Page 44 of Death’s Gentle Hand
Where the Light Refused to Die
Damian
D amian drifted in a liminal space between existence and void, his consciousness floating in warm darkness where pain couldn't reach him.
The sensation was like being cradled in the Lament Baths but deeper, more complete—not just physical comfort but the absolute absence of the ache that had defined his entire adult life.
He dreamed of water—not the cold depths of drowning, but the gentle warmth of healing springs where the desperate came to wash their wounds in mineral-rich pools that smelled of sulfur and hope.
In the dream, someone was speaking, a distant voice saying “Stay with me” over and over like a prayer or incantation that held the fabric of reality together through sheer repetition.
The voice sounded like Cael but carried harmonics he'd never heard before, as if speaking from multiple dimensions simultaneously.
Each repetition felt like hands pulling him back from a precipice he couldn't see but somehow knew was there, waiting to claim him if he stopped fighting toward the sound of his own name.
“Stay with me, Damian. Stay with me. You don't get to leave now, not after everything. Stay with me.”
The words became a rope thrown into darkness, something to grip and climb when the warm void tried to convince him that letting go would be easier than the struggle of consciousness. But easier had never been his path, and the voice carried too much desperation to ignore.
Damian awakened gasping in Cael's arms, rain lashing down around them in the destroyed Obsidian Basin.
His first breath felt like swallowing broken glass, his lungs protesting the sudden demand for function after their extended silence.
Every heartbeat hammered against his ribs like resurrection made audible, proof that his body was remembering how to be alive.
The city of Varos lay broken on the horizon, its time-bells silent and its towers listing at impossible angles that suggested reality itself had been wounded by the forces unleashed in the basin.
Smoke rose from districts that had been consuming themselves in temporal loops, and the very air tasted of change so fundamental it made his enhanced senses recoil.
“What happened?” Damian wheezed.
Cael was weeping openly without shame or restraint, his tears mixing with the rain that fell upward in some places and sideways in others.
The cosmic entity who'd once carried himself with the dignity of universal law now sobbed like a human being confronting loss too large for any single heart to contain.
“You came back,” Damian whispered, his hand finding Cael's face with the instinctive accuracy of long practice. The skin beneath his palm was warm, solid, real in ways that had nothing to do with cosmic manifestation and everything to do with blood and breath and beating heart.
Cael's response carried the weight of cosmic revelation, words that rewrote fundamental assumptions about the nature of existence: “You pulled me with you. When you died, I felt myself dying too. When you came back...”
“When I came back, you came with me,” Damian finished, understanding flooding through him like warm honey. “We're not bound by cosmic law anymore. We're bound by our own decision to exist together.”
Their connection had become something that transcended death itself, a tether forged not by magic or divine authority but by the simple human act of refusing to let go.
The realization should have been terrifying—they'd literally rewritten the rules governing life and death through sheer stubborn love. Instead, it felt like coming home.
As they struggled to stand among the basin's crystalline ruins, supporting each other's weight with movements that spoke of shared exhaustion and mutual care, something unprecedented happened. Damian's sightless eyes fluttered, and for one impossible moment, he saw.
Not shapes or colors or the ordinary visual information that most people took for granted.
Instead, he saw pure light—the golden thread that connected him to Cael made visible as radiant truth that blazed brighter than any star.
The thread pulsed with each of their heartbeats, synchronized now in ways that suggested they shared more than emotional connection.
The vision faded quickly, leaving him gasping with the shock of perception that went beyond anything he'd experienced in twenty years of blindness. But the memory burned bright as starfire, proof that their transformation had only just begun.
“Did you see that?” he asked, his voice thick with wonder and residual awe.
“The light?” Cael's voice carried matching reverence. “Yeah. I saw it too. It's been there all along, but now...”
“Now it's visible,” Damian finished. “Now it's real in ways that cosmic law never made it.”
Supporting each other's weight, they made their way from the destruction they'd survived, each step an act of defiance against forces that had declared their love impossible.
Behind them, the basin began to fill with water that flowed upward, and flowers bloomed from cracks in shattered stone—reality itself healing around the space where love had refused to accept ending.
The walk back to the clinic took hours through streets that no longer followed conventional geography.
Time moved in visible currents that made some blocks age decades while others froze in temporal amber.
They passed buildings that flickered between states of construction and decay, their foundations uncertain in a world where cause and effect had become suggestions rather than laws.
The clinic that had once been their sanctuary now stood as a testament to survival, its walls scarred but intact, its healing magic pulsing with renewed purpose that made the air around it shimmer with visible warmth.
The protective wards his mother had woven into the foundation had not just survived the cosmic upheaval—they'd grown stronger, fed by energies that had never existed before their love rewrote universal law.
Lennar greeted them at the threshold, his own body bearing wounds from the cosmic upheaval—deep cuts that bled silver instead of red, marks that spoke of reality itself having been sharp enough to cut flesh.
But his eyes were bright with something that might have been hope, and his movements carried the energy of someone who'd witnessed impossible things and lived to catalog them.
“You look like shit,” the old informer said without preamble, but his voice carried relief so profound it made his usual cynicism sound like prayer.
“Both of you. I was beginning to think I'd have to explain to the survivors how the two most stubborn people in Varos managed to get themselves killed saving the world.”
“Survivors?” Damian asked, settling heavily onto his familiar examining table while Cael remained standing beside him, their hands linked in a grip that spoke of mutual support. “How many people are left?”
Lennar’s tone grew grim as he spread maps across the wooden surface, the paper rustling beneath his scarred fingers.
He reached out to guide Damian’s hand to the edge of the table, narrating as he went.
“More than I expected, fewer than I hoped. The Eternal Accord’s fracture sent shockwaves through every realm connected to this one.
Some people were torn apart by temporal distortions.
Others—” His voice dropped. “Others are trapped in time loops that might last forever.”
He tapped different spots on the map, describing each one. “Here, whole districts have been frozen at the moment of impact. People caught mid-step, mid-breath—unable to move forward or back. In other places, time rushes or crawls, or twists sideways. Some areas are just… gone. Empty.”
Damian listened, absorbing the shape of disaster through Lennar’s words, imagining the city caught in a web of moments that might never resolve.
“The Elder Wardens have vanished,” Lennar continued, his voice carrying the tension of someone delivering news that changes everything.
“No one’s seen them since the Accord fractured.
Some say they’ve retreated somewhere none of us can follow—maybe another realm entirely, or just hiding, I don’t know.
But their absence is being felt everywhere. ”
The implications settled over Damian like a mantle of impossible responsibility.
Neither he nor Cael was Death anymore—Cael's cosmic authority had been burned away in his transformation to mortality, while Damian had never possessed divine power to begin with.
Yet together, their fused souls might become something unprecedented: not enforcers of cosmic law, but shapers of new possibility.
“So what now?” Damian asked, the question carrying weight that made his voice crack with the magnitude of what they faced. “How do we fix a world where time itself is broken?”
When Cael took his hand, threading their fingers together with newfound certainty that spoke of choices made and accepted, his words carried the weight of vows spoken in sacred spaces: “You are my purpose now. Not duty or cosmic obligation, but choice freely made every moment I draw breath.”
The declaration hit Damian like revelation and benediction combined.
For twenty years, he'd been useful to others while being valued primarily for his function rather than his existence.
Now here was someone offering to build meaning around connection rather than service, around choice rather than necessity.
“Then we make something worth both dying and living for,” Damian replied, his voice gaining strength with each word. “We build a world where love creates rather than destroys. Where people matter more than cosmic order. Where time serves life instead of consuming it.”