Page 39 of Death’s Gentle Hand
What I Cannot Keep
Damian
T he moment Cael collapsed in the city center, Damian felt it like molten steel poured directly into his chest. Their soulbond transmitted not just emotional distress but actual spiritual agony, waves of cosmic pain that sent him to his knees in the middle of treating a patient's time-burns.
The connection between them blazed with distress signals that made his entire nervous system scream in sympathetic response.
“Fuck,” he gasped, his hands shaking as the agony flooded through their link. The woman on his examining table looked at him with alarm, but Damian was already moving, abandoning his supplies and rushing toward the door with desperate urgency.
“I have to go,” he told his patient, his voice rough with barely controlled panic. “Emergency. Get to Corrin if the burns worsen.”
He rushed through the chaos-filled streets of Veil Row, guided by the burning sensation in his heart that grew stronger as he approached Hourglass Plaza.
The usually bustling district felt wrong, charged with supernatural energy that made the air taste of copper and ozone.
People moved with the jerky uncertainty of those who sensed danger without being able to identify its source.
The plaza itself was a scene from a nightmare.
The cobblestones felt slick and strangely cold beneath Damian’s feet, the air carrying a biting chill that didn’t match the warmth he felt on his skin from the sun above.
There was something off in the way the street sounds echoed, as if shadows moved where they shouldn’t, and the magic in the air prickled along his senses.
Time-clocks throughout the district had stopped entirely, their hands frozen at impossible angles that suggested temporal distortion beyond anything Damian had encountered.
He found Cael unconscious near the central fountain, surrounded by a circle of supernatural frost that refused to melt despite the heat radiating from nearby braziers.
His presence pulsed and shifted in the space beside him—sometimes radiating enough heat and energy to make the air vibrate, sometimes so faint that Damian could barely sense more than a ripple of cold at his side.
At moments, the force pressing against him was almost solid, grounding him with its weight; at others, it seemed to slip through the room like mist, barely there at all.
He heard gasps from those nearby, and the prickle of magic on his skin told him the entity’s power was visible, even if he could only feel its shifting intensity.
Civilians gathered at what they hoped was a safe distance, their whispered accusations cutting through the charged air like blades: “He caused this.” “The Hollowed follow him now.” “Death has gone mad.” Their fear was palpable, justified, and absolutely heartbreaking.
A Time Exchange official was already cordoning off the area, his crisp uniform and authoritative voice creating order from supernatural chaos. “Stand back, citizens. This is a temporal hazard zone. Anyone caught interfering with official business will be subject to immediate detention.”
Damian ignored the warning and pushed through the crowd, his white cane tapping against frost-covered stones as he navigated toward Cael's still form. The official tried to block his path, but Damian's voice carried the authority of someone who'd spent twenty years healing in crisis situations.
“I'm his physician,” he lied smoothly, kneeling beside Cael despite the supernatural cold that immediately bit through his clothes. “Unless you want to explain to your superiors why you prevented medical intervention, I suggest you let me work.”
The frost burned against his hands as he checked Cael's vital signs, but his touch seemed to stabilize the cosmic entity's flickering form. Whatever instability was tearing through Cael's transformed essence responded to Damian's presence like magnetism responding to lodestone.
“Come on,” Damian whispered, his fingers finding the pulse point at Cael's throat. The rhythm was erratic, cycling between cosmic timescales and mortal heartbeats with violent inconsistency. “Come back to me. Don't you dare leave me alone with this crowd.”
Cael regained consciousness during the journey back to the clinic, his form still flickering unpredictably between states. His voice, when it came, was raw with self-loathing that cut through Damian's relief like acid through silk.
“I hurt someone,” he choked out, his hands gripping Damian's arm with desperate strength. “There was a soul, lost and wandering, and I was supposed to give them peace. Instead I trapped them inside me. I can feel their memories burning through my consciousness like acid.”
The words hit Damian with nauseating clarity. Cael's transformation from cosmic entity to something unprecedented was progressing in ways none of them had anticipated. Instead of becoming safely mortal, he was becoming unstable, dangerous to the very people he'd once served with gentle mercy.
