Damian
The morning brought a stream of wounded to Damian's clinic, each carrying injuries that reflected the city's growing temporal instability like infection spreading through an open wound. The first was a young girl, maybe eight years old, led by her mother whose tear-stained face spoke of sleepless nights spent watching the impossible.
The child had a time wound—corrupted magic embedded in her bones that was pulling her life forward too rapidly, aging her by weeks with each passing day. Damian could hear it in her voice, the way it had deepened overnight, could feel it in the length of her limbs as she sat on his examining table. Her mother wept helplessly as her daughter grew older before her eyes, childhood stolen by forces beyond mortal comprehension.
“She was seven yesterday,” the mother whispered, her hands shaking as she touched her daughter's face. “Seven years old and now look at her. She's growing up too fast, and I can't stop it. I can't protect her from time itself.”
To extract the corrupted magic, Damian had to channel it through his own body first, filtering the temporal poison through his soul before it could be safely dispersed. The process burned like molten metal in his veins, every second of stolen time searing through his consciousness like liquid fire.
He deliberately bit down on his tongue as he worked, using the sharp pain to maintain focus while cosmic forces tried to tear his awareness apart. The taste of blood helped anchor him to the present moment, prevented him from getting lost in the temporal currents that threatened to sweep his mind away.
When it was over, when the girl's aging had been halted and her stolen years returned to the natural flow of time, Damian collapsed into his chair with hands that shook like autumn leaves. His entire body felt scorched from the inside out, every nerve ending raw with the memory of channeled poison.
After the family left—the mother's grateful tears almost harder to bear than her earlier despair—Damian sat alone in his clinic and confronted a truth that had been building for weeks.
Cael's absence was a physical ache in his chest, made worse by the wooden pendant's warm pulse against his palm. The carved spirals seemed to mock him—proof that their connection remained strong while offering no comfort, feeling instead like a promise someone might not be able to keep.
When had he become so dependent on Cael's presence? When had the cosmic entity's attention become more necessary than air or food or the basic requirements of survival?
A sharp knock at his door interrupted his spiral of self-recrimination. The pattern was familiar but wrong somehow—Corrin's usual three-two-one rhythm, but executed with trembling hands that spoke of exhaustion or fear.
“Corrin?” Damian called out, moving toward the sound. “Where the hell have you been?”
When he opened the door, his enhanced senses immediately catalogued everything wrong with his oldest friend. Corrin's breathing was labored, their usually crisp movements sluggish with magical exhaustion. The scent of bitter herbs clung to their clothes—not the healing varieties Damian was familiar with, but the kind used to mask supernatural traces and block scrying attempts.
“Gods, what happened to you?” Damian reached out instinctively, his healer's training overriding personal concerns. “You look like you've been through a temporal grinder.”
Corrin stumbled into the clinic, their weight heavier against his supporting arm than it should have been. “Had to disappear for a while,” they said, their voice carrying the particular hoarseness that came from screaming or extended magical strain. “Someone's been hunting healers. Anyone connected to the underground network.”
The words hit Damian like ice water. “Hunting how? Who's?—”
“Time Exchange raids,” Corrin interrupted, allowing Damian to guide them to the examining table. “But not the usual bureaucratic bullshit. These are surgical strikes. They know exactly who to target, where to find us, what our weaknesses are.”
As Damian's hands moved over Corrin's body, assessing injuries and magical depletion, he felt his blood pressure spike with growing alarm. Soul-burn scars across their forearms. Temporal displacement damage that spoke of being caught in time-loops for hours or days. The kind of wounds that came from prolonged interrogation by people who understood exactly how to cause maximum suffering.
“They got to Mira first,” Corrin continued, their voice growing smaller as exhaustion claimed them. “Pulled her right out of her safe house three days ago. By the time I heard aboutit, they'd already moved on to Henrik and the twins from the eastern district.”
Damian's hands stilled on a particularly nasty burn. “Mira's dead?”
“Worse. Hollowed while still breathing. They're using some kind of modified extraction technique that leaves the body intact but strips away everything that makes someone human.” Corrin's voice cracked on the words. “She's still walking around, but there's nothing left inside. Just an empty shell that remembers how to follow orders.”
The magnitude of what Corrin was describing made Damian's stomach turn. Systematic targeting of the healing network, torture techniques designed to extract information while leaving victims alive but destroyed—this wasn't random violence. This was coordinated, strategic, personal.
“How many?” he asked quietly.
“At least twelve confirmed captures. Maybe more. I've been hiding in the deep tunnels with the other survivors, trying to piece together what they know and how they're getting their information.” Corrin winced as Damian applied healing salve to a particularly deep wound. “That's why I couldn't come sooner. Couldn't risk leading them here.”
Damian worked in grim silence, channeling healing energy through hands that trembled with more than magical exhaustion. Every name Corrin mentioned was someone he knew, someone he'd worked with, someone who'd trusted him to keep their secrets safe. The weight of their collective suffering pressed against his consciousness like a physical force.
“There's more,” Corrin said softly. “The extraction technique they're using—it's not just stripping away soul essence. They're collecting it. Storing it in crystalline matrices for some kind of larger working.”
“What kind of working?”
“The kind that requires massive amounts of life force and emotional resonance. The kind that...” Corrin hesitated, then forged ahead with the determination of someone delivering necessary bad news. “The kind that could forcibly transfer cosmic authority from one entity to another.”
The implications crashed over Damian like a tide of ice water. “They're not just hunting healers. They're gathering fuel for the Mirror Offering.”
“That's what we think. Every soul they've taken, every healer they've broken—it's all building toward binding Death to someone new. Someone who won't be restrained by love or mercy or any connection to mortal suffering.”
