“Fuck.” The word came out as barely a whisper, but it felt like shouting in the ruined space. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
He needed to ground himself, to anchor his awareness in familiar sensations. Moving to his desk, he ran his fingers along its wooden edges, counting the familiar gouges and scratches that marked decades of use. Here was the deep gouge from where he'd dropped a soul-needle. There was the water stain from the night Corrin had knocked over a cup of tea while arguing about his stubborn refusal to charge wealthy patients.
But the grounding technique that had worked for twenty years failed him now. Instead of calm, he felt a sudden wave of profound grief washing over him. Not his grief, but something vast and ancient, too large for any mortal heart to contain. For a moment, Damian wondered if he was losing his mind, or if something far older and colder had slipped beneath his skin.
His chest heaved with sobs that felt borrowed from someone else's eternity. This wasn't the familiar ache of his own losses, the controlled sorrow he'd learned to manage. This was raw, cosmic grief, the weight of countless endings witnessed and guided. The loneliness of someone who had stood at the threshold between worlds for longer than civilizations had existed.
Damian found himself whispering to the empty room: “Who are you?”
He thought he was addressing his own fragmenting mind, asking the question of whatever stress or exhaustion was causing these episodes. But somewhere deep in his core, something responded. Not in words, but in a resonant ache that felt like recognition. The sensation was both terrifying and oddly comforting, like finally hearing an echo of a call he'd been making his entire life.
Damian sat in the aftermath, his skin still tingling with residual emotion that clearly wasn't his own. Without thinking, he touched the spot on his forehead where his mother's soulbinding sigil rested. The mark was invisible to others, but always warm to his touch, a reminder of her final gift.
For the first time since childhood, it felt active. The sigil pulsed with gentle heat, as if responding to some external presence, some compatible magic that recognized its purpose. Somewhere in his memory, a half-remembered warning from his mother rose up: A soulbinding unfinished may yet find its other half. But he’d never believed the old stories until now. His mother had died trying to protect him with that mark, pouring her life force into a spell meant to shield him from the Time Exchange's attention.
What if the spell had done more than that? What if it had created a connection to something beyond the mortal world?
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 waswrapped 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. Inthat 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'timagining 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.
