Page 27 of Death’s Gentle Hand

The Distance We Keep

Cael

C ael had been summoned to reap a soul in the eastern districts—an old man whose time-debt had finally consumed his last breath, leaving him gasping in a converted tomb that stank of desperation and accumulated grief.

It should have been routine, the kind of simple ending that required no thought, no hesitation, no emotional investment beyond the basic requirement of cosmic duty.

But something was wrong. The soul before him burned with impossible energy, recognition shining in the old man's eyes.

“You're not what you're supposed to be,” the dying man wheezed, his gaze focusing on Cael with impossible clarity. “You're something compromised. Something changed.”

Cael forced himself to complete the motion, to sever the thread that bound spirit to flesh with the clean finality that had defined his purpose since the beginning of time. But when his ethereal blade made contact with the soul's binding, something unprecedented happened.

The scythe fractured.

The cosmic tool that had served him for millennia cracked like broken glass, its ethereal blade shattering into fragments of pure starlight that scattered across both physical and spiritual realms. The disruption sent shockwaves through reality itself, making windows crack in nearby buildings and causing time-clocks throughout the district to stop entirely.

Cael stared at the broken remnants, his consciousness reeling. A reaper's scythe couldn't break. It was an extension of cosmic will, forged from the fundamental forces that governed life and death. For it to shatter meant that something essential in his nature had been corrupted beyond repair.

His power spasmed—one moment barely able to hold his shape, the next so vast it warped the stones beneath him. The old man's soul, freed by the scythe's destruction rather than properly guided, drifted upward like smoke, disappearing into whatever realm awaited unguided spirits.

Cael had failed in his most basic function, and the failure felt like having his essence turned inside out.

Shaken to his core, Cael retreated to the Threads seeking familiar comfort.

But the silver pathways that had always welcomed him now burned under his touch, their surface rippling away from his presence like water recoiling from oil.

The cosmic web itself recognized him as foreign, infected, incompatible with the fundamental order he'd once embodied.

Pain lanced through his essence as reality pushed back against his presence. He tried to force his way deeper into the Threads, desperate for the peace of cosmic emptiness, but the pathways continued to reject him.

He was becoming mortal. Not in body—his form remained ethereal, otherworldly—but in spirit. The careful distance that had allowed him to serve as impartial ending was collapsing, replaced by the messy complexity of personal investment.

Cael collapsed into the Atrium of Silence, his sanctuary within the Threads, but even here the changes were visible.

The walls that had once reflected cosmic order now showed memories of Damian—his face, his voice, the careful way he moved through his clinic as he tended to patients who couldn't afford anyone else's care.

One echo rose above the others, ancient and painful—his first death as a Reaper, eons ago, when he'd held a dying child's hand and wept for the loss of innocence. He hadn't cried since that moment, had trained himself to see endings as necessary rather than tragic.

Now, surrounded by the evidence of his transformation, tears of liquid starlight fell from his void-dark eyes and scattered across the Atrium's floor like fallen stars.

“You are making me human, Damian,” he whispered to the empty cosmic space, his voice breaking with revelation. “And I don't know if I can survive that transformation.”

The admission echoed through dimensions, carrying his terror and wonder in equal measure. For the first time since his creation, Cael was afraid—not of cosmic punishment, but of becoming something so different from his original design that he might lose himself entirely.

But even as fear clawed at his consciousness, he couldn't bring himself to regret the changes. The capacity for feeling that was destroying his cosmic function was also teaching him what it meant to truly exist rather than simply serve.

Cael ventured to a place he'd avoided for millennia—the Catacombs of the Stilled, a cosmic graveyard where former Anchors lay buried.

These were mortals who had once bound Death to the physical realm, lovers and mystics and desperate souls who had thought they could transcend the fundamental laws governing life and ending.

All of them had been consumed by forces beyond their understanding.

The catacombs existed in the spaces between reality, accessible only to cosmic entities and the spirits of those who had died trying to love something larger than mortality could contain.

