Deathless

He died in the woods, surrounded by roots and mist and leaf mould. Ripped away from his body and sent spinning into the night, off into the darkness, lost and alone. He thought he would be driven mad by the darkness and the silence, which was so vast that it echoed. All that was left was to wait for oblivion, and eventually it came in the form of sleep, or something near enough to it.

He woke to bright lights, sliding out into the world. But for the pounding in his ears, he could hear nothing. Someone slapped him and he gasped, lungs stirring with sweet, familiar being.

And then he screamed.


Basileus Renwick loved Magic. He was good at Magic. It came easily to him, easier than history or language arts or arithmetic. While the other children struggled with their Magic, some unable to even make water freeze while others caused it to snap back angrily at them as though they had no business mucking about with it at all, Basil did not have to try. Favored, talented, lucky, magical.

Basil understood Magic. He understood it better than his peers, his professors, the whole of Elberon, even. He knew with a deep rooted, overwhelming certainty that had struck like lightning at some point early on in his childhood that Magic could do anything. His power was great and his mind was keen and there was no limit to what he could do--there were few Magi in the world who could challenge his power.

As a child he hid behind awkward genius. He adopted a facade of quiet, shy arrogance. But behind the mask he was snarling and pacing and biding every loathsome second before he can escape the the tedium of living in Elberon, stuck under his Grandmother’s thumb. The type of exhaustion he experienced was unique to powerful intellects. An affliction of great minds worn down not by overuse but by under-use.

It was so easy to be brilliant. It was so easy to test well, to charm, to send Magic spinning from his fingers.

Basil wanted more. He needed more. And this need manifested as a singular, consuming fixation with a term he came across while reading densely worded, black-marked books in his grandmother’s garden.

Immortality.


Basil took longer than most boys to notice the opposite sex. True, pretty girls had caught his attention before, but it was always with a detached, clinical appreciation that he regarded them. The way one who was not especially fond of art might admire a particularly beautiful oil painting. No female was able to stir in young Basil the interest or the sentiment experienced by other boys his age. No rapidly beating heart, no sweaty palms, no flustered blushing or nervous laughter.

Not until he met Hailee Albertsen.

Basil was twenty-five when he was first acquainted with his wife, in the spring of 1917. Hailee was pretty, with bronze skin and raven hair, but her features were too sharp for her to be considered a true beauty. That was okay though, he thought. It wouldn’t look right for Basil, with his pointed face and pale hair and spindly frame, to be standing next to some soft, peachy, delicate creature.

It took him months to realize it, but eventually the truth was undeniable even to him: he was in love. It was a strange experience, one that left Basil, with his cold, reptilian mind, feeling disquieted and disarmed. He would do many things for Hailee that he would never have done for anyone else. He let her cry on him, despite being uncomfortable with the grief of others. He laid with her, despite finding the base barbarism of sex wholly unappealing.

He gave her a child, despite loathing children.

When Hailee told him she was pregnant, Basil merely stared. And stared. For a long, long time. Unlike his contemporaries, Basil did not care for the psuedo-immortality many claimed through their progeny, and had never felt any responsibility to reproduce. Being a Harbinger was not hereditary. Basil would not be remiss in his duty as a Harbinger if he failed to ensure the continuation of his line. But he would be remiss in his duty as Hailee Renwick’s husband. If Hailee wanted a child, so be it. How difficult could fatherhood be, really?

But then he started noticing children, started to actually pay attention to them and to see them in a light he never had before. And they were absolutely terrifying. It was an event thrown by the MHA that decided him. A young boy, perhaps no older than five, had thrown a ghastly temper-tantrum, the kind that was so loud and disturbing as to be almost surreal. Oh God how could such a small thing be so beastly? And all because his mother had denied him sweets.

Fatherhood, Basil realized, was not going to be conducive to his mental health.


Vdekja Lule.

The Death Flower.

Perhaps one of the cruelest methods of murder Basil had ever come across, it caused its victim to degrade into a large pile of flowers.

Disease creation was a dangerous branch of Magic, explored by only the most daring and depraved of Magi. Magi like Erion Mehmeti, an Albanian Dark Mage who Basil had crossed one too many times. And now he was paying for it, and the price was unbearably high.

Hailee was thrashing on the ground and clawing at her throat. Tears streamed from her brown eyes, which bulged, full of terror. It was a chilling sight, one which would haunt Basil for years. He thought he was going to be sick. Instead, he lurched forward and fell to his knees at his wife’s side. "What's wrong? Please, Hailee, please, tell me what's wrong," he pleaded. That was when he realized she could not speak. Could not even cough. No sound passed her lips, and yet Basil knew she was screaming. Horrible realization dawned on him. She was choking to death. "Stop!" he yelled, rounding on Mehmeti, "Stop it! Please!"

Hailee's struggles were becoming less and less powerful. Basil searched Mehmeti's face, trying to grasp even the smallest shred of sympathy. But when he looked into the man's hazel eyes he found no mercy, only sick amusement. "I grew a flower in her throat," Mehmeti explained softly, as if he were discussing dinner plans. Basil felt his Magic twist and writhe, trembling and paralyzed with ire and fear.

