Fate observed him from the shadows.

His eyes tracked Heart far beyond the boundaries of mortal sight. From here, everything seemed small, flickering, temporary. Just like them.

He should have left.

He should have turned away the moment the puppets were ash and the balance restored.

I was only supposed to deal with those things and move on. So why am I still here, watching this foolish, fragile human?

He had turned away once, countless times.

Yet, something in the space between one breath and the next held him there, suspended, watching the mortal boy stumble home through streets that smelled of rain and gasoline.

The city’s lights flickered across Heart’s skin like ripples of molten gold as he trotted through the back alleys, the lights of the city blinked dimly across him, a dying constellation beneath the veil of his pocket realm. Fate watched safely suspended in his little pocket between time and place. His vision cut through concrete and distance with ease, following the faint glow of the thread still coiled around Heart’s ankle.

Caring for these fickle, fragile things was exhausting.

A dripping discordance, stirred in Fate’s chest, a sort of faint ache, or irritation, or both it thrummed through him as he turned away, the silence of the pocket pressing close, but the thought lingered like a splinter he could not shake:

Will he be alright?

He exhaled slowly, the air bending faintly around him. The boy had little money, even less sense, and no idea what now hunted at the edges of his life.

Fate told himself it wasn’t his concern but it didn’t help that he didn’t quite believe his own thoughts.

He should have let it be.

But Mara had not stepped into his sight in a long time. Something wasn’t right. So pulling him away was all he could do.

To save Heart… Yet, why must I? Why can I not let you die? So many others must have in the blink of my eye.

He was tired… oh, so tired of watching over a world like this.

It was no longer the world he had once loved.

Once, it had been beautiful, a living thing that breathed between the threads. Now it was a husk, turning endlessly on itself, louder and emptier with every century.

And with every new iteration of these beings he had once been a part of, the thought inside him grew stronger.

It’s fine if it all just rotted to hell.

Die in your twisted dichotomy.

That had been his thought, once upon a time, though how long ago, he couldn’t say. The space he cocooned himself in had no time.

It just was. A stagnant pocket of eternity where the concept of before and after blurred into the same dull ache in his heart

He had grown complacent.

Detached.

Eyes trained only to focus on the threads that floated around him, luminous and ceaseless, their pulses of destiny once something that led him back to the souls he had once been a part of, he could not say when the soul on the other side had vanished for him until all he could see were the red threads, hear their mumbling noise.

But at some point they had, now they could glow, fade, burn, or die—it no longer stirred anything in him.

Their births and endings meant nothing.

The strings that surrounded him. He tilted his head, staring at their undulating forms.

When did you stop meaning something to me other than duty?

He reached out and touched one. It trembled, then melted away from his hand, shrinking from contact.

They had been doing that more and more lately—recoiling from him as if they sensed, the little seed of disgust in his heart, how little he cared.

How he felt at the very sight of them. Somewhere beneath the loathing, something in him mourned that they feared his touch. That he had become so empty with only one thing to tether him.

Duty, it was his own dancing thread.

My void of darkness that had encumbered me, resonated with your agony, with the death that was to for come.

Why?

As if he had no other choice but to obey the grand will of some force beyond him, for the first time in centuries he stepped out of the bubble and onto an earth filled with souls he wasn’t sure he wanted to govern anymore.

Still one string.

All he had to do was check on a child by the name of Kritsana Chitphentom aka Heart.

His foot hesitated only a moment before it touched down into the alleyway about a hundred yards away. Far enough that the child could not see him, but he could observe. A compulsion rose inside him as he watched.

A compulsion to save the little thing.

A nudge inside his soul.

He is important.

He must live.

Why, why is this small thing so integral?

Fate pulled the small bit of thread from his pocket and threw it into the air. It hovered in front of him, and Heart’s entire life up till now flashed before his eyes.

Reviewing the life the kid had already led, he seemed like a sensible guy, if but rather morbidly down on his luck. Still nothing important enough that Mara should single him out and steal his thread from Fate while he was “resting.”

Fate cocked his head to the side.

His gaze lingered on Heart, watching the boy’s lighter flicker weakly against the looming darkness.

So abysmal.

If you die, will all the thousands of breaths he could still breathe impact such change that if you seize to exist tonight the world will change? Do you really matter so?

Yet the compulsion tugged at Fate’s core.

He is important. He must live… it repeated stronger than before, almost a compulsion.

It had been a very long time since he had been compelled to do anything as Fate.

So long, he had forgotten what that little voice from the universe sounded like.

Fate frowned.

The faint hint of something tickled the edge of his othersight.

A redness to his vision.

But it faded away before he could even grasp the feeling. Before he could sense what he was experiencing. It felt both familiar and foreign, before he could trace back what it was.

An awful stench tickled his nose and pulled his gaze away.

Their shattered teeth and dead eyes reeked of death. The black aura was so strong that, though they were only human, they moved like mindless bodies scraping themselves along for their master. Chills crawled up his spine and clutched at his heart like it was trying to pull the very life away, sucking everything into its dank and surly aura.

It was exactly what someone without a string smelled like.

Puppets.

Here.

Mara, you are sending puppets after the boy?

Puppets were people right up until their master pulled on their strings, and then their toll came a calling. Having to be paid, mindless, numbing. Half-dead creatures.

Devoid of life, devoid of hope; they had lost the one thing that tethered them to this world their bodies existing as empty sacks that begged for an end until they were finally given the fractured unyielding to death.

Because they had no connection to the world around them, lost their connection to love.

Or rather, they had sold it.

Sold away or traded more than just their souls.

They had traded away their ability to exist.

Because without a string, you were utterly alone and could not form new connections, your ability burned away and forced to watch as the old connections died until you were utterly alone.

And loneliness was the number one precursor to death.

Which was exactly what Mara wanted.

Death.

After that it was as simple as collecting the threads like a trophy and stealing the lives to fuel himself.

Fate sneered.

A selfish god if there ever was one.

The alley filled with the scrape of footsteps, slow and disjointed, echoing like broken machinery. The puppets emerged from the darkness between himself and Heart, their glassy eyes locking onto the boy.

Heart just stood there, flicking his lighter, grumbling over his thoughts and worries. Oblivious to the harm gurgling towards him.

Fate had no choice. He could only do one thing.

Because he wasn’t Mara.

Because he remembered.

Even though he had just thought they could all die.

Seeing pain and suffering.

Even if he had told himself those words, he could do it… He couldn’t.

Fate’s gaze flicked to the puppets lurked. They moved like broken marionettes, their limbs twisting at unnatural angles, the faint creak of bones echoing with every step. A black aura clung to them, thick and suffocating, as though the air itself recoiled from their presence. The stench of their decayed humanity grew stronger, wrapping around him like a suffocating fog.

Heart stood in the distance.