He watched Damian laugh at a child’s joke—pure, spontaneous joy, nothing like the cold, distant contentment Cael had known in the between-space. The sound moved throughCael like music, making him ache for reasons he didn’t entirely understand. For the first time, he realized what it was to envy mortals their attachments, their brief, blinding connections.
He wanted to hold onto this—this day, this simple closeness, the sense of being expected and welcomed. He didn’t want to go back to the empty place between worlds, to the silver corridors of solitude and duty.
As twilight fell and the lamps began to flicker with magic, Cael felt the weight of responsibilities he could no longer ignore. Souls called to him, their suffering a steady thrum in the background, but for once, he hesitated. At the crossroads, he slowed, reluctant to step away.
Without thinking, he reached for Damian—a tentative gesture, his fingers just grazing the fabric of the healer’s sleeve. The touch grounded him, the sensation sparking through his borrowed nerves with electric promise. He felt Damian’s pulse jump, heard the question in his breath.
“Cael,” Damian said quietly, the name falling between them like an invocation. “What are we doing?”
Cael’s answer surprised even him. “I don’t know,” he admitted, letting his thumb circle gently against Damian’s wrist. “But I find myself unwilling to stop.”
He listened to the hope threading through Damian’s reply: “Good. Because I’m not ready for you to disappear into myth again.”
A promise rose to Cael’s lips—an echo of all the vows mortals made to each other, fragile and impossible. “Then I won’t,” he said, and the words made him feel more human than any transformation ever could.
But the air was changing. Instinct, honed over centuries, told Cael something was wrong—a gathering tension, a distortion in the magical field that underpinned Varos. He felt it in thestreetlamps, in the erratic stutter of time-crystals, in the sudden chill that swept the square.
“Something's wrong,” Damian murmured, his healer's intuition picking up what Cael could sense as raw cosmic threat.
Cael let his awareness stretch outward, slipping briefly back into the vastness of the Threads. He saw Time Exchange patrols converging, three units moving in coordinated formation, their purpose cold and precise.
“They're hunting someone,” he said grimly, the certainty ringing through him. “You.”
Damian accepted it with calm that bordered on resignation. “My debt finally caught up with me.”
But even as Cael gathered his power, a deeper cold swept the plaza—a presence older and far more dangerous than any city enforcer. Windows cracked from the sudden drop in temperature. The air itself seemed to recoil, shying away from what was coming.
“No,” Cael breathed, dread freezing him to the core. “Not the Exchange. Something worse.”
He heard the first toll of the bell—not the familiar time-bell, but something deeper, resonating with cosmic judgment. The Celestial Order. They had found him.
The first patrol emerged from the narrow mouth of Serpent's Alley, their crystalline armor gleaming with temporal enchantments that made reality bend around their forms. These weren't ordinary Exchange enforcers—these were Chronarch Guards, elite soldiers whose very presence could slow time itself.
“Damian Vale,” their captain called out, his voice carrying the authority of absolute law. “By order of the Temporal Magistrate, you are under arrest for practicing forbidden soulcraft and consorting with cosmic entities.”
Damian's response was to extend his cane into a full staff, the carved wood humming with defensive magic his mother hadwoven into its core decades ago. “I heal people who can't afford your prices. That's not a crime.”
“Everything is a crime when the state decides it is,” the captain replied, drawing a blade that shimmered with captured time. “Surrender, and your death will be swift.”
The first Guard lunged with inhuman speed, his temporal armor allowing him to move between seconds like a dancer stepping between raindrops. But Damian had spent twenty years navigating a world he couldn't see—he'd learned to read intention in the smallest sounds, to predict movement from the shift of air against his skin.
He swept his staff low, catching the Guard's ankle just as the man materialized from accelerated time. Bone cracked audibly, and the Guard crashed to the cobblestones with a scream that echoed off the plaza's ancient walls.
Cael tried to move, tried to help, but something held him frozen in place. The cosmic presence bearing down on them—the Celestial Order's advance scout—was actively constraining him, preventing intervention while it assessed the full scope of his transformation.
Help him,Cael screamed silently, but his borrowed body refused to obey. Power crackled uselessly around his hands as invisible chains of cosmic law bound him to witness rather than act.
Two more Guards flanked Damian from opposite sides, their movements synchronized through temporal manipulation that let them attack from multiple timestreams simultaneously. But Damian's enhanced senses caught the rhythm of their coordination, the way their breathing aligned despite moving through different rates of time.
He spun his staff in a complex pattern, each movement precise enough to carve warding symbols in the air itself. Where the wood passed, golden light trailed like calligraphy written instarfire, creating barriers that made the Guards' temporal armor stutter and fail.
The Guard on his left stumbled as accelerated time suddenly snapped back to normal speed, momentum carrying him forward faster than his reflexes could compensate. Damian's staff caught him in the solar plexus with a strike that drove all air from his lungs. The man folded like wet parchment, his crystalline armor cracking as he hit the ground.
But the third Guard had learned from his companions' mistakes. He approached carefully, his temporal blade weaving patterns that distorted space as well as time. Where the weapon passed, reality bent like heated glass, creating zones where cause and effect became suggestions rather than laws.
“Impressive,” the Guard said, his voice carrying harmonics that spoke of temporal displacement. “But you're fighting the inevitable. The Magistrate wants you alive, but she'll settle for your corpse if necessary.”
Damian's response was to open himself to the Guard's pain—and there was so much of it. Years of temporal manipulation had left the man's body a battlefield between competing timestreams. His organs aged at different rates, his bones carried stress fractures from existing in multiple moments simultaneously, his nervous system screamed with the constant agony of temporal displacement.
