Page 20 of Death’s Gentle Hand
“How do you bear it?” Cael asked, genuine curiosity making his voice rough. “Seeing the injustice, feeling the suffering, knowing that tomorrow will bring more of the same?”
“By choosing to do something about the part I can control,” Damian replied.
“I can't fix the system, but I can ease one person's pain.
I can't stop the Time Exchange, but I can make sure Mrs. Chen dies with dignity instead of agony. Small acts matter, even when—especially when—the big picture feels hopeless.”
For the first time since his creation, Cael found himself returning Damian's smile with wonder at his own capacity for joy.
They walked together through the winding streets of Veil Row, not touching but sharing space with unprecedented ease.
The city revealed itself differently when experienced alongside another consciousness—sounds became conversations, scents became stories, the play of light and shadow became a kind of poetry that Cael was only beginning to learn to read.
Street musicians played melodies that seemed to follow them, accordion notes drifting on the morning air like memories made audible.
Children's laughter echoed between buildings, sharp and bright against the constant undertone of adult worry.
Somewhere, a woman sang while hanging laundry, her voice carrying a folk song about love surviving hardship.
“The city's more alive than I realized,” Cael observed, pausing to watch a group of children play a clapping game that involved intricate rhythms and breathless laughter.
“It has to be,” Damian replied. “Life finds a way, even here. Especially here. Joy becomes an act of rebellion when someone's trying to steal your time.”
Their conversation flowed naturally—small observations about the flowers struggling to bloom in sidewalk cracks, commentary on the weather that Damian experienced through temperature and humidity while Cael was learning to appreciate for its beauty, discussion of the bitter tea Damian brewed from herbs he grew in window boxes throughout his clinic.
“The tea tastes like punishment,” Cael observed as they passed a vendor selling the same herbs Damian used for his morning brew.
“It's supposed to,” Damian replied with a laugh that made several passersby turn and smile reflexively. “Corrin says anything that bitter has to be good for you. I think they're just trying to make sure I don't enjoy my vices too much.”
“Do you have many vices?”
“Not really. Unless you count staying up too late reading medical texts by candlelight and arguing with cosmic entities about the nature of morality.”
The casual reference to their relationship as something approaching normal made Cael's chest warm with feelings he was still learning to identify. “Is that what we do? Argue about morality?”
“Sometimes. Other times we just talk about whether flowers are beautiful and why people laugh when they're happy instead of when they're sad.”
They paused beside a street performer—a man juggling time-crystals while reciting overwrought poetry about the nobility of suffering. His voice carried theatrical pomposity that made the small crowd gathered around him shift uncomfortably.
“Behold!” the performer declared, tossing glowing crystals in complex patterns. “The sublime tragedy of mortal existence! Each moment precious because it flies so swiftly toward inevitable doom!”
When Damian snorted with barely suppressed laughter, the sound was so genuinely amused that Cael found himself staring in fascination. The performer's face flushed with indignation, but Damian was too lost in mirth to notice.
“What is it?” Cael asked with urgent curiosity, studying Damian's face as it transformed with joy. “What does it mean, to feel like that?”
Damian's explanation was so vivid it made Cael almost experience the emotion himself.
“It bubbles up from somewhere deep in your chest,” Damian said, his voice still carrying traces of laughter.
“Like champagne made of sunlight. It makes the world feel brighter and more possible, like maybe things aren't as hopeless as they sometimes seem.”
“And it comes without warning?”
“The best kind does. You can't force it or fake it or save it for later. It just happens when something strikes you as funny or beautiful or perfectly right.”
Cael filed this information away like treasure, adding it to his growing understanding of what it meant to be human.
He was beginning to realize that mortality wasn't just about dying—it was about living, about experiencing the full spectrum of emotion and sensation that made the brief span of human existence so intense and meaningful.
“You're not just Death,” Damian said thoughtfully as they paused beside a small fountain whose carved figures had been worn smooth by centuries of weather. “You're someone who's never been allowed to live.”
The observation hung in the air between them, too accurate to deny but too painful to immediately acknowledge.
