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Immortality is the ultimate end goal, the ultimate reward. I saved a kingdom, along with my group of friends, and one of the rewards was that one of us could become immortal. The leader of our little group decided that I should get the gift of immortality. She called it a gift. She said, “Averill, this is a great gift.”
I was the least likely to abuse this gift, she said, which is why she decided I should have it. I was the emotional heart of the team, the one who kept everyone else from going too far, and thus the least likely to use such a gift maliciously. She kept saying it was a gift.
Her name was Enora Durand.
Her second in command came around to the idea. He was against it at first, but Enora convinced him that I was the best choice. “Only one of us can have this gift,” she said, “and you and I both know you might not be able to control yourself if you couldn’t die.” He agreed, albeit somewhat reluctantly. People don’t like being reminded of their own faults, but he was able to accept Enora’s decision in the end. He didn’t hold it against me.
His name was Marius Kelsey.
The smartest of us never wanted to be immortal. She was bored often enough already, she’d have no idea what to do with unlimited time to live. If she could never die, she would go crazy. At some point, dying would be the only thing left for her to do. She didn’t tell Enora any of this, just agreed when our leader said I should get the gift. She came to me afterward in private and said she was sorry I had to bear this curse.
Her name was Raquelle Bellerose.
The strongest of us was enraged. He wanted the gift of immortality for himself. Enora was eventually able to get him to agree to let me have it, but he was bitter towards me for the rest of his life. His attitude was what drove Enora to let me become immortal, because she knew if none of us did, he would try everything to get the gift for himself. He would wreak havoc with it, and eventually we wouldn’t be around to stop him.
His name was Killian Blackburn.
When I first became immortal, I was ecstatic. I could help so many people, and oversee the rebuilding of the evil empire we’d defeated, which was called Damerel. Enora took over leadership of the empire, and under her guidance it entered an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. Marius was by her side the whole time. I oversaw negotiations between different groups, and the settlement of disputes that could turn violent. Raquelle became a renowned inventor, and used her prodigious intelligence to create inventions that improved the lives of thousands of people. Killian put his aggression and strength to good use and joined the ranks of Damerel’s military.
Everyone moved on with their lives. Enora and Marius got married and had first a daughter, then a son. Raquelle lived just outside Iyesgarth, the capital of Damerel, in a mansion filled with her own inventions. Killian shot through the ranks of the military. I turned my home into an orphanage and took care of the many children who found their way to my doorstep. My immortality was still a gift.
Enora was the first to die. An infection ravaged her body and killed her in a matter of hours. All of Damerel mourned her death. Marius took over the running of the empire with his children by his side. Raquelle closed herself off from everyone but me, and lamented that she hadn’t been able to save Enora’s life. She holed herself up in her mansion and rarely left for anything. Killian went into a rage, and got himself discharged from the military. He spent his days in the various pubs of Iyesgarth, getting into fights and passing out in the streets. That was the first time I realized I would outlive them all. My immortality was still a gift, but I was less enthusiastic about having it.
Killian was the second to go. Alcohol poisoning is what did him in, in combination with the fights he got into seemingly every other day. He died in a back alley, just keeled over one day after having far too much to drink and didn’t get up. His funeral was much less grand than Enora’s had been, but his loss was still felt by many people. Marius was there with his then-teenaged children, and Raquelle left her house for the fourth time since Enora’s passing to attend. I was there too. However rocky my relationship with Killian had been, I was still sad to see him go. The knowledge that I would outlive everyone weighed on me more with each passing day, but I was still determined to use my immortality to do good in ways no one else could. I still saw a silver lining in outliving everyone I knew and loved.
Marius died third, succumbing to a heart attack in his sleep. He lived to an old age, and his children, fully grown adults by that point, oversaw his funeral. Raquelle and I attended, and it was an affair nearly as grand as Enora’s. Per his request, his body was placed in the same coffin as his wife. His daughter and her family took over the running of the country, much to his son’s chagrin. It was at this point that Raquelle and I realized we only had each other left. We both knew that one day she would die too, and I would truly be alone.
Raquelle lived for far longer than a normal human. She used her genius to extend her lifespan as much as she could in order to stay with me, but eventually she succumbed to cancer. She was my closest friend, and I felt her loss most deeply. Her funeral was the smallest of our group, since she had hidden away for so long and entire generations had been born and died during her life, but her contributions to the country did not go unrecognized. Enora’s grandson, now the ruler of Damerel, oversaw the funeral. I mourned Raquelle longer than anyone, and I still carry her loss with me to this day.
