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"You'll have a unique experience with time," Jour Thames once told her son.
Cale, that son, was only a child, and understood little of what his mother said, but loved her fiercely. So he responded as he usually would, flashing her a bright grin featuring several missing teeth. "Okay, Mama."
And then Jour sang him a lullaby, and he fell asleep and that conversation, along with many others, was forgotten.
Eventually, Jour died, and no one remained who'd overheard her warning. It faded, potentially permanently, from Cale's memory as he grew. The Henituse family, shrunk down to two with Jour's passing, became four, and then five. Cale changed, and grew.
The Henituse shrunk back down to one.
Twenty years passed, after then, in a haze of violence and blood and loss. Cale, caught up in all of it, had little time to reminisce on the strange mother he barely knew. Even when he did, that conversation was one of many he still had no context for, and thus remained buried deep in the part of his mind he could not reach.
The White Star, grin as bloody and violent as those twenty years of war, told Jour Thames's son as he killed him, that he had such a unique experience of time. It was then, burning as though tied to a funeral pyre, that Cale recalled his mother's warning from so very long ago, and he wondered: what experience could he have, with so little time left?
The Henituse shrunk down to none.
Cale blinks awake to a figure looming over him, shrouded in darkness.
Not the best way to wake up, but the last thing Cale remembers is being burned alive. Waking up at all is nothing short of a miracle. A miracle he quickly realizes is impossible as he takes in the shadow-bound figure: finery that's not available in any land the White Star has touched is draped over a man that's more bone and exposed muscle than skin; his face, though complete, leaves the lasting impression of a skull in Cale's mind.
He knows instinctively, despite his lifetime's worth of pointed atheism, that this is Death looming over him.
How disappointing, is all he can think, apathetically. My life ends and all I'm afforded is a greeting from this loser.
Perhaps he'd hoped, without realizing, that his family would be here. His mother—both of them, the one he'd been born to and the one he'd never acknowledged aloud as such—Father, Lily, and Basen.
All that waits around him is the void. Is this his eternal punishment, for the endless blood that stains his hands? An unending existence of nothing? That does sound like hell.
Death laughs in his face, a reserved chuckle. "I'm almost offended, child. Most who greet me in these clothes are comforted by the familiarity, but that doesn't seem to be your case."
Death itself makes a habit of greeting Roan nobility in the clothes they're familiar with? It's almost a comforting thought. Maybe Eric opened his eyes to something he could find camaraderie in.
Mostly, it leaves Cale feeling more isolated. He glances again around himself at the void, as though hoping his long-dead loved ones will emerge from the endless black.
"Is this my afterlife?" Cale asks dully, voice drained. "I hadn't imagined I'd receive one at all, though this is probably as close to a non-existence as I could get..." No one. He spent his whole miserable adulthood without his family, and his whole miserable death will be just the same.
This time, he won't even have Hans by his side to tolerate his pathetic dependency. How pitiful.
"No, no," Death dismisses, and Cale feels something he vaguely recognizes as relief. "This is merely a... waiting room. Lots of souls pass through here quickly, but you..."
...?
Cale's not special. He never was; an average child, and an average noble, and an average soldier until his untimely end, a meat shield as many others had become to thrust the hero Choi Han to victory.
Ah, Cale's death. What was it the White Star had said? It'd reminded Cale of something, so very briefly before his brain melted out of his ears. What—?
"You... you have a peculiar experience with time."
"Cale, dear. Come sit, and listen carefully. Remember this: You'll have a unique experience with time."
Huh. Is this that experience? This unusually long tenure in purgatory?
"Cale, come sit," Death beckons, and Cale has nothing to do but obey. Why while away his stay in hell doing nothing? "You've lived a difficult life."
Cale wants to laugh at the sentiment, but he's lacking the energy. "Everyone has."
Death nods understandingly, and Cale feels like a child venting frustrations of a playmate's stubbornness to a nanny. It's not condescending, but this existence carries with it the mark of many wars harder and bloodier than the battles Cale has fought. Death itself must feel very little in the face of what, to Cale, has been an enormous amount of loss. "When you were a child," Death continues, a seemingly abrupt change of topic. "Your mother warned you of something very few mortals could have deduced. Do you remember her warning?"
