Tongue of Mirror

He lived without end, and eternity was no gift. It was a sentence one that dragged him across centuries, forcing him to watch the world rise, crumble, and rise again, while he remained unchanged.

At first, he wandered through cities vibrant with laughter, the air rich with the scent of bread and wine. Children chased one another through cobbled streets, merchants shouted their wares, and fires glowed warm in every heart. He walked among them, unseen, untouched, a phantom wearing flesh. Then, as decades passed, those same cities rotted. Roofs sagged, streets cracked, ivy swallowed the homes of men who had long since become dust. He stood among the ruins, the silence heavier than the laughter he still remembered.

Forests too changed before his eyes. Where once tall oaks stretched toward the heavens, storms splintered them into stumps, and moss crept like a slow disease over fallen trunks. Fields that once bloomed with gold wheat became deserts of ash. Seasons revolved, relentless in their rhythm, yet he could not join their dance. Spring carried no renewal for him; winter brought no rest.

And the stars how they betrayed him most of all. He lay beneath them countless nights, staring until his vision blurred, whispering to the constellations for mercy. Yet even they shifted over time, their ancient patterns scattering, old stars dying, new ones flaring into existence. The heavens themselves changed, while he remained fixed, a stone in the current of an endless river.

Every seventh year, without fail, the mirror returned.

It would appear in a ruin, in a forest, in the dust of forgotten temples. It cared nothing for setting. Always gleaming, untouched by decay, it called to him.

And when he looked inside, he saw the cruelest truth: his reflection bore none of the weight he carried. The face in the glass was calm, almost serene, unscarred by centuries of grief. Sometimes it smiled faintly, as though it knew something he did not. Sometimes it whispered in a voice like his own, yet softer, sharper, laced with certainty:

"Perhaps you are only my dream. Perhaps I am the one who lives."

The words broke him more than the ruins of empires, more than the silence of forests turned to dust. He began to doubt the ground beneath his feet. Was he the shadow, and the reflection the true man? Or had he become so lost within this myriad of time that he suddenly seized to be ?

Time wore him thin. Madness seeped into the cracks of his being. He stopped counting the years, for numbers mocked him. He stopped praying, for heaven was as deaf as the stones. He forgot his own name, for names belonged to those who could die.

And yet unending, the world continued it's circus of events around him. New cities rose where ruins had crumbled. He watched iron towers pierce the skies, only to collapse into smoke and silence centuries later. He stood on cliffs where oceans had devoured entire kingdoms, their bones hidden beneath restless waves. He walked through wastelands where nothing grew, the air thick with ash, only to see green push through once more, as if mocking his stagnation.

But through it all, one thing endured as he did: the mirror. It was his curse, his confessor, his judge. The only constant in an existence that refused him an ending. And each encounter with it left him more hollow, more afraid—not of death, but of something far worse.

He had been denied the final mercy of ending. Denied the soft silence that took all others. And in that denial, he came to learn a terror beyond comprehension.

For what is a man, when centuries strip him of memory, of purpose, of self yet still force him to stand?

What is left to fear, when not even death will come?

For the terror of life surpassed the forces of death itself.

And so it was written upon his soul, carved deeper than bone

BORN FROM DEATH YET NEVER KNOWING DEATH THEMSELVES, THEY LEARNED A FEAR GREATER THAN DEATH.