The chamber was silent, save for the faint hiss of candle flames guttering against the cold draft that slipped in through the carved obsidian windows. Shadows stretched long across the high walls, coiling around the edges of the room like serpents, devouring everything but him.

Kaelith lay sprawled on his bed — or rather, thrown upon it — a black silk robe hanging open loosely over his bare chest. The faint sheen of his pale skin caught the dying candlelight, while his deep crimson hair, damp from an earlier bath, clung to his sharp jawline and the side of his neck.

Around him, his once-pristine bed was littered with files — mortal files, pages upon pages of humanity’s fleeting lives, scattered like discarded memories across sheets the color of spilled ink. Names. Ages. Death dates. Entire existences reduced to symbols and strokes of ink.

His long, gloved fingers dragged slowly across one page, tracing over the details without truly reading them.

“Pathetic little creatures,” he murmured under his breath, though his tone held no real venom — only exhaustion. “You claw and bleed to live one more day, never realizing that you were mine from the start.”

His voice was low, hoarse, almost intimate as it bled into the silence of the chamber. He tipped his head back against the carved onyx headboard, his red eyes half-lidded, the faintest sigh leaving his lips.

But then, his gaze drifted — inevitably — toward one file among the hundreds. A single mortal name etched in gold at the top of the parchment. He didn’t need to read the rest; he knew it by heart, every cursed line of it.

Her file.

He hesitated, jaw tightening, his fingers flexing against the sheets until the paper beneath them crumpled. He hated how his chest tightened at the sight of it. Hated how his thoughts wandered, slipping like shadows between control and temptation.

“Pathetic,” he whispered again — though this time, the word was for himself.

With a sharp, frustrated exhale, Kaelith shoved the remaining files aside, letting them scatter haphazardly across the bed. He leaned back on his elbows, robe falling slightly to expose the lean, pale lines of his abdomen. His tongue clicked softly against his teeth as he stared up at the ceiling, crimson eyes glowing faintly in the low light.

The candles burned low. The silence grew heavy. And somewhere deep inside, a dangerous thought coiled tighter with every passing second:

How long could even Death restrain himself?