Page 5 of Death’s Gentle Hand

Burn Me to Remember

Damian

D amian woke from a nightmare where his healing hands were covered in blood he couldn't feel.

The dream-blood was sticky and warm and accusatory, belonging to everyone he'd failed to save.

Mrs. Kess, bleeding time from her withered veins.

The woman at the clinic who'd begged to trade her final year.

Children who'd died while he slept, their small hearts stopping in the darkness between one breath and the next.

At the edge of his hearing, in that twilight space between sleep and waking, someone whispered—a language unknown but painfully familiar, syllables heavy with meaning that pressed into his bones.

The words felt ancient, weighted with power and sorrow, speaking of thresholds and crossings and the terrible price of mercy.

He rolled out of bed with hands that still felt stained, though he knew the blood was only dream-memory.

His skin was damp with sweat that smelled wrong, like winter mornings and old graves.

When he touched his face, his fingers came away cold despite the warm night air filtering through his shutters.

The city beyond his window was too quiet. Varos never truly slept, but today even the time-bells lagged, their mechanical heart stuttering, searching for a tempo that wouldn’t come. The cadence that marked his days for twenty years had fractured—like the city’s soul was miscounting the hours.

A knock at his door interrupted his brooding. Corrin's particular pattern, but faster than usual, urgent with barely contained alarm.

“Something's wrong with the city,” they said without preamble when he opened the door. Their voice carried the particular tension of someone who'd been awake all night, watching the world change in small, impossible ways.

“Wrong how?” Damian asked, accepting the cup of tea they pressed into his hands. The liquid was too hot, scalding his tongue, but underneath the pain was the familiar comfort of shared ritual.

Corrin paced the cramped space, shoes tapping out an uneven rhythm.

“People are still talking about what happened with the clocks. The Exchange’s ‘mechanical failure’ story isn’t convincing anyone.

Now there are rumors spreading—some say the hourglasses are changing, that the city itself is holding its breath.

Whatever’s happening, it’s bigger than we thought. ”

Damian set down his cup with trembling hands. Upward flowing sand meant temporal inversion, magic so advanced and dangerous that even mentioning it could draw the attention of the Time Exchange Authority. “How many people know?”

“Too many. Word's spreading through Veil Row like fire. People are scared, Damian. They're talking about signs and portents, about the old gods stirring in their sleep.”

The words hit him like ice water. He thought of his dreams, of the presence he'd been sensing at the edges of perception. The feeling of being watched, studied, chosen. “Have there been any other incidents? Deaths that seemed... unusual?”

“Why do you ask?”

Damian hesitated, unsure how to explain the growing certainty that something vast and ancient was paying attention to his small life. “Just wondering. The city feels different lately.”

Corrin was quiet for a moment, their breathing careful and controlled. “Mrs. Li’s neighbor died in his sleep last night. Natural causes, the death-scribe said. But his time-debt papers were blank when they found him. Completely empty, like his death had erased every year he owed.”

The implications of that were staggering. Time-debt didn't simply disappear. It transferred to family, to estates, to the city itself. For it to vanish entirely suggested intervention from something beyond the Exchange's authority.

“I need to check on Garrett,” Damian said, reaching for his healing kit. “He was bad yesterday. Might not make it through the day.”

“Be careful,” Corrin said, but their voice held more than usual concern. “Whatever's happening, it's bigger than frozen clocks and disappeared debt. The city feels like it's holding its breath, waiting for something to break.”

The walk to Garrett's crypt took Damian through streets that felt subtly wrong, as if the city had shifted during the night like a sleeping giant rolling over.

Familiar landmarks were in unexpected places, or missing entirely.

The scent-map he used for navigation kept leading him astray, forcing him to stop and reorient himself using sound and touch.

Garrett lived in one of the older converted tombs, where the Time Exchange had carved up the cemetery and sold housing to the desperate.

The old man had been dying of time starvation for weeks, his body consuming itself as the temporal displacement ate away at his remaining years.

Each visit, Damian had watched him fade a little more, becoming translucent with approaching death.