“Hey,” Damian said firmly, though fear bloomed in his chest like poison flowers. “Look at me. You're not a weapon anymore, that's all. You're learning to be something new, and change is never clean or easy. That doesn't make you weak or wrong.”
Even as he spoke comfort, Damian couldn't ignore the growing wrongness in Cael's essence. The cosmic entity's presence, once cold but stable, now felt chaotic in ways that made Damian's magical senses recoil. Whatever process was transforming Cael was accelerating beyond safe limits.
Back in the clinic’s safety, they sat together on Damian’s narrow cot while Cael trembled with spiritual contamination.
Fragments of the absorbed soul’s memories were already bleeding through their connection—flashes of a young man’s final moments, the crushing weight of time-debt, and the terror of being caught between life and unlife.
Damian reached instinctively for the familiar techniques of Paincraft, desperate to help. “Let me absorb some of the distress. I’m good at carrying what other people can’t bear.”
“No,” Cael said sharply, pulling away from his touch. “You don’t understand. This isn’t just pain—it’s foreign consciousness. If you take it into yourself, you could lose your own identity entirely.”
But the contamination was already seeping through their bond, the pain and memories forcing their way into Damian’s mind despite his defenses.
It hit him like liquid fire—foreign emotions and half-remembered lives flooding his senses until, for terrifying moments, he couldn’t tell where his own thoughts ended and the lost soul’s began.
“Damian!” Cael's voice cut through the confusion, anchoring him to his own identity through the sound of his name spoken with desperate love. “Don't lose yourself for me. Not for this.”
The foreign consciousness gradually settled into manageable compartments within his expanded awareness, but the experience left Damian shaken in ways he couldn't immediately process. This was what Cael was dealing with—not just emotional trauma but actual invasion of alien thoughts and memories.
They sat in the clinic's familiar quiet, but the easy intimacy they'd built felt strained by cosmic forces neither fully understood.
Every touch carried the risk of further contamination, every moment of closeness potentially dangerous to them both.
The love that had seemed like salvation was becoming a liability neither could afford.
Their fragile peace was shattered when Lennar burst into the clinic without ceremony, his scarred face grim with terrible knowledge that made the very air around him taste of dread and desperation.
“It's started,” he announced without preamble, his voice carrying the harsh edge of someone who'd been running on adrenaline and fear for hours.
“Senra's issued the call for the Mirror Offering.
She's gathering the materials and power sources needed to perform the ritual at the Obsidian Basin tomorrow night.”
Damian felt his blood turn to ice water.
The Obsidian Basin was a natural amphitheater carved from volcanic glass, used for the most dangerous magical workings because its properties contained and amplified supernatural forces.
If Senra was planning to use that location, she was preparing for magic on a scale that could reshape reality itself.
“Tomorrow night?” Damian repeated, his voice barely above a whisper. “As in less than twenty-four hours from now?”
“She's been planning this for months,” Lennar said, spreading ancient texts across Damian's examining table with movements that spoke of barely controlled urgency. “Every healer she captured, every soul she extracted, every time-crystal she hoarded—it was all building toward this moment.”
As Lennar detailed the true scope of Senra's ambition, the magnitude of what they faced became clear.
The Mirror Offering wasn't just about stealing time or accumulating power.
It was a cosmic replacement ritual that would transfer Cael's divine authority to Senra herself, making her the new avatar of Death with none of the restraints or mercy that had defined Cael's service.
“But she needs a powerful anchor to stabilize the transfer,” Lennar explained grimly, his finger tracing relevant passages in the crumbling texts. “Something already bound to the current Reaper. Something that can bridge the gap between cosmic authority and mortal realm.”
The implications hit Damian like ice water cascading down his spine. “She's not trying to kill me. She's trying to use me as a spiritual battery.”
His soulbond with Cael had made him valuable enough to replace Cael entirely. Senra could tether herself to Death's cosmic role through Damian's already-established connection, bypassing the usual safeguards and restrictions that prevented mortals from claiming divine authority.