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 feelingof 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.