Death asks like he already knows the answer, and Cale feels it's useless to lie. "That I'd have a peculiar experience with time. She was very insistent of that." He wants to ask more, but that skeleton-face is gaunt and distant now, as though staring into a future only something like Death could foresee. Cale finds himself uninterested.
"I wish there was a more delicate way to inform you that I'll be the cause of that." Cale stiffens. Will be. Is Death keeping him here, away from all the dead he'd been so ready to see? To what end? Why Cale? How did his mother—and the White Star, who share no connection but their red hair—know? "Matters like these are delicate, and I cannot exert my influence directly, but the world has overbalanced. Cale Barrow—the White Star, you know him as—brings too many souls to me. My influence is stretching thin."
Too much death? How is it possible? And—Cale Barrow. How strange to be able to assign a name to the monster that reaped so many lives. And what a coincidence, terrible coincidence, that he shares both a name and most of a face with Cale.
"The Ancient Times had much the same problem, and came to an end through the sponsorship of mortals by contributing gods. I was too weak, at the time, to help. The time has come that my debt from then is to be repaid, and so I... ask you to become my champion, Cale Henituse. I ask you to return and set the world back in balance, because this deal will not work with only my agreement."
What?
What?
What kind of elaborate afterlife prank—
"Why me?" Cale asks, instead of the thousand other accusations rolling around his head.
Death just smiles, and pats a skinless hand on his head. Cale shudders at the feeling that shoots down his spine with the contact. "All in time, child. All in time."
"I don't care about time," Cale snaps, a scowl finally shattering through his protective wall of apathy. "Explain it now! Why not play with Choi Han's time, huh? The hero is more useful than a former lout of a destroyed county! Or, better yet, why are you so sure I'll do anything at all? You aren't allowed to interfere directly, so what's to prevent me from simply drinking away my life again?"
It's not wise at all to spite a god, to tempt its wrath, but Cale doesn't care. He rose from a footsoldier to a Captain to something General-adjacent, by the time the army had collapsed and rank mattered little when the few fighters left were simply focused on living to see the next day. Despite it all, his life had ended as a meaningless pawn's, mere bait to distract the White Star for a moment long enough for Choi Han to deal a blow. A single blow, not even a defining or ending wound.
A meat shield that failed to even secure victory.
He's tired. Tired of fighting, and surviving just barely, and waiting. Cale is so dearly tired of the waiting. He's exhausted of being used as a fucking pawn.
"I know your soul, child, and your spirit. I've watched you for a long time." Cale wants to roll his eyes. That's not creepy at all. "You'll do what you can, no matter the detriment to yourself. That is why I ask this of you, as much as it pains me; aside, Choi Han is beyond the domain of my influence."
"That's not true," Cale denies, despite knowing it's fruitless. "I won't agree, and this has to be a two-sided deal. I refuse! Find another poor dead bastard and let me rest in peace!"
That same chilling, bony hand lands on his head again. Cale doesn't shudder this time, slumping under it. "Even for the sake of protecting the Henituse?"
He jolts up. "...What?"
Death's face twitches into an expression Cale interprets to be a smile. "I do not expect to simply return you to the war and have things fixed. I'll give you time, child. Simply tell me, to when do you wish to return? That choice acts as your agreement."
Cale could return to being seven. He could save Mom. Jour.
And then what? No Violan, no Basen, no little baby Lily? Can Cale really take the chance of none of them coming into his life, of Lily not existing at all, even if it is for the sake of his mother's life?
Cale had known Mom for seven years, and grieved her for almost forty. He's loved Lily from the time she was born to the time she was fifteen and far too cocky, too young for the battle she entered and never left. He basically raised her, once the county fell. Could he really measure one life against the other?
"Tell me one thing, before I go," he says instead, voice hushed and close to breaking. "What really happened in Harris Village, that caused my mother's death? Why does Cale Barrow have her eyes?"
Cale wakes up, and he visits a red, red tree.