He found Garrett propped up in bed, breathing in short, shallow gasps that sounded like paper tearing. His skin felt like parchment when Damian pressed his hand to the old man’s brow, pulse fluttering beneath his fingers, thin and uneven.

“Damian,” Garrett whispered, his voice barely audible. “Thank God. I thought... I thought I might go alone.”

“Never,” Damian said, settling beside the bed. “I'm here. Let me help with the pain.”

He placed his hands on Garrett's shoulders, opening himself to the familiar flow of Paincraft. But something was different today, wrong in a way that made his stomach clench with unease. As Damian drew the old man's suffering into himself, he felt resistance underneath the pain.

Garrett was fighting death with every fiber of his being, pulling back from some presence that waited just beyond perception.

“Not yet,” Garrett whispered, his voice gaining strength from desperation. “Not yet, I haven't said goodbye. I haven't told her I'm sorry. Please, just a few more minutes.”

“Who are you talking to?” Damian asked.

The old man's eyes widened with sudden terror, not of death but of something approaching too quickly, without mercy or negotiation. “He's here,” Garrett gasped, his grip on Damian's wrist becoming painful.

Damian felt the exact moment death touched Garrett.

It wasn't gradual, wasn't the gentle fading he'd witnessed countless times before.

The old man died mid-sentence, his final words cut off by something that felt like a curtain dropping.

One moment he was speaking, breathing, present, and the next he was simply gone.

Not fading, not drifting away, but severed from life with surgical finality.

Damian tried desperately to hold the man's soul longer, to give him those final moments he'd begged for. But the spirit slipped through his fingers like cold water, pulled away by something vast and implacable and utterly beyond his power to influence.

For the first time in years, Damian wept over a death—not only for Garrett, but for the terrible theft of mercy. The old man had begged for time and been denied. Death should have allowed him dignity. Instead, it felt like a life wrenched away before its final song.

As he sat with Garrett’s cooling body, Damian ran his fingers over the old man’s time-debt papers.

Normally, the parchment would be rough with embossed numbers and debt marks—each one a notch or symbol that could be counted by touch.

But now the paper was smooth, eerily blank, as if death had wiped away every trace.

Not erased, but empty. His blood went cold.

The estate should have inherited the debt, but there was nothing left to claim.

The room felt unnaturally cold, and shadows seemed to move independently of their sources. Damian found himself speaking to the empty air, his voice rough with grief and anger: “Whoever you are, he deserved better. He deserved time to say goodbye.”

The silence that followed felt weighted, pregnant with attention.

For a moment, Damian could have sworn something was listening, considering his words with the patience of eons.

Then the moment passed, leaving him alone with the dead and the growing certainty that something fundamental had changed in the relationship between life and death.

The walk to the Library of the Last Breath gave him time to think, which was both blessing and curse.

Deeply disturbed by Garrett's death, by the sense of supernatural interference in what should have been a natural process, Damian found himself seeking answers in the only place he knew they might exist.

The library hid beneath Hourglass Plaza, a labyrinth of forgotten archives recording every death and the last words that clung to the dying.

The unmarked entrance opened from a maintenance tunnel, thick with the scent of paper, dust, and secrets too old for the surface.

Most people had forgotten the library existed, which was probably for the best.

The librarian was a Hollow who had retained enough consciousness to read, their identity stripped away but their purpose intact.

They guided Damian through the crumbling stacks with patient gestures, pointing toward sections that might contain what he sought.

Their touch was cold and dry, like autumn leaves, but there was kindness in the way they helped him navigate the maze of knowledge.

Most books in Varos were useless to him, but here, the shelves held hundreds of volumes marked with texture—raised letters, indented lines, knots of thread that spelled words for those who read with their hands instead of their eyes.

Damian searched through ancient soulwritings and death records, his fingers tracing raised text and textured bindings that told him which books might hold answers.

Most entries were mundane, the ordinary business of mortality recorded in careful script.

Final wishes, last confessions, the small regrets and large loves that defined human endings.