Maya wiped sweat from her brow as she sorted through the dusty boxes in her uncle’s attic. That’s when she spotted it—a spherical object wrapped in faded velvet.

“What even is all this junk?” she muttered, unwrapping a perfectly round crystal ball.

Maya shook it, expecting snow globe action. Nothing. “Is this from Crystal Maze?” she wondered, thinking of her uncle’s favorite game show. After turning it over several times, she decided, “Probably just a paperweight.”

Still, it was cool. She rubbed it with her shirt hem to clear the dust. Without warning, the ball began cycling through colors—green, purple, amber, red—before settling on a steady blue glow.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Maya gasped.

Part of her had secretly wished it might be magical while her rational mind firmly ruled against it. The cosmic joke wasn’t lost on her.

An image formed within: her uncle walking downstairs, tripping, tumbling, landing awkwardly on his back. Unable to move.

Maya raced downstairs to find him calmly drinking tea.

“Uncle Rob! Are you okay?”

He looked up, puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I just found a crystal ball in your attic,” she blurted. “I saw you falling down the stairs and hurting your back badly.”

Uncle Rob arched an eyebrow. “Well, I better be careful on the stairs now, hmm?”

“I’m serious! Where did you get it?”

“From a gypsy woman in Italy,” he shrugged. “It’s just a trinket.”

“A gypsy. In Italy. Gave you a crystal ball.” Maya’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “And that doesn’t seem even a little suspicious considering what I just saw?”

He laughed. “Keep it if you want. Consider it an early birthday present.”

At home, Maya googled “crystal ball real visions experiences.” One comment stood out: “The crystal shows what you need to see, not what you want. It never shows your own future—only others’. And the colors relate to intensity.”

She tried to message the user, “VisionSeeker82,” but the account had been inactive for years.

Maya rubbed the crystal again. Colors swirled—violet, green, blue, yellow—settling on amber. This time she saw her mother crying in a hospital corridor, her uncle in a bed, machines beeping.

She tried once more. Blues and greens darkened to purples before pulsing crimson. The vision: a cemetery, her family around a fresh grave. Uncle Rob’s name on the headstone, this year’s date.

Horrified, Maya called her mother.

Twenty minutes later, they sat together as Maya explained everything.

“Rob has had back problems for years,” her mother admitted. “We’ve all told him to be careful on those stairs.”

Maya picked up the crystal ball and rubbed it. Nothing happened.

She tried different cloths, different pressures. Still nothing.

“Maybe it only works for you when you’re alone?” her mother suggested.

Maya tried in the other room. Nothing.

What was the trigger? The first time she’d been thinking how cool it would be if the ball were magical. The second and third times she’d been worried about her uncle.

“I think it’s activated by genuine concern,” Maya realized.

She closed her eyes, holding the crystal between her palms, focusing on her love for her uncle—his bad jokes, how he taught her to ride a bike when she was seven.

The ball warmed, colors shifting from purples to yellows before settling on blue.

“It’s working!” her mother gasped, watching the colors dance.

They saw Uncle Rob checking his phone on the stairs tomorrow morning, missing a step…

“We need to warn him.”

Her mother was already dialing. “Rob? Listen carefully. Tomorrow, do not look at your phone on the stairs. Just hold the railing, period.”

The next morning, Maya’s phone rang.

“The strangest thing,” her uncle said, voice shaky. “I was about to check messages on the stairs but remembered Mom’s warning. Just as I put my phone away, the carpet edge came loose. If I hadn’t been holding the railing…”

Maya smiled at the now-dormant crystal. The final colors matched the severity of potential outcomes: blue for warnings, amber for serious harm, red for fatal danger. But what about the swirling colors before? Were they searching through possible futures?

She picked up the crystal again, this time focusing intently on herself. What would her next job be? Would she find love soon? Would she be happy? She rubbed the crystal ball, but it remained stubbornly dark. No rainbow of colors, no visions of her future self.

“So I can see everyone’s future but my own,” she mused. She wondered if there was a way around this limitation. What if she focused on someone else whose future was intertwined with hers? What if she tried different emotions to trigger different outcomes? Could she nudge the ball toward showing happier futures instead of just warnings?

With its power to see and color-code harm coming to those she cared about, Maya realized she held both a gift and a responsibility—one she was only beginning to understand.

She wrapped the crystal in its velvet cloth, already planning her next experiment. One thing was certain: this was just the beginning.