Beside him Hailee had gone still. Her eyes were open, reflecting the sky, but Basil knew that they no longer saw the falling snow.

Basil didn't scream, didn't wail, didn't cry. He merely stood and walked, surprisingly steady, toward the Dark Mage.

And with a howl of rage he brought his fist crashing into the wretched man's hooked nose.

There was a sickening crack as Mehmeti was sent stumbling backwards, holding his face. His thugs began to move forward, but the dark skinned man held up a hand to stop them. He pulled his other hand away from his nose and examined it. Blood dripped from his fingertips, staining the snow crimson.

Mehmeti grinned dispassionately, barring his blood covered teeth in celebration of some private victory that Basil would not understand for years to come. "Good. I would hate for dear Hailee’s death to be for nothing."

Basil wanted to scream at Mehmeti and tear his tongue out of his throat because Mehmeti did not deserve to speak Hailee’s name, did not deserve to even know who she was. But he did nothing, just stared and bared his own teeth right back and stayed silent.

For a moment Basil looked at Mehmeti and saw himself staring back, gazing cruelly out of those dark, burning eyes. Bile burned the back of his throat. His lungs hurt and his head throbbed angrily. It was all too much. He could feel the rungs of his sanity burning beneath him. He closed his eyes softly and saw Hailee. Smiling, laughing, dancing. Crying, screaming, breaking. He saw her corpse, which he knew was lying in the snow only a few yards away. He saw their unborn child, destined to be nothing more than a thought, what-might-have-been, holding up her arms, demanding to be picked up. He could not imagine ever not wanting that child, now that he knew he was never going to have her.

Weakness. Helplessness. Confusion. Basil hated it all. He had never felt this weak before, never this helpless or confused. He felt like a boy again, lost and alone and trapped.

All because of this man, this monster, this Dark Mage. This Dim.

And Basil knew hatred.

He would master it, perfect it. Hatred would give him power, would become his weapon of choice. It would sear his tongue and stain his words and harden his heart. He would hate in the name of all Light Magi who had ever been victimized by the Dark. He would hate in the name of love and light and all that was good and deserved preserving. He would hate in the name of Hailee Renwick.

Basil would hate until it consumed him.


Sometimes he dreamed, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he slept, but mainly he didn’t.

A decade bled away. A decade spent traveling the world, studying under powerful teachers and encountering a cascade of foreign tongues and foreign Magic. A decade spent within ancient libraries, with their straining shelves and dusty tomes, seeking the answer to that desire from so long ago, that desire that he had almost been able to ignore through his romance with Hailee. Almost.

But Immortality was not so easily achieved. There were whispers of it in those grimoires, with their yellowing pages and faded spines, but even in a world so steeped in Magic, it was an illusive, rarely touched upon subject.

He began to notice more and more the gray hairs growing at his temple and the crows feet forming around his eyes. These signs of age unsettled him and he wondered if he was not wasting his life away hunting a fable, a myth, an impossibility.

But his search had not been entirely for naught. Along the way he had gathered a following of like-minded individuals. ‘The Sun Cabal’ they called themselves. In Elberon they had become known as an up-start, extremist political faction. The ‘Spiders’, as they had been dubbed by Elberon’s political commentators, sought justice against Dark Magi.

At first he had been adverse to having any hand in politics. But the more disillusioned he became with his quest for immortality, the more he began to warm up to the ideals of the Spiders. As a Light Harbinger, he had been thrust upon a pedestal in the eyes of these men and women who were so desperate for deliverance, so desperate for a messiah. ‘Troublemakers’ cried the Locusts. ‘Bigots’ screeched the Vultures.

The Vultures. Basil would never forget the first confrontation with the Vultures to end in bloodshed. There would be many, many more, but they would all be washed away by time, forgotten by memory. None would be painted in such vibrant, bold colors as the first.

To know that he was indirectly responsible for Erion Mehmeti’s death had been one thing. But to witness the precise moment when that woman’s heart stopped, when the life left her eyes, to watch her collapse and to stand in the silence that followed, his companions watching him with fear and adoration—that was something else entirely.

That anonymous woman, she would be painted as a monster. Vulture. Dark Mage. Dim. They would compare her murder—because that was what it was, right?--to putting down a rabid dog. Basil was a Light Mage and so his actions were justified—how could they not be? If his hands shook, what did it matter?

Basil’s hollow gaze rested on the woman’s corpse—Was she a mother? A sister? A wife?—and with her face turned away from his and her dark hair falling around her head like some wild, angry halo, he imagined she could have been Hailee.

Later he would vomit, later he would tear at his hair and claw at his face, later he would wake up in a cold sweat and scream and scream and scream.

Later and then never again.


Basil hated Daedarus Cain.

Daedarus Cain was everything Basil wanted to destroy.

