Page 21 of Death’s Gentle Hand
“No,” Cael breathed, dread freezing him to the core. “Not the Exchange. Something worse.”
He heard the first toll of the bell—not the familiar time-bell, but something deeper, resonating with cosmic judgment. The Celestial Order. They had found him.
The first patrol emerged from the narrow mouth of Serpent's Alley, their crystalline armor gleaming with temporal enchantments that made reality bend around their forms. These weren't ordinary Exchange enforcers—these were Chronarch Guards, elite soldiers whose very presence could slow time itself.
“Damian Vale,” their captain called out, his voice carrying the authority of absolute law. “By order of the Temporal Magistrate, you are under arrest for practicing forbidden soulcraft and consorting with cosmic entities.”
Damian's response was to extend his cane into a full staff, the carved wood humming with defensive magic his mother had woven into its core decades ago. “I heal people who can't afford your prices. That's not a crime.”
“Everything is a crime when the state decides it is,” the captain replied, drawing a blade that shimmered with captured time. “Surrender, and your death will be swift.”
The first Guard lunged with inhuman speed, his temporal armor allowing him to move between seconds like a dancer stepping between raindrops.
But Damian had spent twenty years navigating a world he couldn't see—he'd learned to read intention in the smallest sounds, to predict movement from the shift of air against his skin.
He swept his staff low, catching the Guard's ankle just as the man materialized from accelerated time. Bone cracked audibly, and the Guard crashed to the cobblestones with a scream that echoed off the plaza's ancient walls.
Cael tried to move, tried to help, but something held him frozen in place. The cosmic presence bearing down on them—the Celestial Order's advance scout—was actively constraining him, preventing intervention while it assessed the full scope of his transformation.
Help him, Cael screamed silently, but his borrowed body refused to obey. Power crackled uselessly around his hands as invisible chains of cosmic law bound him to witness rather than act.
Two more Guards flanked Damian from opposite sides, their movements synchronized through temporal manipulation that let them attack from multiple timestreams simultaneously.
But Damian's enhanced senses caught the rhythm of their coordination, the way their breathing aligned despite moving through different rates of time.
He spun his staff in a complex pattern, each movement precise enough to carve warding symbols in the air itself. Where the wood passed, golden light trailed like calligraphy written in starfire, creating barriers that made the Guards' temporal armor stutter and fail.
The Guard on his left stumbled as accelerated time suddenly snapped back to normal speed, momentum carrying him forward faster than his reflexes could compensate.
Damian's staff caught him in the solar plexus with a strike that drove all air from his lungs.
The man folded like wet parchment, his crystalline armor cracking as he hit the ground.
But the third Guard had learned from his companions' mistakes. He approached carefully, his temporal blade weaving patterns that distorted space as well as time. Where the weapon passed, reality bent like heated glass, creating zones where cause and effect became suggestions rather than laws.
“Impressive,” the Guard said, his voice carrying harmonics that spoke of temporal displacement. “But you're fighting the inevitable. The Magistrate wants you alive, but she'll settle for your corpse if necessary.”
Damian's response was to open himself to the Guard's pain—and there was so much of it.
Years of temporal manipulation had left the man's body a battlefield between competing timestreams. His organs aged at different rates, his bones carried stress fractures from existing in multiple moments simultaneously, his nervous system screamed with the constant agony of temporal displacement.
The Guard screamed as Damian absorbed it all, then weaponized the concentrated suffering.
Waves of pure anguish crashed over the man, decades of accumulated pain experienced in a single devastating moment.
He collapsed convulsing, his temporal armor dissolving as his consciousness scattered across too many timestreams to maintain coherence.
Cael felt something crack in his cosmic restraints as Damian's display of power sent shockwaves through local reality.
The invisible bonds holding him loosened slightly, but still he couldn't move, couldn't help.
The presence watching from beyond—ancient and terrible and patient as entropy itself—was studying every aspect of their connection, measuring the exact degree of his deviation from cosmic law.
The captain of the Guard patrol stood alone now, his men broken or fled, but reinforcements were already arriving. Cael could sense more patrols converging on the plaza, drawn by the temporal distortions Damian's defensive magic had created.
“You fight well for a blind man,” the captain said, raising his time-blade in formal salute. “But you cannot stand against the full might of the Exchange forever.”
“I don't need forever,” Damian replied, blood streaming from his nose where the magical backlash had struck him. “I just need long enough.”
The captain's blade moved faster than mortal reflexes should have been able to track, slicing through air that crystallized around its passage.
But Damian wasn't relying on reflexes—he was reading the weapon's temporal signature, feeling the way it displaced time like a stone dropped in still water.
He stepped sideways into the wake of the blade's passage, his staff spinning up to catch the captain's wrist. The impact sent vibrations through both weapons, but Damian's grip was sure while the captain's temporal armor made him overconfident.
Damian twisted, using the Guard's own momentum against him, and the time-blade went flying across the plaza to embed itself in the fountain's ancient stonework. Temporal energy bled from the weapon like luminous blood, aging the carved figures by centuries in seconds.
The captain drew a crystalline dagger, its edge sharp enough to cut through the bonds between moments. But before he could strike, Damian pressed his palm against the man's chest and opened himself completely to the Exchange enforcer's accumulated trauma.
This time, Damian didn't just absorb the pain—he absorbed the memories that came with it.
Flashes of the captain's life flooded through their connection: a young man who'd joined the Exchange to protect his family, who'd slowly been corrupted by proximity to institutional cruelty, who now carried the screams of everyone he'd arrested in the dark hours before dawn.
The man's own guilt became his undoing. Faced with the full weight of what he'd done in service to temporal law, the captain broke completely.
He fell to his knees, weeping for crimes he'd spent decades justifying, his crystalline armor cracking as psychological defenses he'd built for years shattered in moments.
“Run,” Cael urged, power gathering around him in instinctive defense. His form flickered, shifting toward the cosmic. “Whatever happens, don't look back.”
But even as he spoke, the cosmic presence that had been watching finally made its move.
The air above the plaza tore open like fabric, revealing a glimpse of spaces between stars where geometric perfection replaced chaotic possibility.
An Elder Warden began manifesting, its faceless form radiating the kind of authority that preceded creation itself.
The sight of cosmic law incarnate broke Cael's paralysis like snapping chains. Whatever had been constraining him dissolved as the Warden's attention focused on his transformed nature, cataloguing the full extent of his deviation from original design.
Damian staggered, the magical backlash from his forbidden techniques finally catching up with him. Blood ran from his ears, his nose, the corners of his mouth—proof that mortal flesh could only channel so much power before breaking under the strain.
“The debt comes due,” the Warden's voice resonated through dimensions, making reality itself straighten in response. “The anomaly will be corrected. The mortal will be processed. Balance will be restored.”
More Exchange patrols poured into the plaza from every street and alley, their armor gleaming with temporal enchantments. But they kept their distance, recognizing that whatever was happening here had moved beyond their authority to resolve.
Cael grabbed Damian's arm, feeling the healer's pulse racing beneath skin that burned with magical exhaustion. “We have to go. Now.”