Unable to bear the clinic's haunted quiet any longer, Damian pulled on his coat and stepped into the night air. The city felt wrong against his skin—too cold in some places, too warm in others, with currents of temporal distortion that made his enhanced senses reel. He needed information, needed to understand what forces were tearing Varos apart from the inside.
Three blocks from his clinic, the ambush came.
Damian's enhanced hearing caught the subtle shift first—five sets of breathing that had been matching his pace for too long, footsteps that tried too hard to be casual. The scent profile was wrong too: desperation-sweat mixed with fermented grain spirits and the metallic tang of blades poorly maintained but recently honed.
“Healer,” a voice called from the mouth of Beggar's Throat Alley, rough with the particular rasp that came from inhaling too much time-smoke. “Got a proposition for you.”
Damian's grip shifted on his cane, thumb finding the hidden release that would extend the walking stick into a proper staff. “I'm closed for the evening. Come to the clinic at dawn.”
“Nah, see, that won't serve.” Heavy boots scraped against cobblestone as two more figures moved to flank him frombehind. “Mistress needs you tonight. And what the mistress needs, the mistress gets.”
The alley reeked of piss and rotting offal, but underneath those familiar urban stenches, Damian caught something else—the cloying sweetness of temporal extraction apparatus. These weren't random cutthroats. They served someone with access to forbidden time-magic.
“Your mistress can petition for an audience like everyone else,” Damian said, his voice carrying the calm authority he'd learned from years of dealing with desperate souls. “I don't make house calls.”
“Afraid you haven't got a choice, blind man.”
The first attacker came from his left, boots thudding against stone with the heavy confidence of someone who thought blindness meant helplessness. Damian let him get close—close enough to smell the sour wine on his breath, to hear the wet wheeze of diseased lungs, to feel the displacement of air as a cudgel swung toward his skull.
Damian ducked and spun, his extended cane sweeping the attacker's legs. The man crashed to the cobblestones with a wet crack that spoke of skull meeting unforgiving stone. He didn't rise again.
“Damn! Willem!”
Two more rushed him from opposite sides, trying to overwhelm him with numbers. But Damian's enhanced senses turned their coordination against them. He could hear their hearts beating in tandem, their breathing falling into the same desperate rhythm—and he used that rhythm to predict their movements.
The one on his right favored his left leg, probably an old wound from the time wars. When he lunged, Damian drove his cane into the weak knee with surgical precision. Bone and sinewpopped like overstressed rope, and the man went down howling, clutching his ruined joint.
The third attacker had learned caution from watching his companions fall. He circled at a distance, breathing hard through his mouth—broken nose, most likely. The scrape of steel on leather told Damian he was drawing a blade.
“You'll rue that, you freak,” the knife-wielder snarled. “Mistress said bring you breathing, but she didn't say nothing about bringing you whole.”
“Your mistress made an error,” Damian replied, his voice deadly calm. “She should have warned you what I truly do.”
The man lunged with his blade leading, steel whispering through the air in a clumsy overhead strike. Damian sidestepped and seized the attacker's wrist, his grip precise enough to hit the pressure point that would numb the hand. The knife clattered to the stones.
But instead of simply disabling his opponent, Damian opened himself to the man's pain—and there was so much of it. Years of time-debt eating away at his flesh, organs failing from temporal displacement, the constant ache of a soul being slowly consumed by forces beyond mortal understanding.
Damian absorbed it all in a rush that made his knees buckle, then weaponized it. He pushed the concentrated agony back into the attacker, amplified by his own magical resonance. The man's scream was inhuman, the sound of someone experiencing every hurt he'd ever ignored all at once.
The knife-wielder collapsed, convulsing on the filthy cobblestones, his nervous system overloaded by his own accumulated suffering concentrated into a single moment. Foam flecked his lips as he thrashed, trying to escape pain that came from within his own flesh.
“Gods preserve us,” one of the remaining attackers whispered. “What sorcery did you work on him?”
“Gave him back what he was hiding from,” Damian said, his voice rough with the backlash of channeling so much concentrated anguish. Blood trickled from his nose, but he wiped it away with steady hands. “Your turn.”
The fourth man broke and fled, his footsteps echoing off the alley walls as he disappeared into the maze of Veil Row's narrow passages. Wise choice.
The last attacker—the leader, judging by the quality of his cloak and the authority in his earlier voice—held his ground but kept his distance. His breathing had gone shallow with fear, and Damian could smell the acrid stench of terror-sweat.
“You're no natural healer,” the leader gasped.
“No,” Damian agreed, taking a step forward. His enhanced hearing caught the man's heart hammering against his ribs like a caged bird. “Not anymore. Now, you're going to tell me who sent you.”
“Can't do that. Mistress would flay me alive.”
Damian reached out with his magical senses, reading the man's pain profile like a physician's chart. Chronic headaches from temporal displacement. Joint-fire in his hands from handling corrupted time-crystals. The slow burn of his liver processing too much alchemical spirits.
“I can make all of that stop,” Damian said softly, his voice carrying the terrible gentleness of someone offering mercy that came with hidden barbs. “Or I can make it so much worse that you'll beg me to grant you the final rest. Your choice.”