Cael's borrowed breath caught, and for a moment he felt dizzy with the weight of all the experiences he'd never had, all the moments of simple humanity that had been denied to him by cosmic law.
“Is that what I'm doing?” Cael asked finally, his voice smaller than he'd intended. “Learning to live?”
“I think so. Or at least learning what living could be like if you chose it.”
If you chose it. The words echoed in Cael's mind like a revelation. Choice—the concept that had been foreign to him for eons—was becoming the defining force of his transformation.
For the first time since stepping into mortality, Cael was acutely aware of the miracle of simply walking beside another being.
Damian’s presence was more than warmth at his side—it was gravity, a constant that reoriented the chaos inside Cael’s borrowed body.
Each step felt new, immediate, and impossibly precious.
He could feel the rhythm of his own feet, the gentle brush of air as their sleeves nearly touched, the chorus of city life rising and falling around them.
He tried to catalog each sensation, to understand why every trivial detail felt extraordinary now: the texture of cobblestones beneath his soles, the faint pattern of Damian’s breathing, the way the healer’s focus darted between sounds and voices, always listening for need.
Once, he might have dismissed these things as fleeting mortal noise.
Now, he recognized them as the architecture of meaning.
Was this what it meant to live? To become attached, to risk heartbreak in exchange for connection?
The idea unsettled Cael, yet he found himself leaning into it—drawn by curiosity, and something deeper that he could barely name.
He wondered if Damian sensed his own uncertainty, the awe and the fear tangled together in his voice when he asked about the city’s markets or the rules of time-debt.
What will become of me, Cael wondered, if I let myself want this? If I stay? If I leave? The possibility of loss was a concept he’d never fully grasped before. Now it was a blade at his throat, sharp and exhilarating.
He watched Damian laugh at a child’s joke—pure, spontaneous joy, nothing like the cold, distant contentment Cael had known in the between-space.
The sound moved through Cael like music, making him ache for reasons he didn’t entirely understand.
For the first time, he realized what it was to envy mortals their attachments, their brief, blinding connections.
He wanted to hold onto this—this day, this simple closeness, the sense of being expected and welcomed. He didn’t want to go back to the empty place between worlds, to the silver corridors of solitude and duty.
As twilight fell and the lamps began to flicker with magic, Cael felt the weight of responsibilities he could no longer ignore. Souls called to him, their suffering a steady thrum in the background, but for once, he hesitated. At the crossroads, he slowed, reluctant to step away.
Without thinking, he reached for Damian—a tentative gesture, his fingers just grazing the fabric of the healer’s sleeve. The touch grounded him, the sensation sparking through his borrowed nerves with electric promise. He felt Damian’s pulse jump, heard the question in his breath.
“Cael,” Damian said quietly, the name falling between them like an invocation. “What are we doing?”
Cael’s answer surprised even him. “I don’t know,” he admitted, letting his thumb circle gently against Damian’s wrist. “But I find myself unwilling to stop.”
He listened to the hope threading through Damian’s reply: “Good. Because I’m not ready for you to disappear into myth again.”
A promise rose to Cael’s lips—an echo of all the vows mortals made to each other, fragile and impossible. “Then I won’t,” he said, and the words made him feel more human than any transformation ever could.
But the air was changing. Instinct, honed over centuries, told Cael something was wrong—a gathering tension, a distortion in the magical field that underpinned Varos. He felt it in the streetlamps, in the erratic stutter of time-crystals, in the sudden chill that swept the square.
“Something's wrong,” Damian murmured, his healer's intuition picking up what Cael could sense as raw cosmic threat.
Cael let his awareness stretch outward, slipping briefly back into the vastness of the Threads. He saw Time Exchange patrols converging, three units moving in coordinated formation, their purpose cold and precise.
“They're hunting someone,” he said grimly, the certainty ringing through him. “You.”
Damian accepted it with calm that bordered on resignation. “My debt finally caught up with me.”
But even as Cael gathered his power, a deeper cold swept the plaza—a presence older and far more dangerous than any city enforcer. Windows cracked from the sudden drop in temperature. The air itself seemed to recoil, shying away from what was coming.