The day Raquelle died was the day I became well and truly alone. I still had the orphanage, sure, but there were fewer orphans than in the beginning. That was definitely a good thing, but it did mean I had more free time that I was beginning to run out of things to do with and motivation to do things with. Neither Raquelle nor I ever had any kids, and Killian probably had several but no idea who any of them were. Enora and Marius’s bloodline continued, with their descendants ruling Damerel, but over time they became corrupt. They forgot what their ancestors fought for, and forgot why they bothered to be good rulers at all. After a falling-out I had with Enora and Marius’s great-granddaughter, I slowly drifted away from the family and became a stranger to them.
I became isolated from the rest of the kingdom, and the people outside the capital slowly forgot I existed as anything but an urban legend. I was a myth, a story, one of the heroes of old, but I wasn’t real to them anymore. No one outside Iyesgarth had seen me since Raquelle’s funeral, and even then it had only been a few people, so the perception of me as a living person faded out of public awareness. To the people in Iyesgarth, I was a living legend. The children in the orphanage constantly asked me to tell them stories of the journey and our conquest of Damerel, and I obliged, though over the decades and centuries the stories became more varied as I forgot the details of some of them, and some became too painful to recall once everyone I had journeyed with was gone. I visited Raquelle’s mansion at least once almost every day, and wandered the maze of corridors and rooms alone. That was how I stayed close to her, in addition to visiting everyone’s graves at least once a week. Those visits were the only times I left my mansion.
Enora and Marius’s great-granddaughter was not a popular ruler, and eventually there were uprisings against her cruelty. She died during the first uprisings and her son took her place, but he wasn’t any better than his mother. The uprisings against him and his family continued, and some people got the idea to come to me for help. I was a living legend, so surely I would aid the people in their time of need. I was still the hero of the people, so I helped them the first time. And the second, and the third. By the time I had been asked to overthrow a fourth monarchy, I was well over a thousand years old, and I had grown weary. I knew that no matter how many times I defeated corrupt leaders, the change wouldn’t last, and what’s worse, the people would become dependent on me as their savior. I would become the hero of all rioters, even those whose goals I opposed. People would come to see my support of the rioters as an endorsement of violence. I stopped responding to calls for help the fourth time I was asked, and simply ran my orphanage. The most I would do, I said when asked, was take care of the children who were left parentless by the riots and the bloodshed. I would not get involved. It was pointless, and even dangerous to do so.
The orphanage was the only thing I had left after that. By refusing to aid the rioters, I had given up my status as a hero in the eyes of the people. The fifth time riots broke out in the streets, they were against me. Some people argued that I was no better than the corrupt monarchies I had once helped overthrow now that I refused to do so anymore. They were angry, and saw my refusal to fight as me taking the opposite side. I was an enemy now. I could no longer visit the graves of my friends, as the cemetery was in Iyesgarth and if I dared to show my face in the city I would be heckled and attacked. I also feared someone would come after my home and the orphanage if I wasn’t there to protect them, so I stopped visiting Raquelle’s mansion. I was more alone than ever. The only interaction with others I had was with the children in the orphanage, and I never let myself get too close to them because eventually they would all have to leave. Children stopped coming to the orphanage as whispered rumors of how I would abuse them or raise them to be corrupt tyrants circulated through the streets.
These stories sparked outrage in people who already hated me, and compelled them to take drastic action against me. They wanted to save the children still in my grasp, and they attacked my orphanage. The attack came in the dead of night. I was awoken by the acrid smell of smoke, and rushed to the children’s sleeping quarters to get them out of the house only to find the rooms deserted. They were all gone, stolen away while they slept so they wouldn’t scream or cry and alert me. The people who had done this then set fire to the house, hoping to trap me inside and kill me. I supposed they had forgotten that I was immortal, or maybe they only wanted to send me a message. Maybe by burning my house, they wanted to force me to flee and never return. Whatever the case, I raced back to my room to grab the few possessions I still valued before running out of the house and fleeing into the night. I took one last look at the building that had been my home for more than a millennia, and I felt tears stream down my face.
