Page 23 of Death’s Gentle Hand

Time Bleeds

Cael

C ael had been contemplating Damian's wooden talisman, feeling its warmth pulse against his palm like a captured heartbeat, when the cosmic call tore through him with violent urgency. The summons yanked him from the Threads like a fish dragged from deep water.

His borrowed form spasmed as reality reasserted its claim. The talisman fell from nerveless fingers, its carved spirals still warm from Damian's hand.

The target was clear before he fully materialized: Oris, the scarred young man who served as messenger for Damian's underground network. But this wasn't a natural death. This was murder, brutal and calculated.

Cael manifested in a narrow alley between crumbling tenements, his feet finding purchase on cobblestones slick with blood and rain. The body before him had been broken with methodical cruelty, limbs twisted at angles that spoke of deliberate torture.

Oris's soul clung desperately to his shattered form, fighting death with stubborn determination. When he saw Cael approaching, recognition flared in his spirit's eyes—not fear, but urgent purpose.

“Tell Damian I didn't betray him,” Oris's spirit said, his voice carrying clearly despite having no physical throat. “They wanted names, locations, everyone connected to the healing network. I gave them nothing.”

The words seared through Cael's consciousness. Here was a young man who had died protecting others, who used his final moments not to beg for more life but to ensure his sacrifice wouldn't be wasted.

“They broke my bones,” Oris continued, his spirit beginning to fray at the edges. “Carved symbols into my flesh. But I didn't tell them about the clinic, about the safe houses. Damian needs to know his secrets are still safe.”

Every instinct screamed at Cael to refuse this reaping, to break cosmic law and find some way to let Oris live. But the Threads convulsed around him, and the Eternal Accord demanded obedience with force that threatened to unmake him entirely.

Pain lanced through his being.

“I'm sorry,” Cael whispered, dropping to his knees beside Oris's fading spirit. “I'm so goddamn sorry.”

He had never apologized for a reaping before. But looking at Oris's brave spirit, thinking of how this death would devastate Damian, something essential broke inside him.

Crystalline tears that shouldn't have been possible began streaming down his face as he performed the reaping with shaking hands. Oris's soul dissipated with dignity, his final expression one of peace.

But as the reaping concluded, Cael noticed something that chilled him to his core. Burned into Oris's forehead was a complex sigil that pulsed with stolen temporal energy. Someone had devoured parts of his essence while he still lived, feeding on his spiritual energy like a parasite.

This was beyond anything the Time Exchange officially sanctioned. This was cosmic blasphemy.

Cael manifested outside Damian's clinic still cloaked in shadows, his form wavering as he struggled with what came next. Through the walls, he could see Damian working with focused compassion—brow furrowed as he tended to a patient whose time-burns had festered.

The normalcy made what he had to tell him even more heartbreaking.

Cael lingered, memorizing this last moment of Damian's peace. The way his hands moved with practiced gentleness, the soft murmur of his voice, the small smile when the healing took hold.

Soon, everything would change.

Finally gathering borrowed courage, Cael stepped into the light and allowed himself to be seen. The patient had gone, leaving them alone in warm candlelight.

Damian's face lit up with joy. “You're early tonight. I wasn't expecting you for another hour. Not that I'm complaining.”

The smile began to fade as he registered tension in the air, wrongness that spoke of terrible news waiting.

“What happened?” he asked, his voice shifting from welcome to concern.

The words felt like swallowing glass: “Oris is gone. They killed him for information about your network.”

Damian went very still, his face cycling through confusion, denial, and growing horror.

“Killed him? Who? Why?”

“Someone who wanted names. Locations.” Cael's voice was steady through tremendous effort. “He didn't give them anything. Died protecting all of you.”

“Where is he?” Damian's voice was getting smaller, more fragile. “Can I... can I see him?”

This was the part that would destroy them both.

“I had to take his soul. The cosmic order demanded it. I couldn't—I tried to resist, but I couldn't save him.”

The silence was absolute. Then, without warning, Damian's hand connected with Cael's cheek in a slap that echoed through both realms.

The violence was nothing compared to the pain in Damian's eyes. For the first time since they'd begun speaking, Cael saw him look with fear rather than trust.

“How could you let it happen?” Damian's voice broke. “You're not just some cosmic force anymore. You feel now, you care, you make choices. You could have chosen differently.”

The accusation struck like a blade between the ribs, hitting every doubt Cael harbored about his transformation.

“Oris trusted you because he trusted me,” Damian continued, his voice rising. “And you took him anyway. What was the point of any of this if you were just going to be Death when it mattered?”

Unable to bear the anguish, Cael dropped to his knees and offered the wooden talisman back with hands that shook like autumn leaves. The carved spirals mocked him, proof of how fragile hope could be.

