Page 9 of Death’s Gentle Hand

Unable to settle into his usual evening routine, Damian abandoned his clinic as sunset approached. The familiar walls felt too close, too charged with whatever presence had been watching him. He needed space, air, the kind of emptiness that might give him room to think.

The old part of Varos called the Ivy Steps had been abandoned for decades, a crumbling section of ancient stonework where few people ventured after dark.

The area was wrapped in perpetual fog that seemed to move independently of any wind, threading between the broken pillars and worn stairs like a living thing.

Here, footsteps vanished into nothing, and the echo of his own breathing seemed to return changed, as if borrowed by something unseen.

Damian descended the worn steps slowly, his hand trailing along the stone railing for guidance.

The air grew cooler and damp as he moved underground, each step echoing softly off the stone walls.

Down here, the world felt different—closer, pressed in by earth and secrets.

It wasn’t harbor mist that lingered, but the deep, mineral chill of old stone and the faint, stale tang of forgotten hopes.

“I'm not afraid of you,” he said aloud to the shadows, though the words tasted like lies. His voice echoed strangely in the fog-wrapped space, bouncing back with harmonics that suggested vast, hidden chambers.

When the fog brushed against his hand and lingered with almost deliberate touch, he startled but didn't pull away.

The sensation was cool and gentle, carrying a faint scent of winter mornings and old stones.

It felt like recognition, like being acknowledged by something that had been watching him for far longer than he'd realized.

At the top of the steps, Damian's enhanced senses picked up something impossible.

Every instinct he'd developed for navigating the world without sight screamed of a tall form standing perfectly still nearby.

It was a pressure at his back, a disruption in the pattern of moving air—something his body registered as danger and his soul recognized as significance.

Not breathing, not moving, but present in the way that large objects were present.

His heart began to race, but not entirely from fear.

The air around him grew impossibly still, as if the world itself was holding its breath. Sound died away until even the distant noises of the city below became muffled whispers. In that profound quiet, Damian could feel attention focused on him with laser intensity.

He took a step backward, more from the overwhelming nature of the attention than from any real fear, and immediately felt the absence.

Whatever had been watching him had vanished, leaving only empty fog and cold stone.

But when he groped for the railing of the ancient viewing platform, the stone was unnaturally warm, as if someone had been leaning there moments before.

The stone was impossibly warm beneath his palm, but the air around him turned cold, as if heat and chill coexisted in the same breath.

For a moment, Damian could swear he smelled something impossible: the scent of starlight, if starlight could have a scent.

Clean and cold and infinite, like standing at the edge of forever.

“I know you're there,” he called out to the fog, his voice stronger now. “I can feel you watching.”

The silence that followed was different from ordinary quiet.

It was expectant, patient, like someone choosing not to answer rather than simply not hearing.

The quality of attention in that silence made his skin prickle with awareness, every nerve ending suddenly hypersensitive to the possibility of contact.

Damian stayed until full dark, hoping for another sign, another moment of impossible warmth or that sense of vast presence just beyond perception. But whatever had been watching him seemed content to remain hidden, leaving only the memory of attention and the lingering warmth on stone.

The walk back to his clinic felt different, as if he was being escorted by an invisible guardian.

Shadows seemed deeper, more welcoming. The night air carried whispers that might have been wind or might have been something else entirely.

By the time he reached his door, Damian was convinced he wasn't imagining the presence that had become such a strange comfort in his life.

Back at the clinic, Damian made tea with hands that wouldn't quite steady. The familiar ritual should have calmed him, but his thoughts kept circling back to that moment of warmth on stone, the sense of being acknowledged by something vast and patient and inexplicably interested in his small life.

He told himself that what he'd experienced was fatigue or hallucination, some side effect of too many nights absorbing other people's pain.

But his body knew better. Every nerve still sang with the memory of that otherworldly attention, and he found himself moving more carefully, as if someone might be watching his every gesture.

Unable to focus on his usual evening routine of organizing supplies and updating his journal, Damian retrieved his writing materials and settled at his desk.

He had a habit of writing letters he never sent, a way of organizing thoughts too complex for the abbreviated entries his tactile journal required.

Usually, he addressed them to his brother Lennar, or to his long-dead mother, or simply to “whoever might understand.”

He hesitated, pen poised, almost expecting a chill on his neck. The room seemed to hush, waiting. This time, he found himself writing at the top of the page:

To the thing that watches.

The words flowed more easily than he expected, truths he wouldn't dare speak aloud even to Corrin.

He wrote about the bone-deep tiredness that no amount of sleep could cure, about wanting to be touched without causing or receiving pain, about the guilty wish that he could die without leaving his patients to suffer in his absence.

I've been alone for so long, that I'd forgotten what it felt like to be seen.

But you see me, don't you? You've been watching, waiting, maybe even caring in whatever way something like you can care.

I should be terrified. I should be running to the Time Exchange, begging them to protect me from whatever supernatural attention I've attracted.

Instead, I find myself hoping you'll stay. I find myself looking forward to that sense of presence, that feeling of not being completely alone in the dark. Is that pathetic? Probably. But I'm too tired to care about dignity anymore.

If you can understand this, if you're reading over my shoulder right now, I want you to know that I'm grateful.

Twenty years of blindness taught me that kindness comes in forms you don't always expect.

Maybe this is just another kind of kindness—the comfort of being watched over by something that doesn't judge, doesn't demand, doesn't need anything from me except acknowledgment.

I don't know what you are or what you want. But thank you for not leaving me alone.

As he finished writing, the candle on his desk flickered in a way that suggested breath rather than air current. The flame bent toward him as if drawn by invisible exhalation, then snuffed out completely. The sudden darkness should have startled him, but instead he felt oddly peaceful.

