The child would live but never age, trapped in a seven-year-old body until her natural death claimed her in four decades. She would watch her friends grow up, fall in love, have children of their own, while she remained frozen in childhood, foreverdependent, forever unable to participate in the full spectrum of human experience.
As Cael approached, trying to understand the mechanism of such calculated atrocity, the mother could not see him—her attention focused entirely on the legal documents that would destroy her daughter's future to save the family's present. But the child turned toward him with the uncanny awareness that some mortals possessed, her innocent eyes meeting his with startling clarity.
“You're not a monster, are you?” she whispered with heartbreaking sincerity, her small voice carrying across the space between them like a prayer. “You look sad.”
The words hit Cael like cosmic lightning, rewriting something fundamental in his understanding of his own nature. Here was a child about to lose forty years of her life, and her first concern was whether the strange figure watching from the shadows was suffering.
His borrowed throat worked soundlessly for a moment before he managed to whisper back, “No, little one. I am not a monster.”
“Good,” she said with a solemn nod. “There are too many monsters already.”
By every law of cosmic order, this should have been a moment for reaping. The child's natural lifespan was being artificially constrained, her death accelerated by human greed. His function was to guide souls across the threshold, to ensure that death came when it was meant to come.
But he didn't take her soul. Couldn't even consider it. Instead, he followed the family at a distance as they left the plaza, the mother's relief palpable in her step while the child looked back over her shoulder with eyes that held too much knowledge for someone so young.
The child waved at him—a small, brave gesture that made his chest tight with emotion he couldn't name.
Cael carried their suffering like a weight in his chest, a new kind of burden that had nothing to do with cosmic duty and everything to do with witnessing injustice he was powerless to prevent. A moral line had been drawn inside him, and he found himself on the side that opposed the very system he'd been created to serve.
As he walked away from the plaza, Cael realized that something fundamental had shifted in his understanding of his role in the cosmic order. These time-trades weren't natural deaths requiring his attention—they were systematic cruelty that his presence somehow legitimized simply by existing within the same reality.
The distinction between reaping and witnessing injustice became crucial to his evolving sense of self. He was no longer simply Death, the inevitable ending that came for all things. He was becoming something else, something that could choose which endings to facilitate and which to oppose.
The thought should have terrified him. Instead, it filled him with something that might have been purpose.
Driven by morbid curiosity and growing moral outrage, Cael made his way to the Time Cathedral, passing through neighborhoods where the architecture itself seemed to reflect the social stratification. Buildings grew taller and more ornate as he climbed, their foundations literally built on the bones of demolished lower districts.
The cathedral rose above the upper city like a crystal growth, its faceted walls reflecting distorted images of time beingextracted, refined, and hoarded by those who had never known want. The sound that emerged from within—a low, harmonic hum—made his bones ache with wrongness.
Inside the cathedral's vast main chamber, he witnessed a ritual of extension that made his borrowed stomach churn with revulsion. A noble—some minor lord whose name carried weight in the floating districts—was purchasing twelve years from a Hollow whose soul fragments had been carefully preserved for this exact purpose.
The process was clinical, almost surgical in its cold calculation. The Hollow lay on an altar-like table while technicians in sterile robes worked around him, their hands moving with practiced skill as they extracted temporal essence from what remained of his fragmented soul. Tubes and crystalline instruments channeled the stolen years into receptacles that glowed with stolen life.
“Beautiful work,” the noble commented, adjusting his cuffs as temporal energy flowed into his body. “I can already feel the vitality returning. How long until the effects are fully integrated?”
“Three days, my lord,” one of the technicians replied without looking up from his instruments. “You'll find your stamina much improved, and the gray in your hair should reverse within the week.”
What made it worse was that the soul being harvested broke without dying, trapped in a state between life and death while its temporal essence was siphoned away like blood from a living body. The Hollow's eyes tracked movement with desperate awareness, still conscious, still suffering, stillaliveenough to experience what was being done to him.
Cael's hands clenched into fists, and he felt his form flicker dangerously between states—cosmic avatar and increasinglyhuman entity warring for control. The urge to intervene, tostopthis abomination, crashed over him with surprising force.
I could end this,he thought, power crackling at his fingertips.One touch, and the noble dies. The Hollow finds peace.
But intervention would reveal him, would expose his presence in the mortal realm and bring cosmic consequences he wasn't prepared to face. Not yet. Not until he understood what he was becoming and what he was willing to sacrifice for it.
For the first time in his existence, Cael felt revulsion rather than duty toward the cosmic order he'd served for millennia. The Time Exchange claimed to operate within cosmic law, to provide a service that balanced life and death in accordance with universal principles. But what he was witnessing had nothing to do with balance and everything to do with the concentration of power in the hands of those already wealthy enough to purchase immortality.
In the reflection of the cathedral's crystal walls, Cael caught sight of his own image and recoiled from what he saw. His face shifted constantly—sometimes the ancient, austere avatar of Death he'd been created to be, sometimes something more human and vulnerable, sometimes a chaotic blend of both that seemed to war with itself for dominance.
He was no longer constant, no longer the unchanging force he'd been designed to be. The instability terrified and exhilarated him in equal measure, proof that his connection to Damian was fundamentally altering his nature in ways he couldn't control or predict.
But even as fear crawled up his spine at the implications of such transformation, Cael found himself grateful for the change. The creature he'd been before meeting Damian would have observed the cathedral's rituals with detached interest, cataloguing them as curiosities within the broader tapestry of cosmic function. Now he felt moral outrage, ethical revulsion,the burning need to do something to stop such systematic cruelty.
As he left the cathedral, one thought echoed in his transformed consciousness with crystalline clarity: what they did to each other was worse than what he gave them. Death, he realized, could be mercy—a release from suffering, a passage to whatever peace awaited beyond the threshold. But this systematic exploitation of mortality was pure evil, the transformation of the sacred process of ending into commodity for the pleasure of those who had never earned their extended years.
The revelation fundamentally altered his understanding of his cosmic purpose. Perhaps his function wasn't simply to end things when cosmic law dictated, but to ensure that endings served justice rather than cruelty, mercy rather than exploitation.
Walking through the city's predawn streets, past vendors setting up stalls with goods they could barely afford to sell and children whose laughter carried notes of desperation even in its joy, Cael began to understand why Damian fought so hard against the system that governed Varos.
