“I don't know what this will make me,” Damian said softly, “but I want to find out with you.”
They talked in whispers as exhaustion finally began to claim them both, sharing observations and sensations that would have been impossible to explain to anyone else. How Cael's touch felt like starlight made tangible. How Damian's warmth seemed to anchor Cael to the physical realm more securely than cosmic law ever had.
As the night deepened around them, they settled into Damian's small sleeping area—not sharing the narrow bed, but close enough to feel each other's presence. Cael took the chair beside the bed while Damian lay down, the wooden pendant between them glowing with unprecedented brightness.
“Are you afraid?” Damian asked softly, his voice carrying clearly in the intimate darkness.
“Terrified,” Cael admitted. “And more alive than I've ever been.”
As they hovered on the edge of sleep, both dreamed of standing atop a precipice, hands clasped, facing a horizon torn by lightning. Behind them, the city dissolved into rivers of light. In the dream, Damian whispered, “If we fall, we fall together.” Cael squeezed his hand in silent promise.
The shared vision was so vivid that when they woke, neither was sure who had dreamed it first.
Unknown to them, one of Senra's spies watched from the shadows outside the clinic, documenting every moment of tenderness through a scrying crystal that transmitted images directly to the Time Exchange Authority. The spy's hands shook as they recorded intimate moments between beings who should never have been able to touch without cosmic catastrophe.
They had once loved a Hollow—before the Exchange took their partner for experimentation. Now they served Senra, but watching this impossible love bloom made old wounds ache with recognition.
Miles away in her floating tower, Senra smiled with satisfaction sharp enough to cut glass as she watched the crystal's glowing surface. “Perfect,” she murmured. “Then we tear the mortal apart and watch Death follow him into madness. The final experiment can begin.”
In her memory, the screams of the last Anchor-Entity pair rang louder than any bell. She had been there when they burned, when love had tried to rewrite cosmic law and failed spectacularly. This time would be different. This time, she would harness that destructive power for her own purposes.
“Let the city watch,” she whispered to her reflection warped by magical glow. “Let Death learn what love costs.”
Chapter 16
The Cost of Want
Cael
Walking through the Threads felt like swimming through quicksilver that actively despised his presence. Each step forward required conscious effort, the silver pathways that had once welcomed Cael like a beloved son now recoiling from his touch as if he carried some cosmic contagion.
Each step sent jolts of pain up his legs, a sensation he'd never known as anything but data. Now it was real, electric, making him gasp—proof he was leaving eternity behind. He hissed as the Threads burned his feet, the pain sharp and immediate, not cosmic dissonance but the rawness of flesh learning to hurt.
His form flickered unpredictably, refusing to maintain consistent substance. Sometimes he was solid as granite, his footsteps echoing through dimensions with the weight of mountains. Other times he became so translucent that starlight passed through him without obstruction, his essence scattered like mist across the cosmic winds.
The Threads themselves seemed to burn where his feet touched them, leaving scorched impressions that spoke of fundamental incompatibility. Navigation, once as instinctive as breathing, had become a conscious struggle. He who had moved through the cosmos as easily as thought now stumbled through his own domain like a stranger lost in familiar rooms.
“You're slipping,” observed the echo-child, materializing beside him with the casual cruelty only children possessed. Her translucent form remained perfectly stable while his wavered between states like a candle flame in a strong wind.
“I am aware,” Cael replied, though the words came out rough and uncertain.
“Not dying,” she continued with devastating honesty. “Changing. Becoming. Soon you'll be too human to stay here, too transformed to go back where you came from.”
Her words carried the weight of cosmic truth, each syllable a nail in the coffin of his divine existence. Transformation was irreversible—he understood that now with crystalline clarity. There was no path back to what he'd been, no cosmic reset button that could restore him to his original function.
He stood at the threshold of losing everything he'd ever been, and the terrifying part was how little that prospect frightened him anymore.
The Threads confirmed his fears by denying him access to multiple souls awaiting reaping. Where once cosmic law had demanded his immediate attendance, now the pathways closed before him like doors slammed in his face. The sensation was both humiliating and liberating—the universe itself no longer trusted him to fulfill his essential function.
He had become a contaminated instrument, too compromised by emotion to serve death's pure purpose. The Eternal Accord recognized him as damaged goods, a reaperwho could no longer be relied upon to maintain the necessary distance between ending and empathy.
“They don't want me anymore,” he said aloud, surprised by how much the rejection hurt. He'd spent eons serving without question, had guided countless souls across the threshold with gentle hands and impartial heart. Now that service was deemed worthless because he'd learned to care about one particular mortal.
“Did you want them to?” the echo-child asked. “Or do you want him?”
The question hung in the silver mist like a challenge. Cael couldn't answer immediately, couldn't find words for the magnitude of what Damian had become to him. The healer wasn't just a connection or an anchor—he was the first thing in Cael's existence that felt like choice rather than obligation.
Desperate to understand what he was losing, Cael revisited old soul-paths—ethereal memories of people he'd once guided gently from life to whatever came after. He walked through ghostly impressions of his past work, feeling each ending like an echo of ancient music.
