Damian looked up from his evening reading, startled but not afraid, his enhanced senses immediately recognizing the familiar presence despite its obvious agitation.
“I need to speak to you,” Cael demanded, his voice carrying harmonics that made the stone walls vibrate. “Now.”
Damian's response was immediate anger, weeks of accumulated frustration and hurt finally finding voice. “So you finally show up. What is it this time, Cael? Another cosmic crisis? Or are you here to tell me why we can never have what we both want while standing close enough that I can feel how much you want it too?”
“You don't understand what you're asking of me,” Cael said, his voice rough with strain. “You don't understand what I'm risking?—”
“Then explain it to me!” Damian shouted, rising from his chair with movements sharp with frustrated energy. “Stop hiding behind cosmic mystery and tell me what you're so afraid of!”
Cael's control snapped. In a moment of pure emotional release, he hurled Damian's wooden talisman at the wall with cosmic force, the small carving embedding itself in solid stone with a crack that echoed through both physical and spiritual realms.
“You made me want!” he roared, glass shattering on every side. “You made me forget what I was supposed to be!”
“And you can want!” Damian fired back, his voice equally fierce despite the supernatural energy crackling around them. “You can choose! You just keep running from those choices like a coward!”
The word “coward” triggered something primal in Cael's transformed nature. Moving with inhuman speed, he crossed the space between them and grabbed Damian by the shirt collar, slamming him against the clinic wall. But it wasn't violence—it was anguish made physical, desperation seeking contact, centuries of suppressed emotion finally finding expression.
Their faces were inches apart, both breathing hard, cosmic energy crackling in the air between them like visible electricity. Cael's fingers dented the stone beside Damian's head, his borrowed form trembling with barely restrained power.
Damian should have been terrified, but instead he looked at Cael with something that might have been relief.
“You will break me, Damian,” Cael whispered, his voice raw with confession. “You will make me so human that I'll forget how to be Death. And when the universe finally notices what I've become, it will destroy us both.”
Instead of pulling away in fear, Damian reached up and touched Cael's face with gentle reverence. His fingers traced the sharp line of cheekbone, the curve of jaw, mapping features that were becoming more human with each passing day.
“Then stay and break with me,” he whispered back, his voice carrying absolute conviction. “Stop trying to preserve something that was never meant to be eternal. Stop choosing duty over desire when desire is the only thing that's made you real.”
Their foreheads touched, breath mingling in the small space between them. The space between their lips was a fault line. If they crossed it, nothing would ever be the same.
Damian's pulse thundered beneath Cael's palm where it rested against his throat. This was what he'd been afraid of—not cosmic punishment or universal dissolution, but the simple reality of wanting something more than his own purpose.
At the moment their lips would finally meet, cosmic instinct overwhelmed emotional desire. Every millennium of conditioning, every ingrained response to maintain distance between ending and beginning, reasserted itself with violent force.
Cael vanished mid-breath, tearing himself away from contact that would have rewritten fundamental laws.
He left Damian pressed against the wall, gasping and alone, his hand still half-raised to where Cael's face had been. The scent of starlight and winter lingered like a promise and a threat combined. The taste of almost-kiss hung in the air between them, proof of how close they'd come to crossing a line that might have destroyed them both.
Back in the Atrium of Silence, Cael's anguish manifested as cosmic storm. Reality fractured around him in response to his emotional breakdown, the carefully ordered space of his sanctuary dissolving into chaos. Memory echoes screamed in harmonic discord, the walls cracked under pressure that had nothing to do with physics and everything to do with a cosmic entity learning to feel heartbreak.
The echo-child appeared in the chaos, her translucent form steady amid the destruction. She looked at Cael with ancient eyes in a young face, seeing through his cosmic nature to the terrified being underneath.
“Do you love him?” she asked with devastating simplicity.
The question hung in the air like a blade, sharp enough to cut through every rationalization and excuse Cael hadconstructed. He opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again, understanding instinctively that speaking the truth aloud would make it cosmically binding.
Love was the most dangerous force in the universe, more destructive than black holes. For a cosmic entity to love a mortal was to invite catastrophe on a universal scale, to risk unmaking the very foundations of ordered existence.
Instead of answering, Cael screamed wordlessly at the void, his voice carrying enough power to extinguish distant stars. The sound echoed through dimensions, carrying his terror and need and desperate want into spaces where such emotions had never existed.
The Threads responded to his emotional breakdown by cutting off his access to three souls he was meant to reap—a cosmic punishment that sent ripples of imbalance through the fundamental order. Death was choosing person over purpose, and the universe was beginning to notice.
The consequences arrived immediately in the form of an Elder Warden of the Accord, a being of pure cosmic law whose very presence made reality straighten and conform to universal principles. The Warden manifested as geometric perfection given consciousness, its voice carrying the weight of absolute authority.
“The anomaly has progressed beyond acceptable parameters,” it intoned, each word resonating through dimensions. “Varos already shows signs of temporal collapse—souls trapped between states, reality bleeding at the edges. If the tether remains, the contamination will spread. The mortal realm cannot withstand a compromised Reaper indefinitely.”
Cael knelt in the cosmic void, his form flickering between states as he struggled to process the magnitude of what was being demanded. “He's innocent. He didn't choose this connection.”
“The mortal's culpability is irrelevant. Cosmic balance requires correction. Kill the anchor, or watch entire civilizations crumble under the weight of temporal instability.”