“I am not made to change fate,” he said, his voice hollow with ancient programming. “I tried to resist, but the Accord binds me beyond my will.”

Yet even as he spoke, those impossible tears continued streaming down his face. Each drop was proof that he truly had changed, that he suffered for what cosmic law had forced him to do.

Damian's anger crumbled into something rawer. He collapsed beside Cael on the cold floor, his own tears falling freely.

“Then why are you here?” he whispered, his voice breaking. “Why give me hope if it always ends in loss?”

The question cut through Cael like cosmic fire. He placed a trembling hand over Damian's heart, feeling the rapid rhythm beneath his palm.

“Because I wanted to stay,” he admitted, his voice fracturing. “Because for the first time in eons, I found something worth defying eternity for. And now I've broken everything.”

They knelt together on the clinic floor, both shattered by the impossible situation.

“I don't know how to do this,” Damian said finally. “I don't know how to care for someone whose job is to take away everyone I care about.”

“I don't know either.”

Their grief was interrupted by chaos erupting outside. Screams echoed through Veil Row, accompanied by sounds that made no sense—footsteps moving backward, voices speaking in temporal loops, the grinding noise of reality buckling under impossible strain.

Damian struggled to his feet, wiping tears as his healer's instincts overrode personal anguish. “Something's wrong. More wrong than just?—”

He moved toward the door, his enhanced senses picking up wrongness in the air itself. The magical currents that normally flowed through Varos in predictable patterns were chaotic, fragmented.

“Don't go out there,” Cael said, rising to follow. “Something's happening. Something that shouldn't be possible.”

But Damian was already opening the door, stepping into the street where their worst fears were being made manifest.

Hollowed figures shambled through narrow alleys with unprecedented coordination, their movements guided by intelligence that should have been impossible.

A child nearby began screaming as her mother transformed mid-sentence into a Hollow, her soul partially extracted but not fully reaped.

The woman stood frozen between states, her eyes holding fragments of recognition while her body moved with jerky motions.

Across the street, a building began aging decades in seconds, stones crumbling while ivy grew and died and grew again in endless cycles. Time itself was bleeding like an open wound.

“Gods,” Damian breathed, his face pale. “The boundary's breaking down. Life and death are becoming?—”

“Permeable,” Cael finished, his cosmic senses reeling. “The Eternal Accord is failing. Someone's experiments have damaged the rules that bind Death beyond repair.”

A vendor's cart nearby suddenly reversed through time, its goods un-rotting while the vendor himself aged backward from elderly to middle-aged to young, his confused cries echoing in temporal loops. The sight was viscerally wrong, reality stuttering like a broken clock.

“This isn't about just us anymore, is it?” Damian's voice was steady despite the chaos, carrying the calm that came when someone finally understood the true scope of crisis.

Cael shook his head grimly, watching fragments of souls drift through the air like ash, neither alive nor properly dead.

“Our bond may have been the catalyst, but whoever killed Oris has been experimenting with forces beyond their understanding. If this continues, everyone in Varos will be caught between life and death forever.”

The implications were staggering. An entire city trapped in perpetual transition, millions of souls caught in endless suffering with no hope of peace. It would be hell beyond anything the cosmic order had ever permitted.

Standing together in apocalyptic chaos, both men understood that their personal happiness must take second place to saving their world. Their love had triggered something ancient and dangerous, and now they bore responsibility for stopping it.

“We have to stop whoever's doing this,” Damian said, determination replacing grief. “Oris died protecting the network. We can't let that sacrifice be meaningless.”

“It won't be,” Cael replied, taking Damian's hand for the first time without hesitation. The touch sent electricity through both of them—grounding rather than overwhelming, connection rather than consumption.

“Whatever comes next,” he said, meeting Damian's sightless eyes with intensity that transcended physical vision, “we face it together.”

Damian nodded, squeezing Cael's fingers with desperate hope. “Together. Even if it destroys us both.”

As screams echoed through the breaking city and reality continued fracturing around them, as time bled and the dead walked among the living with increasing frequency, they stood united by grief and determination and love that had survived its first real test.

The world itself had become a patient requiring salvation, and they were the only healers capable of treating a wound that threatened to consume everything they held dear.

Around them, Varos writhed in temporal agony—people aging backward and forward in stuttering loops, buildings crumbling and rebuilding themselves, shadows moving independently of their sources. The very air tasted of copper and ozone, reality straining against forces it was never meant to contain.

But in the midst of chaos, two figures stood hand in hand—Death learning to choose love over law, and a healer who refused to let the world die on his watch. They had found each other across impossible odds, and now they would fight to save everyone else.

The war had found them. Now they would find the strength to fight back.