His name was Jupiter.

That was all anyone knew. Not a single soul living in the worn-down, forgotten city of Ferytt could tell you what kind of man he was—they could only tell of assumptions, presumptions, hopeful predictions about what his character could, perhaps, entail. He was a dream. A ghost of the past, present, and of the future. One minute he was there. The next, gone. It was unexplainable. But they could feel it.

His presence pervaded those resplendent masquerades he hosted, yet no one could tell you which jewelled mask hid the face of such an apocryphal figure. Some nights, the timeworn lamps in the windows of the penthouse he was rumoured to inhabit would flicker ever so slightly, like the distant flash of lightning in a faraway storm. Never once, however, did anyone hear his voice, nor spy his piercing orange eyes.

Many believed that Jupiter was inhuman. That he was, imaginably, a god of some kind, or a fairy. A genie. An altruistic deity. Others simply repudiate his existence altogether, though their claims are quickly extinguished by the evidence of Mr. Jupiter’s charitable replies that would, on occasion, appear mysteriously in the mailbox of some bereft accountant or salesman who no longer felt purposeful.

His letters never bore a signature, just the elegant swirl of the letter J at the foot of every page. No one saw the hand that penned them, nor the eyes that understood what you hadn’t yet even recognised yourself. Yet all of Ferytt felt his presence—always in character, always just beyond reach. Jupiter was a performer. Never himself, no. But if you glanced up into the night, if you were lucky, you may have seen a pair of burnished, marble-like lumens dancing through the dark, weaving in and out of whispy clouds, swaying to a beat that you could not hear. Jupiter’s waltz.

Some other days, you might have stood in awe under a rainbow sky as sunlight broke through a wall of darkness, bathing the earth in a swell of golden light. Sat at the sea as the waves whirled in a secret samba.

You may not have believed it then, and you many not believe it now.

But that was all him.

That was all Jupiter.