Page 28 of Death’s Gentle Hand
Damian should have been terrified, but instead he looked at Cael with something that might have been relief.
“You will break me, Damian,” Cael whispered, his voice raw with confession. “You will make me so human that I'll forget how to be Death. And when the universe finally notices what I've become, it will destroy us both.”
Instead of pulling away in fear, Damian reached up and touched Cael's face with gentle reverence. His fingers traced the sharp line of cheekbone, the curve of jaw, mapping features that were becoming more human with each passing day.
“Then stay and break with me,” he whispered back, his voice carrying absolute conviction. “Stop trying to preserve something that was never meant to be eternal. Stop choosing duty over desire when desire is the only thing that's made you real.”
Their foreheads touched, breath mingling in the small space between them. The space between their lips was a fault line. If they crossed it, nothing would ever be the same.
Damian's pulse thundered beneath Cael's palm where it rested against his throat. This was what he'd been afraid of— not cosmic punishment or universal dissolution, but the simple reality of wanting something more than his own purpose.
At the moment their lips would finally meet, cosmic instinct overwhelmed emotional desire. Every millennium of conditioning, every ingrained response to maintain distance between ending and beginning, reasserted itself with violent force.
Cael vanished mid-breath, tearing himself away from contact that would have rewritten fundamental laws.
He left Damian pressed against the wall, gasping and alone, his hand still half-raised to where Cael's face had been.
The scent of starlight and winter lingered like a promise and a threat combined.
The taste of almost-kiss hung in the air between them, proof of how close they'd come to crossing a line that might have destroyed them both.
Back in the Atrium of Silence, Cael's anguish manifested as cosmic storm.
Reality fractured around him in response to his emotional breakdown, the carefully ordered space of his sanctuary dissolving into chaos.
Memory echoes screamed in harmonic discord, the walls cracked under pressure that had nothing to do with physics and everything to do with a cosmic entity learning to feel heartbreak.
The echo-child appeared in the chaos, her translucent form steady amid the destruction. She looked at Cael with ancient eyes in a young face, seeing through his cosmic nature to the terrified being underneath.
“Do you love him?” she asked with devastating simplicity.
The question hung in the air like a blade, sharp enough to cut through every rationalization and excuse Cael had constructed. He opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again, understanding instinctively that speaking the truth aloud would make it cosmically binding.
Love was the most dangerous force in the universe, more destructive than black holes. For a cosmic entity to love a mortal was to invite catastrophe on a universal scale, to risk unmaking the very foundations of ordered existence.
Instead of answering, Cael screamed wordlessly at the void, his voice carrying enough power to extinguish distant stars. The sound echoed through dimensions, carrying his terror and need and desperate want into spaces where such emotions had never existed.
The Threads responded to his emotional breakdown by cutting off his access to three souls he was meant to reap—a cosmic punishment that sent ripples of imbalance through the fundamental order. Death was choosing person over purpose, and the universe was beginning to notice.
The consequences arrived immediately in the form of an Elder Warden of the Accord, a being of pure cosmic law whose very presence made reality straighten and conform to universal principles.
The Warden manifested as geometric perfection given consciousness, its voice carrying the weight of absolute authority.
“The anomaly has progressed beyond acceptable parameters,” it intoned, each word resonating through dimensions.
“Varos already shows signs of temporal collapse—souls trapped between states, reality bleeding at the edges. If the tether remains, the contamination will spread. The mortal realm cannot withstand a compromised Reaper indefinitely.”
Cael knelt in the cosmic void, his form flickering between states as he struggled to process the magnitude of what was being demanded. “He's innocent. He didn't choose this connection.”
“The mortal's culpability is irrelevant. Cosmic balance requires correction. Kill the anchor, or watch entire civilizations crumble under the weight of temporal instability.”
The choice was presented with the clinical detachment of universal law—Damian's life weighed against the stability of existence itself. By any rational calculation, the answer was obvious. One mortal's death to preserve cosmic order was not just acceptable but necessary.
But Cael could not be rational about Damian.
“I can't,” he whispered, the words torn from his essence like pieces of his soul. “Not now. Not anymore. I would rather unmake myself than harm him.”
The admission sealed his fate, marked him as fundamentally compromised in the eyes of cosmic law. He had chosen love over universal stability, personal desire over the greater good, the wants of his transformed heart over the requirements of his essential function.
The Elder Warden's response carried the finality of cosmic judgment: “Then you have forfeited your right to exist as you were. The Accord will take action to preserve balance, with or without your cooperation. The mortal will be eliminated through alternative means.”
As the Warden faded, taking with it the last hope of cosmic mercy, Cael understood that forces beyond his control were now moving against them both. He had tried to preserve some middle ground between duty and desire, but the universe recognized no such compromise.
He was going to lose Damian whether he fought for him or not. The only question was whether he would face that loss as the cosmic entity he'd been created to be, or as the being he was becoming through love.
Alone in the ruins of his sanctuary, surrounded by the evidence of his cosmic failure, Cael made a choice that would echo through eternity. If the universe wanted to take Damian from him, it would have to go through everything he was willing to become to protect what mattered most.
Let the Accord try. If the universe wanted to destroy what he'd become, it would have to break him first.
The war between love and law was about to begin in earnest.