Time and space are complicated.

This may sound like a stupid thing to say, like describing water as wet or fire as an extreme response to not getting whipped cream on your coffee. But it goes further than that. Deeper.

Time and space are complicated.

They are not simply unusual, or odd, or overwhelming, or baroque, or Byzantine, or any of the other words you could find if you looked up your own thesaurus. They are a level of complexity beyond human comprehension. Or elf or genie, for that matter. But even though genie's can't understand it, they can alter it. This has consequences, many of them unintended.

Somewhere, in the infinite clockwork of all that was, will be and is, there was an assumption, based on a likelyhood that might have happened about a year from now, that Kyle would lose the fight. When he won it, the clockwork...shifted.

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This is not uncommon. This happens all the time. People are always making choices, defying expectations, and shifting the clockwork of reality in one direction or the other. And no one ever notices. For anyone to notice, someone with some understanding of the workings of it all would have to be staring into the cosmic all at the exact tangle of time and space connected to that specific change at that specific moment.

A man sat in a room made of rings. Metal rings of every different color and size, roughly forming an orb around him. He hovered in the air, arms and legs crossed, his eyes closed, the rings spinning around him in a dance of incalculable complexity.

At the exact second Kyle's fist impacted Sylvanandra's chin, he opened one eye.

"Huh," the old man muttered, in the ancient language of Uzbedi. "That's weird."