The Weight of Forever

The first time Isla rode the elevator up through the clouds she forgot to breathe.

Below her, the city flickered, old neon signs, expansive holographic ads begging for attention as they fought the ever-present rain and hazy smog that covered the city in perpetual dusk. The higher the elevator rose, the less Isla could smell the rust, the carbon.

The elevator climbed higher, past the towers with mirrored skin, past the glimmering drones making non-stop deliveries, past the horns and the hawkers and the synthetic murmur of a world that couldn’t sit still. As the small glass box sliced through the mist like a knife through silk, she began to feel anxious. It wasn’t until she looked out over the unmarred sky that she realized why.

It was the silence.

The bright, clear sunlight, the endless immaculate space.

The sky was a soft, empty blue, a color she had never seen before from the streets.

The agency called this a “high-clearance placement.” Legacy Tier. Confidential client that would compensate well as long she did her job, remembered her place, and stayed unnoticed. Isla called it her last shot. Everything on the surface was cramped, crowded, and didn’t pay enough for her to afford anything.

Her last job phased out when the downtown café replaced all staff with robotic servers. Her bank account overdrawn. She’d cried in the bathroom of the staffing agency when the placement call came through. The kind of cry you don’t talk about.

And so, she did her job with the fervency of the desperate, and was amazed at the luxury that surrounded her. The sterile thrum of wealth that was so immense it had forgotten the need to announce itself.

She moved like breath through the rooms, quiet and invisible, adjusting cushions that no one sat on, sweeping spotless floors that never saw dirt. Wiping down counters that had never known hunger.

Weeks went by before she met Jonathan Soren, the man that walked through these opulent halls.

He was always impeccably dressed. Pale shirts, tailored jackets, gorgeous cufflinks that caught the light and shimmered like water.

He was quiet, contemplative. She told herself not to look too long. Not to wonder.

But she did.

Not because he was kind. Not because he was cruel. But because he didn’t feel real.

Because sometimes, the way he looked at the sky made her think he’d forgotten how to belong to the earth.

On the few occasions their paths crossed, he nodded, once. A tilt of the head, not impolite, but distant in a way that made the word "lonely" feel too small.

Isla had been tending to Soren’s home for two months on the day she noticed the painting.

She had walked past it innumerable times, swept and mopped the floors beneath it over and over again, somehow missing it every time amidst the opulence of the suite.

But that morning, something made her stop.

A rare shaft of sunlight had slipped through the living room’s smart glass and landed, almost deliberately, on the painting.

Isla tilted her head and looked.

It was oil. Large. Unframed. The canvas edges rough and uneven. The colors warm but muted, layers of ochre and violet swallowed by smoke and time.

She stepped closer.

A man was crumbling to ash. Hands outstretched, reaching for a woman cloaked in gold, the space between them open like a fatal wound.

The man’s body was skeletal and soft in places, disintegrating into flecks, not dramatically, but gently, like wind through brittle leaves.

The woman watched with helpless sorrow. Her face was turned toward him, her hands unmoving. The moment frozen between grief and release.

Something in it hurt.

“Do you like it?” A deep voice asked from behind.

“Oh, I… excuse me.” She said, ducking her head down, rushing to leave the room, to blend in with the furniture.

“Stop…” he said, almost pleading. “I… You were admiring it. I’d… like to know what your thoughts are.”

There was something in his voice, in the way his gaze held her. He wanted honesty, a true appraisal.

“It’s lovely,” she said. “It reminds me of Escher Wolfe, the blurred edges, the way he made everything feel as though it was fading.”

“He learned that from me.”

She laughed, but something in the way he said it. So matter of fact. “You’re joking. Escher Wolfe has been dead for over a century.”

“One hundred and twenty-three years.” He said. “He was an incredible student, he surpassed me in every conceivable way. But this one, I painted this one for him.” It wasn’t said with pride, just… a statement of fact.

Suddenly, the realization swept over her. Soren wasn’t just wealthy. He was one of them.

