Page 31 of Death’s Gentle Hand

The Cost of Want

Cael

W alking through the Threads felt like swimming through quicksilver that actively despised his presence. Each step forward required conscious effort, the silver pathways that had once welcomed Cael like a beloved son now recoiling from his touch as if he carried some cosmic contagion.

Each step sent jolts of pain up his legs, a sensation he'd never known as anything but data.

Now it was real, electric, making him gasp—proof he was leaving eternity behind.

He hissed as the Threads burned his feet, the pain sharp and immediate, not cosmic dissonance but the rawness of flesh learning to hurt.

His form flickered unpredictably, refusing to maintain consistent substance.

Sometimes he was solid as granite, his footsteps echoing through dimensions with the weight of mountains.

Other times he became so translucent that starlight passed through him without obstruction, his essence scattered like mist across the cosmic winds.

The Threads themselves seemed to burn where his feet touched them, leaving scorched impressions that spoke of fundamental incompatibility.

Navigation, once as instinctive as breathing, had become a conscious struggle.

He who had moved through the cosmos as easily as thought now stumbled through his own domain like a stranger lost in familiar rooms.

“You're slipping,” observed the echo-child, materializing beside him with the casual cruelty only children possessed. Her translucent form remained perfectly stable while his wavered between states like a candle flame in a strong wind.

“I am aware,” Cael replied, though the words came out rough and uncertain.

“Not dying,” she continued with devastating honesty. “Changing. Becoming. Soon you'll be too human to stay here, too transformed to go back where you came from.”

Her words carried the weight of cosmic truth, each syllable a nail in the coffin of his divine existence.

Transformation was irreversible—he understood that now with crystalline clarity.

There was no path back to what he'd been, no cosmic reset button that could restore him to his original function.

He stood at the threshold of losing everything he'd ever been, and the terrifying part was how little that prospect frightened him anymore.

The Threads confirmed his fears by denying him access to multiple souls awaiting reaping.

Where once cosmic law had demanded his immediate attendance, now the pathways closed before him like doors slammed in his face.

The sensation was both humiliating and liberating—the universe itself no longer trusted him to fulfill his essential function.

He had become a contaminated instrument, too compromised by emotion to serve death's pure purpose. The Eternal Accord recognized him as damaged goods, a reaper who could no longer be relied upon to maintain the necessary distance between ending and empathy.

“They don't want me anymore,” he said aloud, surprised by how much the rejection hurt.

He'd spent eons serving without question, had guided countless souls across the threshold with gentle hands and impartial heart.

Now that service was deemed worthless because he'd learned to care about one particular mortal.

“Did you want them to?” the echo-child asked. “Or do you want him?”

The question hung in the silver mist like a challenge. Cael couldn't answer immediately, couldn't find words for the magnitude of what Damian had become to him. The healer wasn't just a connection or an anchor—he was the first thing in Cael's existence that felt like choice rather than obligation.

Desperate to understand what he was losing, Cael revisited old soul-paths—ethereal memories of people he'd once guided gently from life to whatever came after. He walked through ghostly impressions of his past work, feeling each ending like an echo of ancient music.

Here was a grandmother's final smile as she saw deceased loved ones waiting to welcome her home. There was a soldier's peaceful sigh as pain finally left his battle-scarred body. A child's trust, offered freely even in the face of ending, her small hand slipping into his without fear or hesitation.

Those encounters had felt sacred once, each one a perfect note in the cosmic symphony of transition. Now they seemed impossibly distant, like remembering someone else's dreams or trying to recall the taste of foods he'd never actually eaten.

The realization that his past was becoming foreign to him should have been devastating.

Instead, Cael found himself surprisingly at peace with the loss.

Those memories belonged to someone else—a cosmic entity who had served without question or personal investment.

The being he was becoming had different priorities, different needs, different definitions of sacred.