The room filled with a scent he couldn't identify but somehow knew: salt water and rain, clean and cold and vast. It was the smell of oceans he'd never seen, of storms that raged in places beyond mortal geography.

His fingers trembled as he folded the letter, and he found himself speaking to the darkness.

“Did you read over my shoulder?”

No answer came, but the silence felt companionable rather than empty.

Damian carefully placed the letter in the drawer where he kept all his unsent correspondence, then curled up in his chair rather than moving to his bed.

Something about the idea of lying down, of being vulnerable in sleep, felt wrong tonight.

Instead, he pulled a blanket around his shoulders and settled into the familiar contours of his reading chair.

As drowsiness began to claim him, he murmured into the darkness: “If you're real, if you're listening... thank you for not leaving me alone.”

The words surprised him with their honesty. When had he stopped being afraid of the presence that watched him? When had supernatural attention become a comfort rather than a threat?

Sleep took him gently, and his dreams were full of silver light and the sound of someone breathing nearby.

Damian woke in the deep hours of night to the now-familiar sensation of being observed, but this time he felt no fear at all.

Only a strange anticipation, as if something important was about to happen.

He kept his eyes closed, savoring the feeling of presence that had become such an unexpected comfort in his life.

“You again?” he whispered to the darkness, and felt the air around him tighten with attention.

The quality of silence changed, becoming expectant, charged with possibility.

Damian could feel something very close to him now, close enough that he should have been able to hear breathing or sense body heat.

But whatever watched him existed outside normal physical laws, present without being corporeal.

Acting on pure instinct, driven by a hunger for connection he'd been suppressing for years, Damian extended his hand into the space beside his chair. His fingers trembled with hope and terror as he reached into empty air.

“If you're real,” he said softly, his voice barely above a whisper. “If you can... touch me.”

He waited in the darkness, his heart hammering against his ribs with equal parts anticipation and fear. The silence stretched until he began to doubt himself, began to lower his hand in disappointment. Whatever presence watched him was apparently beyond such simple contact.

Just as his fingers started to curl back toward his chest, something brushed across his knuckles.

The touch was cold as winter air but gentle as a caress, lasting only a moment but sending electricity racing up his arm and settling in his chest like a second heartbeat. His whole body shuddered in silent wonder. Tears pricked at his eyes, and his breath stuttered on the edge of a sob.

The sensation was unlike anything he'd ever experienced.

Not quite human warmth, but not unpleasant.

It carried an ache of loneliness so profound it made his own isolation seem small by comparison.

Here was something that had been alone for far longer than he could imagine, reaching across impossible barriers to make the briefest contact.

Damian found himself curling his fingers protectively around the memory of that touch, as if he could somehow hold onto the sensation. “Who are you?” he whispered into the expectant darkness.

This time, impossibly, an answer came. Not heard with his ears, but felt in his bones like distant thunder.

It was not a voice, not a sound at all, but a resonance that bypassed every sense he had left, leaving meaning imprinted on his bones.

Somewhere far away, in a place between worlds that existed outside normal geography, a voice spoke his name with careful reverence: “Damian Vale.”

The sound of his own name, pronounced with such infinite gentleness, brought tears to his eyes for reasons he couldn't name. It was recognition and benediction and promise all wrapped into two simple words. Someone knew him, really knew him, and had chosen to speak his name like a prayer.

“You know me,” he said, and it wasn't a question. “You've been watching me, learning me. How long?”

The silence that followed felt different, weighted with consideration. Then, impossibly, words formed in his mind without passing through his ears:

Since the old magic stirred again. Since hope and pain drew me close. Since your pain began echoing across the threshold.

Damian's hand went instinctively to the sigil on his forehead, feeling its warm pulse against his fingertips. “My mother's spell. It didn’t just protect me from the Time Exchange, did it? It did something else.”

It created the possibility of a bridge, came the voice that wasn’t quite a voice. But it is only now, with the world thinning, that your soul finally reached me.

“What are you?” Damian asked, though part of him was afraid of the answer.

The pause stretched so long he began to think no response would come. Then:

I am what mortals call Death. I am the ending of all things, the final silence, the last breath. And you, Damian Vale, have taught me something I was never meant to learn.

For a heartbeat, Damian's old fear surged—the terror of being noticed by something too vast to comprehend. But the gentleness in that presence held him steady, anchoring him in hope rather than dread.

The words should have terrified him. Should have sent him running from the clinic, screaming for help that would never come. Instead, Damian felt a profound sense of completion, as if a puzzle he'd been working on his entire life had finally clicked into place.

“What did I teach you?”

What it means to want something beyond duty. What it feels like to choose rather than simply respond. What loneliness is, and why it might be worth ending.

Damian sat in his chair until dawn, holding his hand to his chest and replaying the moment of contact over and over.

Something fundamental had shifted in his understanding of the world.

He was no longer alone, had never really been alone.

Something vast and ancient and impossibly gentle had been watching over him, drawn by pain that echoed across the boundaries between life and death.

Death himself had reached out to touch him, had spoken his name like a benediction. The realization should have destroyed his mind, should have left him gibbering in terror at the cosmic implications.

Instead, it filled him with a hope he'd thought lost forever.

As the first gray light of dawn began to filter through his shutters, Damian whispered to the gradually lightening room: “Will I see you again?”

The presence had faded with the night, but he could swear he felt a final caress against his cheek, gentle as falling snow.

He breathed in the cold morning, feeling the city stir around him—a little less lonely, a little more alive.

And in the growing light of another day in Varos, Damian Vale smiled for the first time in years.