The Immortal

The first thing he ever remembered was fire.

It wasn’t the warmth of a hearth or the gentle flicker of a candle. No, it was the roar of flames consuming a city—his city. Stone crumbled under the heat, screams echoed like a broken chorus, and he stood in the center, untouched, unburned, staring into the heart of destruction. That night, he discovered he couldn’t die.

He didn’t know his name then. He would go by many through the ages: Kael, Idran, Marcus, Elias. But none were truly his. Names were temporary things, like the people who gave them.

At first, he believed it was a gift. Time became his companion. He watched empires rise and fall, walked among pharaohs and peasants, kings and revolutionaries. He learned languages that no longer existed, crafted music that was never recorded, and painted sunsets over battlefields and temples. Every century added a new layer to his mind, until memories stacked like books in a library too vast to ever be catalogued.

But the weight grew.

He remembered every friend he'd lost. Every lover aged while he stayed young. He had buried too many. Eventually, he stopped connecting. The pain of goodbye was too cruel, too inevitable.

He tried dying, more times than he could count. Sword, poison, fire, ice. Nature and man alike failed to claim him. He didn’t scar. He didn’t age. He simply continued. Alone.

One winter, in the shadowed ruins of a forgotten monastery in the Carpathians, he met someone who changed everything.

Her name was Alina. She was quiet, thoughtful, and saw things few others did. When he wandered into the village at the base of the mountain, wearing tattered clothes and eyes full of centuries, she offered him bread and shelter. She didn’t ask questions he didn’t want to answer.

Over time, he told her pieces of his truth. Not all—just enough. She didn’t call him mad. She listened. And in the flicker of candlelight, she smiled with a sadness that mirrored his own.

"You’re not cursed," she whispered one evening. "You’re chosen. But maybe not for the reason you think."

That night, he dreamed for the first time in decades. Not of war or fire or death, but of peace.

She was dying by spring. A sickness of the blood. Something silent and slow. He offered to take her somewhere—anywhere in the world, to find help. But she refused.

“I’ve seen what you carry,” she said, reaching out with thin fingers. “You’re not meant to live forever alone. You’re meant to witness, to remember… and to tell.”

Her last words etched into his soul like carvings in stone: "Don’t just endure. Live."

For the first time in centuries, he wept.

He left the village after her funeral, carrying only a small journal she had kept—a collection of thoughts, sketches, and pressed flowers. He read it cover to cover, over and over, in every corner of the world.

And then he began to write.

He started small. Anonymous articles. Short stories. Legends based on truths no one else remembered. He published under pseudonyms, built libraries of tales hidden in plain sight. People read them, not knowing they came from the lips of someone who had lived the stories.

In 1983, he met a young woman named Mara in Buenos Aires. She was a journalist, hungry for stories that mattered. He gave her one—a tale about a forgotten rebellion in a corner of the world no longer on modern maps. She fact-checked everything. She found no lies. When she asked how he knew so much, he simply said, "I was there."

She laughed, then stopped. “You believe that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

And somehow, that answer was enough.

They became partners. She brought light to hidden corners. He gave her knowledge only time could grant. Together, they uncovered truths buried by power, by fear, by the erosion of memory.

He told her once, in the middle of a desert, “If I ever disappear, don’t look for me. But don’t forget me either.”

She smiled, sun in her eyes. “That’s all any of us want, isn’t it? To be remembered.”

The world turned. Technology bloomed. He watched humanity stretch toward the stars, while still warring with itself on the ground. Yet something had changed. He had changed. He was no longer just surviving.

He was living.

Every decade brought someone new. A student who rediscovered ancient glyphs he'd carved centuries before. A child in Mumbai who claimed to dream of places she’d never seen—places he once called home. An old man in Kyoto who asked him, in perfect Akkadian, “Have you forgiven the gods yet?”

He never answered that question. Perhaps he never would.

Then, one day in 2025, he stood on a rooftop in Istanbul, looking over a city that wore its history like a layered robe. Minarets and satellites. Markets and skyscrapers. It was beautiful in its contradictions.

Beside him stood a girl no older than ten, holding a notebook.

“You’re the man who remembers,” she said, not asking, just stating.

“Who told you that?”

“My dreams,” she said. “And the stars.”

He knelt beside her. “What do you remember?”

“Fire,” she said. “A city burning. But I wasn’t afraid.”

He froze.

“Did you know,” she continued, “that not all immortals are alone?”

He looked at her, really looked, and saw something ancient in her gaze. Not ageless, like his own reflection, but deep. A soul that had traveled far.

In her, he saw the beginning of something new.

Maybe he wasn’t the only one.

For the first time in a thousand years, he smiled without sorrow.