Before the stars ever whispered his name, Orion was just Ezra Kole—a boy born on the edge of the Arctic Circle, in a mining colony so remote even satellites ignored it. The sun only rose for two hours a day in winter, and those hours were dim, painted in bruised gold and silence. His mother was a geophysicist, his father a contractor with a limp and a drinking problem. Neither believed in miracles.
But Orion didn't need them to.
The signs began early. Magnetic storms would surge whenever Ezra cried. The aurora borealis would bend toward him, shimmer in spirals that defied physics. Birds flew in figure-eights above his head. Machines glitched. Compasses spun.
He was six when he vanished for the first time.
One moment, he was beneath the snowdrift gathering fallen drone parts. The next, his body blinked out—dematerialized—and reappeared thirty feet above the treeline, suspended in a cocoon of fractal light. No one saw it but the forest. But the forest remembered.
Ezra didn't speak for weeks.
When he did, he only said one thing: "I saw the Pattern."
As he grew, so did his obsession—with quantum mechanics, particle collapse, entropy, spacetime geometry. By twelve, he could do equations professors couldn't solve. By fifteen, he spoke in algorithms when he dreamed. His brain didn't process time the way others did. He would answer questions before they were asked. He would complete sentences no one had spoken yet. His teachers feared him. So did his family.
By seventeen, Ezra Kole no longer existed.
In his place was Orion.
He chose the name himself—after the constellation. Not because it was heroic. But because it was flawed. One of the stars in Orion's belt had already died. Humans just didn't know it yet.
"The light you admire," he once said, "is already gone. You're just catching the echo."
He was recruited—briefly—by a division of Sentinel Solutions known only as the Paradox Choir. They built machines to simulate time distortion, and they thought he was the key to unlocking causality loops. He let them think that.
In truth, he was already outside their equations.
Orion learned to bend probability. Not manipulate objects—but events. He didn't lift boulders or fire lasers. He simply changed what was likely. What was certain. He could make a one-in-a-billion chance happen three times in a row. He once walked through a battlefield untouched because statistically, he shouldn't have existed there.
But his gift was also a curse.
The more he tapped into the Pattern, the more he drifted from linear time. He began seeing futures that hadn't happened. Remembering memories that weren't his. He would stare at someone and see them dying in a hundred different ways. Sometimes, he cried. Other times… he just watched.
Eventually, Sentinel tried to cage him. They failed.
Orion disappeared for four years.
When he returned, he arrived on the same day as a comet that hadn't been visible in Earth's skies since the Black Plague. The world called it an omen.
Lucas Vance called it a reunion.
The Harbingers welcomed him like a prophet returning to his temple. Vesper didn't trust him. Matthias said nothing, only bowed slightly. Dr. Apauex observed him like a problem too elegant to solve.
And Orion?
He smiled—barely—and said,
"I've seen how this ends. We don't win. We don't lose. We become… inevitable."
He is not the most powerful of the Harbingers.
But he is the most dangerous.
Because Orion doesn't bend reality.
He convinces it to rewrite itself.