Restraining

My lovely elder brother, ten years my senior, had gritted his teeth for fourteen torturous years before deciding that enough was enough. Though he hid his burning anger from me while he taught me how to ride my bike and helped me sneak candies out of our mother's carefully-guarded stash, it nevertheless reached my young ears through the thin walls of my home during those long nights where he and my father raised their voices at each other during special training sessions in the basement. Levi could act a normal rebellious teenager when having a smoke with his friends in the neighboring woods or when covertly using illusory spells to win some small money in local kitchen table poker games, but as soon as he stepped back through our front door he carried the burden of being the future seventy-seventh head of the House of Atlas. So one day, he left and never came back. The two thousand years of legacy and tradition forced upon his shoulders lost their intended bearer, and the seventy-six head of the family paced around the house for days raving about their esteemed family line being made fools from the moment their proud Jewish ancestors took on the name of a Greek Titan. Many years later, when Levi and I had reconnected in secret, I would read about the Atlas personality and see in it a perfect impression of that beautiful, radiant smile of my brother at age twenty, escaping from the weight of the magical world just to take on the weight of a simpler one. But at the age of ten, I had not even truly felt his absence before I was given a choice by my father: become the new heir, or allow our hallowed name to be further sullied through neglect.