Chapter One
The doctor's office was unnaturally cold, as if the air conditioning had been set deliberately to the temperature of a morgue.
Aldric sat in the black leather chair, his back straight, his hands resting flat on his knees. His eyes drifted between a framed diploma on the wall and a generic print of a waterfall — a cheap attempt to soothe nerves. Why do doctors always hang waterfalls in their offices? he wondered idly. Do they think the imagined sound of water will wash away the bad news?
The doctor was a man in his late forties, gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. He was holding a pen, but it was perfectly still now. He looked at the medical chart on the desk, then at Aldric, then back at the chart. The hesitation was a language Aldric understood fluently.
"Mr. Aldric..." the doctor began, his voice carefully measured. "The results are definitive."
He paused. Perhaps waiting for a question or a flicker of fear. Neither came. Aldric remained fixed on the canvas waterfall.
"Pancreatic cancer. Stage four."
The doctor looked up, bracing for the impact. He found nothing. Just a pair of calm, grey eyes staring at the wall. He had delivered this news hundreds of times. He had seen tears, he had seen silence, he had seen the eerie calm of shock. This was one of the calms.
He continued, his voice dropping to a softer, clinical register: "Based on the progression, we are looking at a timeline of months. Not years."
A dense silence settled over the room. Aldric blinked once. Slowly. Finally, he opened his mouth.
"Okay."
One word. Dry. Devoid of any tremor.
The doctor's pen hovered over the page. He didn't speak. He just looked at Aldric for a moment longer than necessary, his eyes searching the patient's face. The wall was up. Solid stone. After a decade in oncology, the doctor had learned to recognize the difference between acceptance and nihilism. He wasn't sure which one this was.
"Would you like a referral to a psychiatrist?" the doctor asked quietly. "Some patients find it helpful to process this phase with a specialist."
Aldric almost smiled. Almost. "No," he said. "But I'll take the pain medication."
The doctor nodded slowly and wrote the prescription. Strong opiates. Anti-nausea medication. He tore off the sheet and held it out.
Aldric took the paper. He folded it neatly once and slipped it into the inside pocket of his coat. No need to stumble on the way out.
He stood up, nodded once, and walked out of the room.
The doctor watched the door click shut. He did not call after him. He just sat there for a long moment, the pen still in his hand, looking at the empty chair where the man who didn't care had been sitting.
In the long hallway with its harsh white lighting, Aldric moved slowly. To his right, an elderly woman sobbed into her daughter's arms. "Why me? Why, God?" she wailed. To his left, a janitor pushed a mop across the tiles with a face devoid of expression. Aldric kept walking.
He didn't stop at the trash can. The folded prescription sat in his pocket like a ticket stub to a show he was only half-interested in seeing.
Cassian was waiting in the car outside the main hospital entrance. The engine idled in a low hum, and a light rain traced thin lines down the windshield. Cassian was chewing on the edge of his thumb — an old habit that flared up whenever anxiety gripped him.
Aldric opened the passenger door and slid into the seat in silence. He shut the door, leaned his head back against the headrest, and closed his eyes for a moment.
"What happened, Aldric?" Cassian's voice was hoarse with tension. "You've been quiet as a grave."
Aldric opened his eyes slowly, staring at a large billboard across the parking lot. An ad for cough syrup: a happy family laughing in the sun.
"Nothing," he said finally. "Just a bit of pain. I'll rest soon."
Cassian turned to look at him sharply. He didn't speak. He just studied the side of Aldric's face, searching for the lie he knew was there. Then he let out a long breath and faced the road.
"Alright. If you say so."
Aldric pulled a cigarette from a pack in his coat pocket. He lit it, exhaling a plume of smoke as he stared out at the rain falling harder now.
"The car is new, man!" Cassian muttered. "That smoke is going to stick."
Aldric didn't answer. He inhaled deeply, feeling the warmth fill his weary lungs, and let the smoke drift out slowly.
Then something strange happened.
The smoke coiled before his eyes — not like smoke, but like a thin ribbon of blood dissolving in water. Aldric blinked slowly. And when his eyes opened, his hand — the one holding the cigarette — was smeared with blood.
Thick, warm, viscous blood. It coated his fingers, seeped under his nails, dripped onto his trousers.
He didn't flinch. He didn't scream. He just stared at his hand with a quiet curiosity, like a scientist examining a slide under a microscope.
Then, with a terrifying slowness, he raised his eyes to the side-view mirror.
Someone was sitting in the back seat.
A corpse. A partially decayed face, skin tinged blue, sunken eyes fixed on him. The mouth hung open slightly, trying to form a word — but the decay had stolen its voice. The jaw trembled with effort. The rotten vocal cords scraped against each other in the silence.
And then, the word came. One word. Carried on a breath that smelled of wet earth and iron.
"Hypocrite."
Aldric took another drag of his cigarette. He blew the smoke slowly toward the mirror, watching it wrap around the corpse's face before dissipating.
Then he smiled.
A quiet smile. Not joy. Not sarcasm. Not madness. It was the smile of a man who has finally seen a familiar face in a dark room.
"Aldric?"
Cassian's voice came from very far away. Aldric blinked.
He looked at his hand — it was clean. Pale, bony, trembling slightly from the cold, but spotless. He looked at the rearview mirror — the back seat was empty.
Cassian's knuckles were white on the steering wheel. He hadn't looked directly at Aldric, but his peripheral vision had caught the way Aldric had smiled at an empty mirror. The way a man smiles at an old friend. Cassian's throat tightened. He didn't ask what was wrong. He didn't want to know the answer.
Aldric took a deep breath and stubbed out his cigarette.
"Drive," he said, his voice calm. "Faster."
Cassian pulled the car out into the busy city streets, the rain blurring the red taillights ahead. He drove in silence, gripping the wheel with both hands.
But Aldric was looking out the window, watching the blurred lights and the pedestrians rushing under their umbrellas. Watching life go on, regardless of everything. His eyes were actually fixed on the reflection in the glass.
He could see it clearly, without a shred of doubt. That rotting face in the back seat.
The corpse was smiling at him now, too.
Aldric felt the folded prescription press against his ribs inside his coat. I'll need to fill that tomorrow, he thought. No point in being a martyr before the curtain falls.
It seems my time is coming sooner. They're coming... finally.
What a joy.
And so they drove through the crowded, rain-soaked streets of the city. Cassian drove in silence, the unease coiling in his stomach like a cold snake. And Aldric sat beside him, watching a decayed face in the rearview mirror smiling back at him, thinking of nothing — and everything — at once.
Aldric was the only one who knew that a few months wasn't a deadline.
It was a countdown.