The old man was taking too long to die.
Kael Ashford sat in a straight-backed chair beside the bed, hands folded in his lap, watching the shallow rise and fall of the merchant's chest. Seventeen minutes. The death rattle had started seventeen minutes ago, that distinctive wet gurgle that meant the lungs were filling, that the body had begun its final surrender. Most people at this stage lasted five minutes. Ten at the outside.
This one was stubborn.
The room smelled of lavender and decay, an insufficient attempt to mask the reality of what was happening here. Expensive tapestries hung on the walls—hunting scenes, mostly, men on horses pursuing stags through forests that probably no longer existed. The merchant had been wealthy once. Wealthy enough to afford a private death, which in Verantum meant wealthy enough to afford a Witness.
Kael was sixteen years old. He had witnessed forty-three deaths in his short career with House Mourning, and he had learned that the wealthy died differently than the poor. Not better, necessarily. Just... differently. The poor died quickly, efficiently, as though they understood that lingering was a luxury they couldn't afford. The wealthy clung. They had so much more to lose.
Twenty minutes.
He shifted slightly in his chair, careful not to let it scrape against the floor. The family had been asked to wait beyond the inner threshold, just outside the room, where the thick oak door stood ajar only a hand's width. Close enough to be summoned. Far enough to grant the dying man privacy.
House Mourning insisted on it. The last moments belonged to the dying—and to the Witness alone.
From the corner of his eye, Kael could see their shadows in the corridor beyond the door. The wife, rigid and upright. Two sons, both older than Kael, both wearing the crisp uniforms of the Merchant's Guild. A daughter about his own age, her outline hunched, as though trying to fold herself smaller. They spoke in murmurs out there, too low to carry, as if sound itself might be an intrusion.
They were near.
But they would not hear this.
The merchant's eyes fluttered open—a momentary lucidity that sometimes came at the end. His gaze found Kael's face and held there, surprisingly sharp for a man whose body had already begun to shut down.
"You're..." The voice was barely a voice at all, more breath than sound. "You're just a boy."
The words would not have carried past the bed. They would not even have reached the door.
"Yes, sir," Kael said. Neutral. Professional.
"Doesn't seem right." The merchant's hand twitched against the silk sheets. "A boy... seeing a man's final moments. Carrying a man's last regret."
Carrying it forever, Kael thought, but did not say. Keeping it like a splinter in my mind that will never work its way out.
Instead, he said, "It's an honor to serve, sir."
The merchant made a sound that might once have been a laugh. It collapsed into a wet cough, flecking his lips with pink foam. "Honor. That's what they tell you. That's what they told me about... about a lot of things."
His eyes began to glaze. The air in the room felt different now—thinner, heavier at once. Kael leaned forward slightly, not toward the man, but inward, turning his attention to that fragile, liminal place House Mourning had trained him to sense.
The Witnessing was not magic. Not exactly.
It was an attunement. An openness. A willingness to stand where most people instinctively turned away. As the body failed, the mind loosened its grip on sequence and speech. Thoughts no longer needed words. Regret did not need a voice.
Kael had learned to listen without sound.
"My daughter," the merchant whispered. "I should have... I should have told her..."
The words dissolved before they were finished.
The weight struck Kael all at once.
Not as sound. Not as memory. As presence.
His breath hitched, fingers digging into the armrests as the merchant's failing consciousness brushed against his own—not reaching outward, not intentionally, but collapsing inward, shedding what it could no longer hold.
I should have told her she was enough.
The thought was whole. Complete. Not phrased, not spoken—felt, dense with years of restraint and pride and fear.
That her paintings were good. That I was proud. I kept waiting for her to prove herself and she was already proving herself every day and I never said and now I'll never and she'll never know—
The merchant died.
The room was silent.
The regret settled into Kael's mind like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through every corner of him. He closed his eyes, breathing carefully, counting as he had been taught, building mental walls around the чужд emotion before it could dissolve into his own.
That isn't my regret. That isn't my failure. I carry it but it doesn't define me.
The mantra felt thin. It always did.
Because it was his now. He would carry the knowledge of that unspoken love for the rest of his life. He would feel its echo whenever he saw a young woman with paint on her fingers, whenever pride went unspoken in favor of expectation.
Forty-four regrets.
Forty-four silent weights lodged behind his eyes.
When he opened them, the family was standing in the doorway.
They had not heard the words. But they knew the moment.
They always did.
