sees you and sometimes, if you listen…
You can hear a tired, gentle voice whisper,
“You're not alone.
I see you.
Let me help.”
**This story is dedicated to my wife Jamie and her sister Lee and her family who I love dearly.
Absolutely stellar. Wow!!!!!