Here was a grandmother's final smile as she saw deceased loved ones waiting to welcome her home. There was a soldier's peaceful sigh as pain finally left his battle-scarred body. A child's trust, offered freely even in the face of ending, her small hand slipping into his without fear or hesitation.
Those encounters had felt sacred once, each one a perfect note in the cosmic symphony of transition. Now they seemed impossibly distant, like remembering someone else's dreams or trying to recall the taste of foods he'd never actually eaten.
The realization that his past was becoming foreign to him should have been devastating. Instead, Cael found himself surprisingly at peace with the loss. Those memories belonged to someone else—a cosmic entity who had served withoutquestion or personal investment. The being he was becoming had different priorities, different needs, different definitions of sacred.
Without conscious direction, Cael found himself manifesting at the entrance to Damian's clinic. He hadn't chosen to come here, hadn't willed himself across dimensions—yet here he stood, drawn like iron filings to a magnet whose pull had become impossible to resist.
The realization that Damian had become his true north, his cosmic anchor, filled him with equal parts terror and wonder. How had one mortal's gentle hands and patient voice rewired the fundamental programming of his existence?
“I'm pathetic,” he whispered to the empty street. “A cosmic entity reduced to lingering outside windows like a lovesick teenager.”
But even as he spoke the words, he couldn't bring himself to leave. Through the clinic's walls, he could sense Damian's presence—the steady rhythm of his breathing, the warm pulse of blood through human veins, the particular quality of attention that made him so devastating to be around.
Returning to the Atrium of Silence felt like visiting a tomb where he'd once lived. The space that had been his sanctuary for eons was crumbling, its walls cracked and unstable as memory echoes leaked into each other in chaotic cascades. The careful order he'd maintained for millennia was dissolving into cosmic dust.
Cold seeped into his bones—real cold that made him shiver and seek warmth rather than simply observing temperature as cosmic data.
When Cael touched the echo-child's silver bell—a simple artifact that had anchored his sense of purpose for longer than human civilization had existed—it remained silent. Even this remnant of his past recognized that he was no longer the being who had first placed it here with reverent hands.
The echo-child materialized one final time, her form already beginning to fade as the Atrium lost cohesion around them. The walls were translucent now, showing glimpses of the void beyond, and Cael understood that his sanctuary was dying along with his cosmic nature.
“If you stay with him, you'll never return here,” she said with matter-of-fact finality. “This place, these memories, everything you've been for eons—it will all dissolve into nothing. You'll be mortal, Cael. Temporary. Forgettable.”
The words should have struck him like lightning, should have sent him fleeing back to the Threads to beg for restoration. Instead, his response came without hesitation, spoken with the conviction of absolute truth.
“Then bury this place with honor,” he said quietly. “I'd rather be lost with him than remain untouched and eternal.”
The echo-child smiled—the first expression of joy he'd ever seen cross her ancient face. “Then you understand what love actually costs.” She reached out, her translucent fingers brushing his cheek like a blessing. “Go, then. Be forgotten here, and unforgettable there.”
“I'm beginning to.”
In a final attempt to preserve what he'd been, or perhaps to test the strength of his conviction, Cael raised his fractured scythe toward the golden thread that bound him to Damian. One clean cut would sever the connection, restore his cosmic function, return him to the pure purpose for which he'd been created.
As the scythe hesitated above the golden bond, reality buckled. Distant souls howled, the cosmos holding its breath as choice remade the fabric of existence. But instead of cutting cleanly, the blade showed him visions that took his breath away.
Brief flickers of possible futures bloomed before him: himself and Damian growing old together, silver threading through their hair as they argued over something wonderfully petty. Damian laughing in the rain, his face bright with unbridled joy. The two of them sitting in comfortable silence, hands intertwined, watching sunrise paint the sky with gold.
Hope—real, genuine hope—flooded through him for the first time as a genuine possibility rather than abstract longing.
“This is the first thing I've ever wanted to live for,” he whispered to the collapsing Atrium, tears streaming down his face in rivers of liquid starlight. “The first time existence has felt like choice rather than obligation.”
The tears weren't grief for what he was losing—they were gratitude for what he'd found. For the first time in his existence, he was crying tears of joy rather than cosmic sorrow.
As the Atrium finally crumbled into cosmic dust around him, Cael spoke a vow that bound him more thoroughly than any cosmic law ever had: “I choose mortality. I choose impermanence. I choose love over duty, connection over purpose, Damian over everything I was meant to be.”
The words echoed through dimensions, sealing his transformation. In the city's oldest clock tower, the gears froze. On the horizon, a single star winked out—a silent eulogy for Death's abdication. The universe reacted to his rebellion, and for the first time in his existence, Cael did not care who witnessed his defiance.
Seeking answers about what he was becoming, or perhaps just delaying the inevitable confrontation with his transformed nature, Cael visited the Ruins of the Veiled Gate. This mythic place had once been where divine and mortal realms touched before cosmic law separated them permanently, and the ancient stones still hummed with residual power that made reality itself feel thin and malleable.
In the crystalline surfaces of the broken archway, fragments of possibility played like prophetic films. Cael watched visions of potential futures with the fascination of someone seeing magic for the first time.
A vision manifested before him that stole his breath entirely: himself, fully human, bleeding from wounds that healed normally rather than closing with cosmic fire. In the vision, he aged visibly—skin gaining lines, hair turning silver, movements becoming slower and more careful as mortal years accumulated.
He experienced hunger, real hunger that gnawed at his stomach rather than the abstract awareness of others' needs. Cold that made him shiver and seek warmth rather than simply observing temperature as cosmic data. Fatigue that demanded rest, pain that required comfort, loneliness that could only be soothed by connection.
The thousand small discomforts that made mortal existence precious by virtue of being temporary.
But what terrified him most wasn't the pain or the aging or even the eventual certainty of his own death.
