Cael emerged from the Threads into the world of Varos—a city sprawling below, built of obsidian and bone, stitched with centuries of desperation. Through his perception, the living flickered as distant sparks, their feelings muted and remote until the precise instant they crossed into his care.
Only then, at death, did mortals become vivid to him. Only then did they fully belong to his keeping.
He moved toward the source of the summons, his form insubstantial, passing through walls and memories. In a weathered tomb, an old woman lay dying—her years spent, her soul loosening from her bones. The Reaping should have been simple: arrive, sever the Thread, ease the passage.
But as Cael drew near, he sensed an unfamiliar magic, a quiet web of power stretched between the woman and something far away. Her soul was tethered by emotions too fierce, too focused. She was not afraid. She was not even thinking of herself.
“Mrs. Kess,” he murmured, drawing her name from the cosmic records, “your time has come.”
She met him with unblinking eyes, sadness weighing her down but not fear. “I know,” she whispered, voice thin as fading mist. “But he’ll be alone now. Damian… He thinks he’s strong enough to carry everyone’s pain, but he’s just one man. Someone should watch over him.”
The name meant little to Cael at first—just another mortal. But as Mrs. Kess whispered it, her soul carried a request no reaper could ignore. He realized, distantly, that he’d brushed the edges of Damian’s pain before, but never looked directly. Mrs.Kess’s words brought Damian into sharp focus—an echo finally resonating in the place where death and the living meet.
“Damian,” she breathed again, the name falling between worlds. “He needs… someone needs to look after him, when I’m gone.”
Duty called. Cael performed the Reaping, severing her Thread with practiced gentleness. Mrs. Kess slipped into the mists, her suffering ended. Yet, when he should have departed, he lingered in the tomb, drawn by a current he could not ignore.
This, too, was forbidden. A violation of the order he embodied.
But he remained, unsettled by the strength of the woman’s final thoughts—her fierce, stubborn care for someone she would never see again. Most souls died clutching regrets, or afraid. But Mrs. Kess’s last tether was love, fixed on a man who healed others by shouldering their pain.
What kind of person inspired such loyalty at the very end? What mortal’s name could echo so loudly across the Veil?
Within the Threads, Cael sifted through the residue of emotion. Mrs. Kess’s focus had not been on herself, but on the one she left behind. Her love felt like an anchor, her memory a door he could not close. For the first time in millennia, something that might have been curiosity caught at him—alien, insistent, impossible to brush aside.
He tried to let it go, to settle back into the comfort of emptiness. But the questions multiplied, soft as snow and just as relentless. What did it mean to carry another’s pain? Why would anyone choose it?
The Atrium of Silence lay at the heart of the Threads, a sanctuary Cael had shaped over centuries—a place woven from the last thoughts of the dead. Here, memories drifted like smoke and the air tasted of final breaths. It was usually peaceful. Tonight, it felt charged, unsettled.
“You’re different,” came a small voice.
Mia’s spirit shimmered at the edge of his vision, a child’s echo preserved by her own resilience. She hovered, face round, eyes too old for her years. “The old woman’s death troubled you,” she said.
“I am unchanged,” Cael replied, but even to his own ears the words were brittle.
Mia drifted closer. “She spoke of someone you’d never met, but you stayed anyway. That isn’t like you.”
He considered this. “Her last thoughts were not for herself. She was concerned for someone she called Damian.” The name left his tongue unfamiliar, yet not unwelcome. “I… wondered about him.”
“Wondered,” Mia echoed, almost smiling. “That’s new.”
“It is.” The admission lingered in the Atrium’s cool air. “I don’t understand why her thoughts clung to him, not her own ending. It seems… inefficient.”
“Maybe that’s the point,” Mia offered. “Loving someone more than you fear death. That’s the beauty mortals find, even at the end.”
Cael found no logic in it. Endings were meant to be clean. Love, suffering, all of it should dissolve at the threshold. Yet, Mrs. Kess’s worry still pulled at him—a thread left uncut.
“What does it feel like, to wonder?” he asked softly.
Mia’s smile was gentle, impossibly patient. “It’s like hunger, but not for food. It’s reaching for something you don’t know, a question that makes you ache a little.”
Cael let the Atrium’s hush wrap around him, but tonight the familiar emptiness did not come. Instead, pieces of the Reaping floated to the surface: a name, a longing, a thread of magic that refused to break.
“Damian,” he whispered, tasting the name in the silence. It vibrated through the Atrium, echoing deeper than he expected.
For the first time in centuries, something like a dream found him. Sensations not his own: the scent of healing herbs, the hush of breath in darkness, the careful brush of hands wrapped in linen. None belonged to him—yet they felt close, heavy with meaning.
In the dream’s deepest core, he sensed a figure working by candlelight—dedication in every movement, gentleness in every touch. Someone who soothed pain, not by ending it, but by sharing the burden.