One of the immortals.

The uber-elite, the ultra-rich, one powerful enough to afford Revantis, the world-altering life extension drug.

Revantis had been developed 300 years ago. It was touted as a breakthrough treatment to end worldwide suffering. Though, like every medical miracle, it came with a cost.

This one, astronomical.

The medication wasn’t sold. Not legally. Not prescribed in hospitals or peddled on neon-lit corners. It was granted, licensed through a global board with no transparency, reserved for the ultra-elite. Those with enough influence to matter. Those whose deaths, if they ever occurred, would inconvenience the world’s machinery.

One dose could fund a country for a decade.

The first generations who received it didn’t die. They simply… continued. They consolidated.

Wealth, power, land, labor.

Social structures ossified. The rich didn’t just get richer. They got older. And older….And older. While the average man drowned in smog below the clouds, building resentment for the social elites.

Isla stared at him, trying to fit the man she’d cleaned up after, the man who folded his hands while he read in the sun, into the myth she’d grown up hating.

He wasn’t supposed to look tired.

He wasn’t supposed to look… sad.

“Why are you telling me this?” She asked

“I’ve had this painting for a century. Do you know how many people have been to my home, that walk right by it? You’re the first in over a hundred years to take the time to experience it.”

He moved toward the floor-to-ceiling windows. Sunlight caught in the fine lines around his eyes. Lines that had stopped aging long ago.

"I took my first dose of Revantis when I was twenty-eight," he said. "I had nothing. I was starving. I’d stolen shoes to get to the interview that led me to the man who offered it." He paused. "He said I was promising. Wanted to see what I’d build, given enough time."

Isla said nothing, but focused on the pain breaking through Soren’s words. "And I did build. At first." He touched the glass. "Companies. Movements. Fortunes. It was easy to think I was still like everyone else. Just… faster. Wiser. Better prepared."

He turned to her again. "But the truth is, immortality doesn’t make you wise. It just makes you... bored. You start thinking you’ll get to everything eventually. And then you stop trying altogether."

Isla’s fists began to clench. She stood very still, afraid that if she moved, the moment might break apart. "It’s not fair," she said softly.

Soren tilted his head, not unkindly. "No. It’s not.” He took a beat and continued. "Do you know what happens when the same people own the same wealth for centuries? The world stops moving. Revantis didn’t just break death," he said. "It broke history. It broke the cycle. It broke hope.”

She looked down at her hands, the worn skin of her knuckles, the faint scars from years of invisible work. "We try so hard," she murmured. "People like me. We work. We push. We reach for things we know we’ll never touch."

When she glanced up, he was watching her with an intensity that made her want to look away—and not.

"That’s why I noticed you," Soren said. "You see things. You care." His voice was quiet, almost reverent. "You remind me of who I used to be." He stood slowly, and motioned for her to follow him. "I’d like to show you something."

He led her into a room she had never cleaned. A private lounge where the furniture wasn’t white, but warm, filled with leather and velvet. A phonograph sat in the corner, impossibly old and worth a decade of her life. Books lined the walls, real ones. She caught the scent of them before she even reached the shelves, dust and ink, real paper.

He poured her a glass of something aged and dark. The bottle looked like it hadn’t been opened in a century. Maybe it hadn’t.

He didn’t pour one for himself.

"Taste it," he said.

She did. Let it sit on her tongue a moment.

"It’s…" she paused. "It tastes like dirt and fruit. Like wet stone…” suddenly a warmth bloomed in her chest, filling her body and racing to her fingertips. “And firewood! I love it! It’s incredible!"

He smiled. Not the polite hollow smile she’d seen before, but a real one that crinkled the corners of his eyes, showing beautiful crow’s feet.

He didn’t drink.

He only watched her.

That became their rhythm.

He gave her things, books, wines, strange fruits flown in from vertical farms in ancient mountain ranges. He never indulged with her. Only observed, as if her joy was a reflection of a life he could no longer access. He stopped fading into the background of his own home.

