Damian struggled to his feet, wiping tears as his healer's instincts overrode personal anguish. “Something's wrong. More wrong than just?—”
He moved toward the door, his enhanced senses picking up wrongness in the air itself. The magical currents that normally flowed through Varos in predictable patterns were chaotic, fragmented.
“Don't go out there,” Cael said, rising to follow. “Something's happening. Something that shouldn't be possible.”
But Damian was already opening the door, stepping into the street where their worst fears were being made manifest.
Hollowed figures shambled through narrow alleys with unprecedented coordination, their movements guided by intelligence that should have been impossible. A child nearby began screaming as her mother transformed mid-sentence into a Hollow, her soul partially extracted but not fully reaped. The woman stood frozen between states, her eyes holding fragments of recognition while her body moved with jerky motions.
Across the street, a building began aging decades in seconds, stones crumbling while ivy grew and died and grew again in endless cycles. Time itself was bleeding like an open wound.
“Gods,” Damian breathed, his face pale. “The boundary's breaking down. Life and death are becoming?—”
“Permeable,” Cael finished, his cosmic senses reeling. “The Eternal Accord is failing. Someone's experiments have damaged the rules that bind Death beyond repair.”
A vendor's cart nearby suddenly reversed through time, its goods un-rotting while the vendor himself aged backward from elderly to middle-aged to young, his confused cries echoing in temporal loops. The sight was viscerally wrong, reality stuttering like a broken clock.
“This isn't about just us anymore, is it?” Damian's voice was steady despite the chaos, carrying the calm that came when someone finally understood the true scope of crisis.
Cael shook his head grimly, watching fragments of souls drift through the air like ash, neither alive nor properly dead. “Our bond may have been the catalyst, but whoever killed Oris has been experimenting with forces beyond their understanding. If this continues, everyone in Varos will be caught between life and death forever.”
The implications were staggering. An entire city trapped in perpetual transition, millions of souls caught in endless suffering with no hope of peace. It would be hell beyond anything the cosmic order had ever permitted.
Standing together in apocalyptic chaos, both men understood that their personal happiness must take second place to saving their world. Their love had triggered something ancient and dangerous, and now they bore responsibility for stopping it.
“We have to stop whoever's doing this,” Damian said, determination replacing grief. “Oris died protecting the network. We can't let that sacrifice be meaningless.”
“It won't be,” Cael replied, taking Damian's hand for the first time without hesitation. The touch sent electricity through both of them—grounding rather than overwhelming, connection rather than consumption.
“Whatever comes next,” he said, meeting Damian's sightless eyes with intensity that transcended physical vision, “we face it together.”
Damian nodded, squeezing Cael's fingers with desperate hope. “Together. Even if it destroys us both.”
As screams echoed through the breaking city and reality continued fracturing around them, as time bled and the dead walked among the living with increasing frequency, they stood united by grief and determination and love that had survived its first real test.
The world itself had become a patient requiring salvation, and they were the only healers capable of treating a wound that threatened to consume everything they held dear.
Around them, Varos writhed in temporal agony—people aging backward and forward in stuttering loops, buildings crumbling and rebuilding themselves, shadows moving independently of their sources. The very air tasted of copperand ozone, reality straining against forces it was never meant to contain.
But in the midst of chaos, two figures stood hand in hand—Death learning to choose love over law, and a healer who refused to let the world die on his watch. They had found each other across impossible odds, and now they would fight to save everyone else.
The war had found them. Now they would find the strength to fight back.
Chapter 13
Friction in the Flame
Damian
He lay awake in his narrow bed, listening to the city beyond his windows sound fundamentally wrong. The time-bells that had marked Varos's hours for centuries now rang off-rhythm, their bronze voices cracked and uncertain. Shadows moved independently of their sources, creating footsteps where no one walked and whispers where no one spoke. Even the air tasted metallic and sharp, flavored with temporal distortion that made his enhanced senses recoil.
His clinic sat half-empty because patients were too afraid to venture out after dark. The streets belonged to the Hollowed now, those caught between life and death by whatever experiments had torn holes in reality itself. Damian was left alone with thoughts that circled like hungry birds, picking at the wounds Oris's death had opened in his carefully constructed world.
Sleep had become impossible. Every time he closed his eyes, he was back in that moment with Cael—the cosmic anguish radiating from him, the sound of his voice breaking on anapology that changed nothing and everything. Damian could still feel the tremor in Cael’s hands, the impossible warmth of tears that shouldn’t have existed, and the echo of his own slap, palm stinging with the memory of trust shattering in a single, irrevocable second.
Unable to bear the restless energy thrumming through his body, Damian rose and lit a candle by touching wick to the banked coals in his brazier. The flame cast warm light he couldn't see but could feel against his skin, creating the illusion of comfort in a world that had grown cold and uncertain.
He retrieved his writing materials—good paper saved for important correspondence, ink that flowed smooth and dark, a pen that fit his hand like it had been crafted for his grip. Usually he wrote letters to abstract concepts, to the dead, to ideas that couldn't write back. Tonight felt different.
