He woke with a start, uneasy.
A new summons tugged at him, another soul waiting at the edge. For endless eons he had answered such calls without question. But now, a moment’s hesitation rippled through the Threads.
He obeyed, as always, but the hesitation lingered, unsettling the mist itself.
Back in the liminal realm, Cael found himself drawn not by cosmic law, but by the lingering echo of that name. He moved once more toward the world of Varos—not to end a life, but to follow a thread of longing that was not entirely his own.
He passed through the city unseen, the misery and hope of Veil Row blending beneath him. Guided by instinct, he drifted to a converted clockmaker’s shop—a small, hidden place soaked in healing magic. The air was thick with pain, but here it had been transformed, softened, made bearable.
He hovered outside, listening. Within, a presence resonated—a mortal whose soul seemed to ring with the ache of others, layered upon his own.
This, Cael knew, was Damian.
He let his consciousness linger at the threshold. Through the walls, he could sense the healer moving quietly, tending to pain with a kind of reverence. Even at a distance, Cael recognized thecost. Each act of healing left the man a little more hollow, but still he persisted.
Cael lingered longer than he should have, telling himself it was only to understand the anomaly—a mortal whose pain drew others’ love so powerfully that even the dying could not let go. But the lie grew thin as he pressed closer, curiosity growing roots in the silent spaces of his mind.
He wanted, for the first time, to see not just the end, but the living struggle.
Returning to the Threads, he was met by silence less welcoming than before. Mia watched him, knowing.
“You found him.”
“I observed,” Cael said, choosing caution. “He is unusual. Where I end suffering, he carries it.”
“Does that trouble you?”
He hesitated. “It… interests me. His methods are painful, but effective. The mortals he tends leave lighter. Their suffering eases—without dying.”
“Is that all?” Mia’s voice was soft, but the question dug deeper.
Cael did not answer at first. The truth was uncomfortable: he could not dismiss Damian from his thoughts, nor the way the man’s pain resonated inside him. “I do not know,” he finally admitted. “I am not meant to be curious.”
“Maybe that’s what’s changing,” Mia said. “Maybe you’re allowed to change.”
He stood at the edge of the Atrium, gazing into infinity. “He carries their pain,” he said, speaking to the Threads. “He does not end it, but transforms it. I want to understand how.”
Another summons reached for him, duty calling him back. He obeyed. But as he moved through the mists, the questions trailed behind him, quiet as snow. Something in him had shifted. Obedience no longer felt like enough.
He wanted more. He wanted to know why love—why one man’s suffering—could reach across the Veil and call to Death itself.
And that want, that flicker of longing, felt like the beginning of something new.
Something for which he had no name.
Something that, for the first time, made him wonder what might happen if he followed the thread instead of the summons.
Chapter 5
Of Splinters and Silence
Damian
Damian's hands trembled as he cleaned the time-burns across the young woman's palms—a betrayal from fingers that could not afford mistakes, not here, not now.
The wounds were severe, angry red welts where corrupted Hourveins had leaked temporal energy directly into her flesh. She'd been working in one of the illegal time-farms, extracting years from desperate souls in the deep boroughs where the Exchange didn't bother to look.
“Easy,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “Just need to neutralize the temporal residue first.”
