CHAPTER TWO — UNCLAIMED

His Point of View

I went to the café because Eli’s thread was nearing its end.

Nothing more.

I appear only when endings unfold, moving in the thin space between breaths, unseen by mortals and ignored by time itself. Wherever I step, the air cools, sound dulls, and time loosens its grip. Tonight was routine. Ordinary. Predictable.

Until Nora touched the tarot cards.

The moment her fingers brushed the deck, something in the weave shivered. Mortal intuition should not disturb fate’s threads. Human thoughts are noise. Their fears mean nothing. Their desires matter even less.

But the instant her skin met the cards, the strands around Eli trembled.

My attention snapped toward her.

Her head lifted.

Her breath hitched.

Her gaze shifted a fraction toward where I stood, unseen.

Irritation stirred in me.

Mortals do not sense me.

Mortals cannot sense me.

Yet she reacted.

And then, impossibly, her eyes widened.

Not in fear.

In recognition.

She did not merely react to my presence.

She saw me.

Only a flicker, the faint outline of my silhouette, a shadow she was never meant to perceive. No mortal should be able to see even that much.

Yet she did.

I reached for her thread, expecting to sense the watcher assigned to monitor it. Though only I collect the dead, every mortal soul is observed.

There was nothing.

Her thread was unclaimed.

Impossible.

I watched her deal the cards, unaware of how each motion grazed Eli’s thread. She did not understand the forces she touched, yet her actions carried weight no mortal should possess.

When she warned him, the thread bent. It rearranged around her words.

A single mortal shifted the path of death.

Unacceptable.

I left the café before she finished the reading, not because I trusted the anomaly to resolve itself, but because a deeper concern twisted through the system.

A soul without a watcher should not exist.

I moved through the network of threads, searching the ranks assigned to this region. Watchers stood at their posts, each tethered to the lives they monitored. None were negligent. None were absent.

Nora had never been assigned a watcher at all.

Her name did not appear in the registry of souls.

She was not missing.

She had never been entered.

That was worse.

I turned my attention back to Eli. His thread tightened as the moment of impact approached.

Eli should have died minutes later.

I arrived at the collision point. The world dimmed at my presence. Sound fell away. Time thinned like stretched glass. The car spun. Tires screamed. The thread quivered.

And refused to break.

Eli braked early.

He steadied the wheel.

He lived.

I stepped closer, examining the fracture in the path. Her warning pulsed faintly through the thread, an echo of a command she should never have been capable of giving.

No mortal shifts an ending.

I followed the disturbance backward through the vast network of mortal lives until it reached its source.

Nora.

Her thread stood out now, glowing faintly, charged with something foreign to the system I designed.

I reached for it again.

No watcher.

No guide.

No oversight.

The absence remained, confirmed and undeniable.

Her soul had never been placed under supervision.

Only I move without oversight. No mortal should share that distinction.

My jaw tightened. My construct form sharpened, shadows drawing toward me as if pulled by my focus. When I touched her thread, it hummed beneath my hand. Alive and responsive, reaching back when it should not have possessed awareness at all.

And again, she sensed me.

A flicker of instinct.

A tremor across realms.

Recognition trying to surface.

She had seen me once, and her mind remembered the shape even if she could not name it.

I withdrew from her mind. The air around her remained chilled long after I left.

Time drifted strangely around me. Minutes stretched long beneath my presence.

She walked straight home, unaware I still watched.

When she entered her apartment, the air shifted again. Subtle, but unmistakable. The anomaly clung to her like a second pulse.

She sat at her table and whispered her question, shuffling the deck with hesitant hands.

“Did I change anything?”

She drew a single card.

Death.

She placed it to the right of the deck, exactly where she intended it to be.

Then the lights flickered.

Cold swept the room. Her breath fogged in the air. She stiffened, eyes snapping toward the corner as though she sensed a form pressing against the boundary of her world.

Sensing, not seeing.

That moment was enough.

I moved the card.

A simple shift. Silent and precise. Placed in the center of her table, directly in her line of sight.

She turned back and froze.

Her heartbeat leapt. Her fingers curled inward. Confusion tightened every breath as she stared at the card she had not touched.

Only then did I change it.

Ink stirred beneath her gaze.

The word DEATH thinned, dissolved, and vanished. She watched every fragment fade. I shaped new lines with the same precision used when engraving a mortal’s end.

A single word formed.

Nora.

A mark.

A warning.

A declaration.

Her name glowed faintly in the dim light as disbelief washed over her.

I withdrew, leaving her with what she believed she witnessed.

Afterward, I reached for her thread and marked it with a single command.

Observe.

A tether formed. One only I can place.

She now existed under my attention.

I have guided billions of souls without error. Disruption is intolerable. Disorder is impossible. Mortals do not see me. Mortals do not alter death.

Yet Nora had done both.

She altered an ending.

She sensed my presence.

She saw me.

And she existed outside the system entirely.

I stepped back into the vast darkness between realms. My attention lingered not from fascination, but calculation.

I would dismantle this flaw.

I would restore order.

I would learn how she broke the rules so I could prevent it from ever happening again.

Whether she knew it or not,

Nora had been claimed by Death.