Now, he lingered.

He spoke more. Walked beside her instead of past her. Invited her to sit—once, then again, until it became a quiet ritual neither of them named.

"You take joy seriously," he told her once, smiling at her as she took a bite of a decadent seared duck breast with figs and lavender honey reduction, her eyes fluttering closed, memorizing the way richness lingered, soft and slow.

She shrugged. "I don’t have much. Not all of us have infinity, Jonathan.” She teased. “I have to savor what I can."

He nodded, as though some profound bit of wisdom had clicked into place. Without a word, he poured her another glass.

Over the next few months, they grew closer, not through grand gestures, but in quiet, accumulating ways. Shared meals. Lingering conversations. Jonathan shared the bits of his life that he had tucked away, forgotten to appreciate.

They had come from different worlds and yet, in her presence, he began to remember what it meant to feel time move. As he watched her experience the world for the first time, he knew, this life belonged to her now—and for the first time in three hundred years, he was ready to let go.

They never named what they were to each other, never gave it shape, but their days began to bend around one another. She brought him music she loved, old recordings on warped data drives, half-corrupted files that still carried soul.

He showed her how to spot forged paintings, how to tell a good glass of wine by the way it clung to the crystal. “Slow legs,” he said, meant a wine that lingered.

Sometimes, he laughed. Sometimes, she cried.

And slowly, quietly, the space between them softened.

So, when she entered the dining room one evening, the table set, perfectly, intentionally, she paused.

Two places. A single candle. Soren, standing at the head of the table, smoothing the linen napkins like the smallest wrinkles mattered. A strange calm settled on his face.

She didn’t know what it was then, but later she’d realize it was the look of someone who had made peace with the ending.

The food was exquisite. She took a bite of the lobster, the saffron-soaked risotto melting on her tongue like sunlight. She closed her eyes, savoring it fully, and when she opened them, Soren was watching her.

And then he said it, gently, but with the weight of finality. "I’m leaving, Isla."

She looked up and her smile faltered. "Leaving?"

"This world," he said.

The words didn’t make sense at first. Then they made too much sense. She choked on her breath. "You’re… you’re not serious."

"I am."

Her fork clattered against the plate, shattering the stillness. Her hands were shaking.

"Why would you do that? You have everything!"

Soren’s gaze held hers, and for once he didn’t look like a ghost. He looked heartbreakingly present. "Because I’ve lived too long, and I’ve forgotten how to live at all. You reminded me what it looks like…but I can’t feel it anymore. I enjoy watching you live, Isla. But I can’t reclaim that for myself." He reached for her hand. "I’ve sucked the marrow dry. And I’m…tired."

She broke.

Tears spilled, silent and hot. She shook her head, whispering, "Please… just stay a little longer." He pulled her into him and held her. One arm around her shoulders, the other stroking her hair softly. That night, she fell asleep beside him on the couch. Warm. Held.

Still believing he might stay.

She woke to sunlight. The blanket still clung to her shoulders, the couch beside her was empty. The apartment was silent.

Not peaceful.

Just... empty.

She searched each room, the library, the kitchen, the terrace where he sometimes stood when he couldn’t sleep.

But he was gone.

And in the study, she found it: A single sheet of paper, folded with care. A capsule resting on top, clear and humming with potential.

Revantis.

She held the machinery-stopping drug in her hand, and stared at it for a long time before picking up the note.

It read: We weren’t meant to live forever. We were meant to be beautiful castles in the sand. I’ve had my time. This is my choice. Now, you have one too.

The capsule glinted in the morning light. Impossibly light. Unbearably heavy.

She stood in the quiet. The city moving far below, indifferent and alive.

Jonathan Soren had left her a chance at forever.

Isla stood there for a long time, the weight of indecision holding her in place.

The beauty of life is in its finite nature.

We are sandcastles Isla thought.

And the tide was coming in.