“That's insane.”
“Is it? You've been having dreams about presence and silence. Hollows are carving symbols that match your mother'ssoulbinding marks. And now you're dreaming about figures who look like they stepped out of Ashen Accord mythology.”
Damian wanted to argue, to dismiss it as coincidence and magical exhaustion. But deep in his bones, he knew Corrin was right. The strangeness wasn't random. It was focused, intentional, drawing ever tighter circles around his small life.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“I don't know,” Corrin admitted. “But I think we're about to find out.”
The next morning brought impossible changes that made denial futile. The sigil carved into Damian's wall was now glowing with soft silver light that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. The symbol had grown more complex overnight, sprouting delicate branches and spirals that weren't there before, as if something was adding to it piece by piece.
When Damian placed his palm against the glowing mark, warmth spread up his arm and settled in his chest like a second heartbeat. The sensation was deeply intimate, as if someone was touching him from the inside out. For a moment, he swore he could feel another presence layered beneath his own awareness, vast and patient and achingly lonely.
“It's beautiful,” he whispered, tracing the new patterns with wonder.
“It's terrifying,” Corrin corrected, but their voice held awe as well as fear.
Outside his window, a raven had taken up permanent residence on the sill. It didn't flee when Damian approached, instead studying him with intelligence that seemed distinctly non-animal. Its eyes were black as winter night, but they held depths that spoke of ancient knowledge and endless sorrow.
The raven's presence seemed to calm something in Damian he didn't realize was agitated. As he went about his morning routine, he found himself speaking to the bird as if it mightrelay messages to whoever was listening in the spaces between silence.
“Tell him I'm not afraid,” he said while preparing his healing supplies. “Tell him I understand what this means. Tell him...” He paused, struggling to find words for the longing that had been growing in his chest like a tumor made of starlight. “Tell him I'm ready to meet him properly.”
The raven tilted its head, considering his words with the gravity of a judge weighing evidence. Then it spoke again, its voice carrying harmonics that seemed to echo from very far away: “He knows.”
Throughout the day, patients noticed changes in Damian's healing. His touch seemed cooler but more effective, drawing pain with greater intensity and leaving behind a sense of profound peace rather than mere relief. One woman commented that his hands felt “blessed by the old gods,” and Damian didn't correct her.
Mrs. Kess was among his patients that day, her condition deteriorating rapidly as the temporal strain ate away at her remaining vitality. But when Damian touched her, something extraordinary happened. The pain flowed out of her and into him as usual, but underneath it came something else: peace.
Not his peace, but something foreign and vast and infinitely gentle. As if someone was pouring comfort into her through his hands, using him as a conduit for mercy he'd never been able to provide on his own.
“You're different today,” she said when the healing was done, her voice stronger than it had been in weeks. “There's something in your touch that wasn't there before. Something old and kind.”
Damian's hands were shaking, but not from exhaustion. The borrowed peace sat in his mind like a gift, beautiful and terrible and utterly foreign to his own experience. “How do you feel?”
“Like I've been forgiven,” she said simply. “Like someone very powerful decided I'd suffered enough.”
That night, as Damian prepared for sleep, he realized he no longer felt the crushing weight of solitude that had defined his adult life. The darkness around him was companionable rather than empty, filled with patient presence that watched over him like a guardian made of starlight and shadow.
He spoke to it as he might to a friend, his voice soft in the intimate darkness: “I don't know your name yet, but I know you're listening. Thank you for hearing me. Thank you for the peace you gave Mrs. Kess. Thank you for... whatever this is.”
The shadows seemed to deepen in response, not threateningly, but like a gentle embrace. The air grew warmer, and for a moment Damian could have sworn he felt fingers in his hair, stroking with impossible tenderness.
Sleep came easily for the first time in years, and his dreams were full of silver light and profound peace.
Chapter 4
The Weight of Stillness
Cael
The Threads existed in the pause between heartbeats, between inhale and exhale, where time twisted itself into impossible patterns. Cael moved through the silver mist like a shadow given form, his essence drifting between the faint echoes of souls in passage—the only rhythm that had ever mattered.
Here, in this liminal realm, he was what he had always been: inevitable, impartial, alone. The Threads recognized him and parted with the silent deference reserved for the oldest truths, making way as he slipped past, guided only by the cosmic necessity that summoned him to every ending.
He felt the next summons before it fully formed—a pull at the core of his being. But even as it shaped itself into duty, something in this call unsettled him. Not the familiar sharp demand of approaching death, but something gentler, almost questioning. The difference was so subtle that Cael paused mid-motion, his form rippling with something he could not name.
For eons, he had drifted passively, responding to the weight of souls reaching the threshold. Choice was not part of his nature; he was the shadow at the end, neither cruel nor kind, simply the inevitable. Yet now, this summons felt… less like a demand, more like a door left ajar.