The air here reeked of temporal decay and broken promises, thick with the accumulated weight of hope that had curdled into tragedy.

Cael walked among tombs carved from crystallized time, reading names erased from mortal history but preserved here as warnings:

“Meren of the Eastern Reaches, who loved the Angel of Justice until she crumbled to dust under celestial attention.”

“Kaelen the Dreamer, who bound himself to the Lord of Storms and was torn apart by competing loyalties.”

“The Twins of Varos, who thought they could share a single cosmic entity between them and died screaming each other's names.”

Every tomb was a cautionary tale, proof that the universe punished mortals who reached too high and cosmic entities who stooped too low. The pattern was always the same—initial transcendence followed by inevitable destruction as universal law reasserted itself with violent finality.

At the catacomb's heart, Cael found a tomb unlike the others. Instead of a name, its surface held a mirror of polished obsidian that reflected not his own face but something that made his borrowed heart stop entirely.

Damian's face looked back at him from the black surface, but not as he was now.

This was Damian aged by supernatural forces, his skin mapped with lines of cosmic strain, his eyes clouded with the particular blindness that came from staring too long into infinity.

The reflection showed what would happen if their connection continued—Damian would be consumed by proximity to cosmic force, his mortal frame unable to withstand the fundamental energies that Cael carried in his essence.

The message was brutally clear: this path always ended in the mortal's destruction.

With shaking hands, Cael drew the fragments of his fractured scythe.

The broken blade was still sharp enough to cut spiritual bonds if wielded with enough determination.

The Threads themselves seemed to whisper encouragement, promising restored power and cosmic stability if he would just sever the golden thread that bound him to Damian.

He could see the binding clearly now, a rope of light that connected his transforming essence to Damian's mortal soul. It pulsed with each of the healer's heartbeats, carrying emotional resonance back and forth between them like a spiritual telegraph.

As the broken blade touched the binding, the thought of losing Damian burned hotter than any cosmic punishment the universe could devise. The connection between them wasn't just magical compulsion—it had become something chosen, something precious, something that made existence meaningful.

Unable to complete the severance, Cael stormed from the catacombs in fury and desperation.

The cosmic realm dissolved around him as he manifested in the physical world with unprecedented solidity, his arrival shattering every piece of glass in Damian's clinic and making the candles flare with supernatural light.

Damian looked up from his evening reading, startled but not afraid, his enhanced senses immediately recognizing the familiar presence despite its obvious agitation.

“I need to speak to you,” Cael demanded, his voice carrying harmonics that made the stone walls vibrate. “Now.”

Damian's response was immediate anger, weeks of accumulated frustration and hurt finally finding voice.

“So you finally show up. What is it this time, Cael? Another cosmic crisis? Or are you here to tell me why we can never have what we both want while standing close enough that I can feel how much you want it too?”

“You don't understand what you're asking of me,” Cael said, his voice rough with strain. “You don't understand what I'm risking?—”

“Then explain it to me!” Damian shouted, rising from his chair with movements sharp with frustrated energy. “Stop hiding behind cosmic mystery and tell me what you're so afraid of!”

Cael's control snapped. In a moment of pure emotional release, he hurled Damian's wooden talisman at the wall with cosmic force, the small carving embedding itself in solid stone with a crack that echoed through both physical and spiritual realms.

“You made me want!” he roared, glass shattering on every side. “You made me forget what I was supposed to be!”

“And you can want!” Damian fired back, his voice equally fierce despite the supernatural energy crackling around them. “You can choose! You just keep running from those choices like a coward!”

The word “coward” triggered something primal in Cael's transformed nature.

Moving with inhuman speed, he crossed the space between them and grabbed Damian by the shirt collar, slamming him against the clinic wall.

But it wasn't violence—it was anguish made physical, desperation seeking contact, centuries of suppressed emotion finally finding expression.

Their faces were inches apart, both breathing hard, cosmic energy crackling in the air between them like visible electricity. Cael's fingers dented the stone beside Damian's head, his borrowed form trembling with barely restrained power.