I lived in Raquelle’s mansion after that, and I never left it. I didn’t need to eat or drink, so I was never forced to leave in search of food or water. Even if I had, or on the rare occasions that I wanted to eat something, there were greenhouses attached to the building that were full to bursting with every imaginable type of crop. I would simply gather the ingredients and make the dish myself. Every day I walked the halls of the mansion as I had done before the riots against me, simply because I had nothing else to do. I was completely and utterly alone now, and everything seemed to remind me of it. I was enveloped in a sense of all-encompassing numbness, feeling nothing except yearning for the only things beyond my reach. I spent a lot of time crying, and a lot of time unable to cry because I had shut off my emotions.
Of the few possessions I had taken with me, most were reminders of my friends. A golden locket from Enora which contained a picture of us right after the end of our journey, a silver dagger that Killian had once saved my life with and which he later taught me to use, a small leather-bound notebook from Marius where he’d drawn images of all of us throughout and after our journey, and a pouch of marbles Raquelle had always played with to calm herself down when everything became too much. I took the utmost care of all of them, as they were my last connections to times and people long gone.
I developed a routine to help speed up the monotony of living alone, and to have something to do. I looked over the relics of my friends first, and made sure they were in perfect condition, then I went to the greenhouses and tended to the plants. That would take up the morning. In the afternoon I would wander the halls, looking at Raquelle’s inventions that still filled the house and trying some of them out. Once I had wandered the entire house, I would return to the room I was using and look over the relics again before taking a shower and going to sleep. I didn’t sleep in Raquelle’s room, but rather the room right next to hers. Some days I would finish my wandering well before the sun went down, and on those days I would stand in the middle of her room and cry.
After enough centuries had passed, I probably could have returned to Iyesgarth, but there was nothing for me there. I had no motivation to rebuild the life I’d had. It would inevitably be destroyed again anyway, when my refusal to support an uprising would be taken as a sign of aggression or a paranoid ruler decided I was too powerful and could easily become a threat to their rule.
I lost any and all sense of morality I still had. Human concepts of right and wrong are fundamentally based on the need for the approval of others, and I had no one to seek the approval of. It’s not like I cared what anyone thought of me by the fourth riots anyway, but now I had absolutely no feedback from anyone and there was no pressure on me to go with the flow and do what was ‘right’. I wasn’t even sure I counted as human anymore, so why should the rules of humanity apply to me? I didn’t become destructive, burning things left and right just to watch them be destroyed, but I did change. Boredom and isolation combined to form a powerful and all-consuming numbness that I tried desperately to escape. There was no reason for me to live anymore, nothing attaching me to the world, but I couldn’t die. I could still feel pain, but it would never last, and no matter how badly I was injured, I would never die. I knew that turning to pain to escape numbness was a dangerous way of thinking and coping, and I knew that my friends wouldn’t want that. That knowledge could only hold me back for so long, however, and before I knew it my body was covered in cuts. I learned exactly how long it took my body to heal from every type of injury I could inflict upon it, and I used this knowledge to inflict as much pain as I could onto myself.
Eventually, even that couldn’t stave off the numbness, and I did everything in my power to die. I wanted nothing more than to cease existing. Nothing could chase the numbness away for long enough, it was always back in what felt like the blink of an eye. I lost all sense of the passage of time, and measuring it became meaningless.
At some point I started refusing to live in the present. I relived the past and I made up new stories to distract myself from my existence. Those helped, but I eventually ran out of ideas. The stories started repeating and becoming too similar to ones I had already written down, and they lost their appeal. I tried to live some of them day to day and let them continue on forever, but my characters had to die eventually and I ran into the same problems in fantasy that I was trying to escape in reality. I made immortal characters to combat this, even pretending that my friends were immortal, and I talked to them and lived out their stories with them as best I could, but when I didn’t know where to take the stories next, I would be consumed by the swirling vortex of boredom and loneliness once more. I could never truly escape it, and one day I resigned myself to that fact.
Raquelle once told me that my immortality would be a curse. I understand now why she said that. She recognized what the rest of us were too short-sighted and high on our victory to comprehend. Immortality is a curse without someone to share it with. It is one of the most terrible things that can happen to someone, and it can make the best of humanity crumble under its weight. It is the cruelest curse that can befall someone, and it forces those with it into a never-ending state of loneliness, boredom, and despair. In all the stories, immortality is a gift. It’s the end goal, the big reward. Those stories end with happily ever after. Mine will never end. I will continue to exist forever, something no human could ever truly comprehend. Immortality wasn’t a reward or gift, it was a curse, and I had made the sacrifice of bearing it so others wouldn’t have to and so it could not fall into the hands of someone who would abuse it. I am doomed to be separate from the rest of the world, trapped and isolated, forever.