Vignettes from the Battle for Tymbren: Discretion

The enemies parted before him like a stream around a boulder, but to any outsider he would have seemed entirely out of place on the battlefield. Little was remarkable about him. From the old cloak slung around his shoulders, to the set of his face. If not for the fact that he was so calmly walking through the battle for the fate of the world wearing a silver circlet around his head, one might have easily mistaken him for a beggar in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Before him, a single needle, gold-and-silver, hovered parallel to the ground. It led him through the ranks of the enemy, pointing at one tall Galbadian who did not shrink away from him like the others.
He stopped, eyes briefly shining gold-and-silver as he faced the Galbadian.
***
He was Razgal, runt of his creché. While the others displayed their adequacy and moved on to be trained under the old masters, year after year he was held behind. The raw strength of his psionic faculties was pathetic, and he lacked the skills to make up for his shortcomings. With little worth to the Apparatus, he was sure to be discarded. Turned into one of those hulking mindless brutes.
He refused that fate. He struggled against it with every fibre of his being. Even as he was being strapped in for the procedure, he railed against destiny and refused to surrender. That was when she came and made him an offer he had no desire to refuse.
In his darkest hour, Razgal seized the strand of his own fate and, seeing what lay ahead in his future, he forcefully set it on another path. Saved from certain death, he did not stop. Once he had a hold of his thread, he refused to let go, using it to gain influence and power that he could have only dreamed of before.
***
The man had seen enough. Reaching up, he plucked Razgal's thread out of the aether. He seized control of it, wrenching it out of the Galbadian's grasp. The presumptuousness of it all, of changing fate for the sake of power, irked him greatly.
What he did, as he forced the thread back into its proper place, was surely the province of the gods. And yet, here he was, watching impassively as Razgal's war decorations faded one by one as he restored the natural flow of destiny.
He couldn't help but wonder what it was that separated gods and men, if it wasn't the powers that they wielded.
Razgal sank to his knees, clutching his temples. The psionic power he'd built up over the years as he twisted and tangled and knotted his thread whipped loose in powerful waves of telepathic backlash, toppling hundreds of troops around him.
When the cloaked man was done, Razgal was dry-heaving on the ground, every bit as weak as he had been the moment he accepted Valendis' honeyed lies.
The man brushed his fingers along the hundreds of threads that had been tangled with Razgal's in the process of restoring it to its proper place. As he touched each one, he saw the life that it contained.
To a god, they were all guilty of tampering with the weave. To a man, some were innocent, averting only the tragedies that would have struck the people they loved.
That was the answer, the man supposed. Discretion was the difference between a man and a god.
He raised his gold-and-silver dagger, cutting through Razgal's thread and all the others tangled with it in one smooth stroke. The Galbadian in front of him, as well as the hundreds in the unit that surrounded him, all turned to gold-and-silver threads and faded to nothing. Innocent or not, they had all perverted the course of fate.
Perhaps things would have been different, had Saa Osiros' parents not died in battle against the Necromancer.
Discretion was what made a man different from a god, but the man he had been was now buried in an unmarked grave beside the Osiroses, high amongst the peaks of the Skywall.