Page 18 of Death’s Gentle Hand

Where the Time Gathers

Cael

H e walked openly through Varos in the hushed hours before dawn. Each step felt like commitment, like choosing mortality over the ethereal drift he'd known for eons.

The change unsettled him in ways he was only beginning to understand.

His feet—when had he started thinking of them as feet rather than extensions of cosmic will?

—pressed against cobblestones with weight that surprised him.

The cold bit at his skin now, sharp and immediate, making him pull the borrowed coat tighter around shoulders that had never known temperature before.

His stomach cramped with what he was learning to recognize as hunger, an alien sensation that left him lightheaded and strangely vulnerable.

This is what mortality feels like, he thought, stumbling slightly as exhaustion—actual, physical exhaustion—dragged at his limbs. No wonder they treasure it so fiercely.

Time bent subtly around his presence, reacting to his increasing corporeality with small rebellions against natural law.

Street clocks stuttered as he passed, their mechanical hands jumping backward for crucial seconds before resuming their steady march toward everyone's eventual debt.

Shadows lingered longer than physics should have allowed, clinging to his form like memory given substance.

The early morning air carried scents that made his newly sensitive nose burn: coal smoke thick enough to taste, the sour tang of unwashed bodies pressed too close together, the metallic bite of time-magic that bled through cracked foundations like infected wounds.

Underneath it all, the green struggle of plants fighting to grow in polluted soil—hope made manifest in the most unlikely places.

A dog growled as he passed, hackles raised, sensing something not-quite-right about the figure that cast shadows but moved too quietly. The sound made Cael flinch, his borrowed heart racing with an emotion he slowly identified as fear. When had he become afraid of being discovered?

His wandering was aimless at first, driven more by restless energy than any particular destination.

But as the sky began to lighten with the gray pre-dawn that passed for sunrise in Varos, Cael found himself drawn toward the upper districts where the city's wealthy made their homes in floating quarters that literally looked down on the suffering below.

The House of Years rose before him like a monument to mortal cruelty, its opulent facade gleaming with inlaid precious metals and crystals that caught and refracted light in patterns designed to mesmerize and impress.

The building itself seemed to hum with stolen time, making Cael's teeth ache with sympathetic resonance.

Through its crystalline windows, he observed the final stages of negotiations that had been conducted throughout the night.

Nobles emerged from the building's carved doors, their laughter sharp and satisfied, their movements carrying the loose confidence of people who had just purchased extended life from the desperate.

One woman, her face artificially youthful but her eyes ancient with cruelty, counted time-crystals like a merchant tallying profit.

“Forty years for a face-lift,” she murmured to her companion, voice carrying on the still morning air. “Quite reasonable, considering the girl was pretty enough to make it worthwhile.”

For the first time in his existence, Cael felt something unfamiliar and burning settle in his chest. It took him long moments to identify the sensation, to put a name to the way his borrowed stomach clenched with revulsion at what he was witnessing.

Disgust. Pure, uncomplicated moral disgust at the casual cruelty of beings who treated others' life spans like currency to be traded for their own comfort.

He had ended countless lives throughout his cosmic service, had guided souls across the threshold between existence and whatever lay beyond.

But those had been natural deaths, endings that served cosmic balance and universal law.

This was different. This was systematic exploitation of mortality for profit, the transformation of the fundamental force of life into commodity.

At the edge of the plaza, Cael witnessed a transaction that stopped him cold.

A woman knelt before a Time Exchange official, her hands shaking as she signed documents that would sell her young daughter's next forty years to clear a family debt that had accumulated through medical expenses and failed crops.

The child would live but never age, trapped in a seven-year-old body until her natural death claimed her in four decades.

She would watch her friends grow up, fall in love, have children of their own, while she remained frozen in childhood, forever dependent, forever unable to participate in the full spectrum of human experience.

As Cael approached, trying to understand the mechanism of such calculated atrocity, the mother could not see him—her attention focused entirely on the legal documents that would destroy her daughter's future to save the family's present.

But the child turned toward him with the uncanny awareness that some mortals possessed, her innocent eyes meeting his with startling clarity.

“You're not a monster, are you?” she whispered with heartbreaking sincerity, her small voice carrying across the space between them like a prayer. “You look sad.”

The words hit Cael like cosmic lightning, rewriting something fundamental in his understanding of his own nature. Here was a child about to lose forty years of her life, and her first concern was whether the strange figure watching from the shadows was suffering.

His borrowed throat worked soundlessly for a moment before he managed to whisper back, “No, little one. I am not a monster.”

“Good,” she said with a solemn nod. “There are too many monsters already.”

By every law of cosmic order, this should have been a moment for reaping. The child's natural lifespan was being artificially constrained, her death accelerated by human greed. His function was to guide souls across the threshold, to ensure that death came when it was meant to come.

But he didn't take her soul. Couldn't even consider it. Instead, he followed the family at a distance as they left the plaza, the mother's relief palpable in her step while the child looked back over her shoulder with eyes that held too much knowledge for someone so young.

The child waved at him—a small, brave gesture that made his chest tight with emotion he couldn't name.

Cael carried their suffering like a weight in his chest, a new kind of burden that had nothing to do with cosmic duty and everything to do with witnessing injustice he was powerless to prevent.

A moral line had been drawn inside him, and he found himself on the side that opposed the very system he'd been created to serve.

As he walked away from the plaza, Cael realized that something fundamental had shifted in his understanding of his role in the cosmic order.

These time-trades weren't natural deaths requiring his attention—they were systematic cruelty that his presence somehow legitimized simply by existing within the same reality.

The distinction between reaping and witnessing injustice became crucial to his evolving sense of self. He was no longer simply Death, the inevitable ending that came for all things. He was becoming something else, something that could choose which endings to facilitate and which to oppose.

The thought should have terrified him. Instead, it filled him with something that might have been purpose.

Driven by morbid curiosity and growing moral outrage, Cael made his way to the Time Cathedral, passing through neighborhoods where the architecture itself seemed to reflect the social stratification.

Buildings grew taller and more ornate as he climbed, their foundations literally built on the bones of demolished lower districts.

The cathedral rose above the upper city like a crystal growth, its faceted walls reflecting distorted images of time being extracted, refined, and hoarded by those who had never known want. The sound that emerged from within—a low, harmonic hum—made his bones ache with wrongness.

Inside the cathedral's vast main chamber, he witnessed a ritual of extension that made his borrowed stomach churn with revulsion.

A noble—some minor lord whose name carried weight in the floating districts—was purchasing twelve years from a Hollow whose soul fragments had been carefully preserved for this exact purpose.

The process was clinical, almost surgical in its cold calculation.

The Hollow lay on an altar-like table while technicians in sterile robes worked around him, their hands moving with practiced skill as they extracted temporal essence from what remained of his fragmented soul.

Tubes and crystalline instruments channeled the stolen years into receptacles that glowed with stolen life.

“Beautiful work,” the noble commented, adjusting his cuffs as temporal energy flowed into his body. “I can already feel the vitality returning. How long until the effects are fully integrated?”

“Three days, my lord,” one of the technicians replied without looking up from his instruments. “You'll find your stamina much improved, and the gray in your hair should reverse within the week.”

What made it worse was that the soul being harvested broke without dying, trapped in a state between life and death while its temporal essence was siphoned away like blood from a living body.

The Hollow's eyes tracked movement with desperate awareness, still conscious, still suffering, still alive enough to experience what was being done to him.

Cael's hands clenched into fists, and he felt his form flicker dangerously between states—cosmic avatar and increasingly human entity warring for control. The urge to intervene, to stop this abomination, crashed over him with surprising force.