The daughter—the one who painted, the one who had been enough—had both hands pressed over her mouth. Her eyes were wide, searching Kael's face, as though the answer might leak through his expression despite his training.
"It's done," Kael said softly. "He's at peace."
The lie slid out smoothly. Practice made perfect.
The wife broke down, sobbing into her sleeves. The sons hovered, uncertain, bound by propriety and discomfort. One of them guided their mother away from the bed.
The daughter did not move.
She stepped fully into the room now, crossing the threshold House Mourning usually preferred families not cross so quickly.
"What was it?" she asked. Her voice was steady, which made it worse. "His regret. What did he die thinking about?"
Kael felt the words rise in him like poison.
I should have told her she was enough.
It would take so little effort. A sentence. A kindness. He could change the shape of her grief forever.
But kindness was not his mandate.
"I'm sorry," he said, gently. "House Mourning's protocols forbid—"
"Please." She took another step closer, away from her family, her voice dropping. "I've spent my whole life trying to understand what he wanted from me. If I could just know what he was thinking at the end..."
He held her gaze.
"Final regrets are not for the living," Kael said. "They are carried by the Witness as a sacred trust. To share them would violate the dying's last privacy."
It was a carefully constructed lie, polished by centuries of institutional use.
Her face collapsed. She turned away sharply, and one of her brothers put an arm around her shoulders, shooting Kael a look that bordered on hatred.
"Your fee will be delivered to House Mourning within the week," the wife said, her voice brittle. "You may go."
Kael bowed—precisely thirty degrees, appropriate for a merchant family of middle standing—and left the room.
Only once the door was fully closed behind him did he allow himself to breathe.
In the hallway outside, a House servant waited with Kael's coat. The night air would be cold, and he had a long walk back to the Mourning compound. He shrugged into the heavy wool, feeling its weight settle onto his shoulders like another burden.
Forty-four regrets.
When he was younger, newly assigned to Witnessing duty, he had made the mistake of thinking it would get easier. That he would grow numb to the accumulated weight of other people's dying thoughts. His trainer—a hollow-eyed woman named Vessen who had witnessed over three thousand deaths—had laughed at him.
"It never gets easier," she had said. "You just get better at pretending."
Kael was getting very good at pretending.
He walked through the nighttime streets of Verantum's merchant quarter, passing under the glow of debt-lamps—those softly luminescent spheres that marked the boundaries of various Houses' territory. Blue for the Merchants' Guild. Green for the Physicians of House Vaelorn. The deep burgundy of House Mourning's own domain, still several blocks away.
The city was quiet at this hour. Most sensible people were in bed. But Kael had stopped being sensible about sleep a long time ago. Sleep meant dreams, and dreams meant revisiting the deaths he had witnessed, feeling those final regrets again with a vividness that made it impossible to tell which memories were truly his own.
He was so lost in his thoughts that he almost didn't notice the warmth.
It started as a subtle heat in his chest, just beneath his sternum. A sensation like sunlight on skin, but internal. Pleasant. Comforting, even.
And completely unfamiliar.
Kael stopped walking. He pressed a hand to his chest, confused. In sixteen years of life and four years of Witnessing, he had never felt anything like this. It wasn't painful. It wasn't threatening. It was simply... present. As though something inside him had woken up and was now gently making itself known.
Then the cold came.
A thread of ice, winding through the warmth. Not displacing it—coexisting with it. A contradiction made physical. Safety and danger. Approach and beware. Come closer but be careful.
Kael's heart was pounding now. He looked around the empty street, searching for the source of this impossible sensation. There was no one. Nothing. Just shadows and debt-lamp glow and the distant sound of the night watch making their rounds.
The warmth intensified. The cold sharpened.
And then, from an alley thirty feet ahead, a child stumbled into the light.
She couldn't have been more than eight years old. Dirty, ragged, her hair a matted tangle that suggested weeks without care. She was crying—silently, the kind of crying that children learned when noise was dangerous—and there was blood on her hands.
Not her own blood. Kael could tell immediately. The way she held her hands away from her body, the horror in her eyes as she stared at her own palms—someone else had bled, and she had been close enough to be marked by it.
The warmth in his chest surged. Help her. Protect her. She matters.
The cold cut deeper. Be careful. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.
Kael stood frozen, caught between the contradictory commands of whatever had awakened inside him. The child looked up and saw him. Her eyes widened—
And behind her, in the darkness of the alley, something moved.