Without conscious direction, Cael found himself manifesting at the entrance to Damian's clinic. He hadn't chosen to come here, hadn't willed himself across dimensions—yet here he stood, drawn like iron filings to a magnet whose pull had become impossible to resist.

The realization that Damian had become his true north, his cosmic anchor, filled him with equal parts terror and wonder. How had one mortal's gentle hands and patient voice rewired the fundamental programming of his existence?

“I'm pathetic,” he whispered to the empty street. “A cosmic entity reduced to lingering outside windows like a lovesick teenager.”

But even as he spoke the words, he couldn't bring himself to leave. Through the clinic's walls, he could sense Damian's presence—the steady rhythm of his breathing, the warm pulse of blood through human veins, the particular quality of attention that made him so devastating to be around.

Returning to the Atrium of Silence felt like visiting a tomb where he'd once lived.

The space that had been his sanctuary for eons was crumbling, its walls cracked and unstable as memory echoes leaked into each other in chaotic cascades.

The careful order he'd maintained for millennia was dissolving into cosmic dust.

Cold seeped into his bones—real cold that made him shiver and seek warmth rather than simply observing temperature as cosmic data.

When Cael touched the echo-child's silver bell—a simple artifact that had anchored his sense of purpose for longer than human civilization had existed—it remained silent. Even this remnant of his past recognized that he was no longer the being who had first placed it here with reverent hands.

The echo-child materialized one final time, her form already beginning to fade as the Atrium lost cohesion around them. The walls were translucent now, showing glimpses of the void beyond, and Cael understood that his sanctuary was dying along with his cosmic nature.

“If you stay with him, you'll never return here,” she said with matter-of-fact finality. “This place, these memories, everything you've been for eons—it will all dissolve into nothing. You'll be mortal, Cael. Temporary. Forgettable.”

The words should have struck him like lightning, should have sent him fleeing back to the Threads to beg for restoration. Instead, his response came without hesitation, spoken with the conviction of absolute truth.

“Then bury this place with honor,” he said quietly. “I'd rather be lost with him than remain untouched and eternal.”

The echo-child smiled—the first expression of joy he'd ever seen cross her ancient face. “Then you understand what love actually costs.” She reached out, her translucent fingers brushing his cheek like a blessing. “Go, then. Be forgotten here, and unforgettable there.”

“I'm beginning to.”

In a final attempt to preserve what he'd been, or perhaps to test the strength of his conviction, Cael raised his fractured scythe toward the golden thread that bound him to Damian.

One clean cut would sever the connection, restore his cosmic function, return him to the pure purpose for which he'd been created.

As the scythe hesitated above the golden bond, reality buckled. Distant souls howled, the cosmos holding its breath as choice remade the fabric of existence. But instead of cutting cleanly, the blade showed him visions that took his breath away.

Brief flickers of possible futures bloomed before him: himself and Damian growing old together, silver threading through their hair as they argued over something wonderfully petty.

Damian laughing in the rain, his face bright with unbridled joy.

The two of them sitting in comfortable silence, hands intertwined, watching sunrise paint the sky with gold.

Hope—real, genuine hope—flooded through him for the first time as a genuine possibility rather than abstract longing.

“This is the first thing I've ever wanted to live for,” he whispered to the collapsing Atrium, tears streaming down his face in rivers of liquid starlight. “The first time existence has felt like choice rather than obligation.”

The tears weren't grief for what he was losing—they were gratitude for what he'd found. For the first time in his existence, he was crying tears of joy rather than cosmic sorrow.

As the Atrium finally crumbled into cosmic dust around him, Cael spoke a vow that bound him more thoroughly than any cosmic law ever had: “I choose mortality. I choose impermanence. I choose love over duty, connection over purpose, Damian over everything I was meant to be.”

The words echoed through dimensions, sealing his transformation.

In the city's oldest clock tower, the gears froze.

On the horizon, a single star winked out—a silent eulogy for Death's abdication.

The universe reacted to his rebellion, and for the first time in his existence, Cael did not care who witnessed his defiance.