The words should have terrified him. Should have sent him running from the clinic, screaming for help that would never come. Instead, Damian felt a profound sense of completion, as if a puzzle he'd been working on his entire life had finally clicked into place.
“What did I teach you?”
What it means to want something beyond duty. What it feels like to choose rather than simply respond. What loneliness is, and why it might be worth ending.
Damian sat in his chair until dawn, holding his hand to his chest and replaying the moment of contact over and over. Something fundamental had shifted in his understanding of the world. He was no longer alone, had never really been alone. Something vast and ancient and impossibly gentle had been watching over him, drawn by pain that echoed across the boundaries between life and death.
Death himself had reached out to touch him, had spoken his name like a benediction. The realization should have destroyed his mind, should have left him gibbering in terror at the cosmic implications.
Instead, it filled him with a hope he'd thought lost forever.
As the first gray light of dawn began to filter through his shutters, Damian whispered to the gradually lightening room: “Will I see you again?”
The presence had faded with the night, but he could swear he felt a final caress against his cheek, gentle as falling snow. He breathed in the cold morning, feeling the city stir around him—a little less lonely, a little more alive. And in the growing light of another day in Varos, Damian Vale smiled for the first time in years.
Chapter 6
Breathless, Becoming
Cael
Cael walked through the streets of Varos in a form more solid than ever before, each footstep leaving faint impressions in the dust that gathered in doorways and alley corners. The transformation unsettled him on a level deeper than thought—he could feel himself being drawn down, slowly anchored to the physical realm by forces he was only beginning to recognize, pulled by a gravity that felt at once dangerous and necessary.
His breath created small clouds in the cold night air—visible proof of lungs that shouldn’t exist, a metabolism that defied every cosmic law. The sensation of air moving through his throat was strange, almost luxurious, each inhalation drawing in the layered scents of Varos: coal smoke and human desperation, the metallic tang of time-magic bleeding from cracked foundations, the green hint of hidden gardens where hope clung on, stubborn as weeds.
The weight of his footsteps was a marvel and a threat, foreign enough to make him pause and study his own feet witha child’s wonder. For eons, he had passed through the world like mist, insubstantial, untouchable. Now he felt the resistance of stone beneath his soles, the air pushed aside by his passage, small eddies in the ever-present fog swirling in response to his existence.
Most mortals still could not see him, but his presence sent invisible ripples through their lives, enough to quicken his new, uneasy pulse. Children playing in narrow alleys would pause mid-laughter, suddenly glancing over their shoulders, caught by a chill with no wind. Dogs and cats grew restless as he passed, hackles rising, their gaze tracking him as if they glimpsed a shadow trailing just behind their world. A tabby cat arched and hissed at what its owner saw as empty air, prompting a nervous mutter and a hurried step.
The sensitive shivered, pulling their coats tight against a chill that had nothing to do with the night. A time-debt worker stumbled as Cael brushed past, blinking as if the world had blurred around the edges. At a market stall, an old woman selling herbs locked eyes with him for a heartbeat—her pupils wide with a terror she could not explain.
“Death walks tonight,” she whispered, and Cael felt a tremor of something dangerously close to guilt. They sensed him—not with sight, not yet, but with that ancient animal intuition that recognized the weight of his presence in the world, like a stone dropped in still water.
He was becoming real, and reality carried responsibilities he'd never had to consider before. Every step toward true corporeality was a step away from the cosmic order that had defined his existence since the beginning of time.
The streets of Veil Row at night revealed patterns he'd never noticed during his brief appearances for Reapings. Cael moved slowly, taking time to observe the intricate web of mortal existence that played out in shadows and candlelitwindows. He saw time-debt collectors hammering on doors, demanding payment in years that couldn't be spared. Children huddled around braziers fed with coal that smelled of temporal displacement, their faces prematurely aged by proximity to corrupted magic.
But he also saw acts of quiet kindness that pressed against his forming heart, tightening it with unfamiliar ache. A baker leaving bread at doorways, a musician playing soft lullabies to cold, listening children, an old man pressing his last time-crystal into a desperate mother’s palm. These brief lives—once just marks on the cosmic ledger—were knotted together in ways he’d never learned to see.
They suffered, yes, and died and grieved—but they also chose, again and again, to love, to hope, to sacrifice. None of it made sense in the cold economy of endings. But here, in the slow burn of living, there was meaning.
How had he moved among them for eons without seeing the intricate connections that bound them together? How had he missed the beauty in their temporary nature, the way they created meaning despite—or perhaps because of—their mortality?
The questions multiplied with each step toward Damian's clinic, and Cael found himself both eager and apprehensive about what he might discover tonight.
When he reached the familiar building, Cael found Damian exactly where he'd hoped—working late by candlelight, his hands moving with careful precision over a patient who lay still on the examining table. But tonight, something was different about the scene. The healer's movements were less steady than usual, his breathing irregular in ways that suggested distress.
Cael moved closer, his form becoming more solid as his attention focused. Through the walls, he could sense the now-familiar signature of absorbed pain, but it was stronger tonight,more chaotic. Damian had been pushing himself beyond his usual limits, taking on more suffering than one mortal frame could reasonably bear.
The sight of Damian—shaken, hunched, pushing past his limits—stirred something hot and unfamiliar in Cael’s chest. For long moments he could not name it. Concern. Worry, not as a cosmic function but as a personal ache for this one mortal’s wellbeing.
When had a Reaper ever felt such a thing?
Damian finished treating his patient—a young man with time-burns across his arms—and helped him to the door with movements that spoke of bone-deep exhaustion. As the patient left with grateful thanks, Damian locked the clinic door and leaned against it, his breathing harsh and uneven.
Cael watched him slide down the door to sit on the floor, head in his hands, shoulders shaking with the effort of containing whatever he was feeling. The raw vulnerability of the moment made Cael's newly forming heart race with unfamiliar urgency.
“I can't keep doing this,” Damian whispered to the empty clinic, his voice rough with exhaustion and something that might have been despair. “There's too much pain, too many people who need help. I'm drowning in it.”