He was worse than a Dark Mage. He was a Dark Harbinger, Basil’s counterpart in Magic and by definition his most hated enemy. Cain’s was a powerful intellect, devious and cunning and perhaps stronger than Basil’s own, despite being almost ten years younger. He was bundle of powerful magic and poor judgment, with an easy arrogance that made Basil’s skin crawl and his fingers itch to slap the hubris out of the younger man. So sure he could do anything, so sure he could make the world quake and the oceans shudder and the sky break open.

Basil saw in Cain’s eyes, blue-not-yet-red, the same madness and the same eldritch fire that he had seen in Erion Mehmeti’s. The same Basil saw in his own reflection, when he bothered to look.

They were admittedly similar. They were both Harbingers and passionate idealists. As children they were both isolated by their brilliance. And--what should have been their most uniting similarity--both had lost those most dear to them.

But Basil was Light and Cain was Dark and that one difference made all of the difference.

It was 1942 and the winds of April sang a bitter prelude to war. Basil could feel it resonate through his bones. He had not seen Cain for half a decade, but he did not need to in order to know what was coming. Elberon could not contain their struggle.

The flat Basil had rented in Singapore was tiny, dingy and smelled of wet wood and mold. It was tucked between a noisy night club and ‘Psikik yang Den’, which was no bigger than a closet and advertised ‘Psychic Readings’ in glowing neon letters.

Basil sat absorbed in a scroll he had acquired in Bhutan, his fingernails rapping listlessly against the dusty wood of the table. Despite being spring, the room was permeated by a perpetual chill.

He felt Cain approaching long before the door had even opened. Basil knew the other man’s Magic almost as well as his own, had faced it in battle enough times to be able to recognize its offhanded viciousness. He would liken it to a lion, if anything at all. Fierce and wild, with all the casual bloodlust and violent serenity of a predator.

The distinct, overpowering smell of pine assaulted Basil’s senses as Cain entered the room. He looked up from his text just as a pair of bloody spheres hit his chest, squelching slightly as they made contact with his waistcoat.

"Are those eyeballs?” Basil asked, thin lips curling in disgust.

“I had a run in with Russia’s most notorious Vampire coven. They tried to kill me,” Cain said by way of explanation. He had yet to move from the doorway, and was leaning languidly against the frame.

“How cliche,” Basil drawled.

“Quite. Though their leader managed to give me an impressive lashing.” Cain turned around to reveal the back of his shirt, torn and stained with blood.

Basil flinched in sympathy. “That’s barbaric.”

Cain took the seat across from Basil and absently began to trace patterns in the wood. “Is it? Well, you know what they say, what doesn't kill you makes you the villain."

The Dark Harbinger smirked under Basil’s withering gaze.

“Were you expecting mercy? Remorse? True power doesn’t flinch, Basil-dear.” Cain shot a wry glance at the bloody eyeballs that glared up at them from the unfinished floor. “Not until you carve its eyes out with a spoon, that is.”

Basil had seen smiles like that before--on pictures of werewolves. “You strike me…as a psychopath,” he observed, words glacier slow.

Cain let out a warbling, raspy laugh. “I will strike you as a meteor.”

Basil could only stare. Truly, he had never met a more ludicrous man. Or a more dangerous one.

He asked the obvious question. “What is wrong with you?”

Cain held up the hand that had been tracing the spiraling grains and allowed tiny, pin-prick flames to dance between his fingers. “I have fire in my soul.”

And quite literally too, if the Fae were to be believed. But the more Basil came to know his enemy, the less it seemed that his etheric element was Fire—or Water or Earth or Air, for that matter. No, it seemed much more likely to be Surprise.

“You will keep your magic to that side of the table,” Basil warned. Basil trusted Cain about as far as he could throw him. Without magic.

“Oh, very well,” Cain pouted. Basil resisted the urge to roll his eyes. It was unseemly.

“What do you want, Cain?”

Cain hummed lightly. “Many things. World domination would be nice. But from you, my friend, I want merely a word.”

Basil’s green eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Pertaining to what?”

“What did it feel like when your wife died?”

“I beg your pardon?” Basil spluttered. He did not expect sympathy from Cain. Never sympathy. Cain had unsubscribed from morality after putting the part of his soul responsible for basic human decency through a blender. But he did expect the grudging respect born from being equals in Magic, and with that respect came the unspoken rule that Cain was never to mention Basil’s late wife.

“Your wife, I take it you loved her. What did you feel when she died?” Cain clarified, seemingly oblivious to Basil’s consternation.

“Kindly refrain from mentioning Hailee in my presence,” Basil all but snarled.

“It’s been years. I don’t understand—”

"I wouldn’t expect you to,” Basil interrupted scathingly.

There was something of a child in the way that Cain stared, openly and unabashedly, genuinely puzzled over why Basil was upset. It was for this reason that Basil was able to pardon Cain’s offense.

“What… is this about, really?”

“Do you know, I’m not quite sure. A long overdue existential crisis, maybe.” Basil was eighty-four-percent sure that Cain’s whole existence was a crisis, but he decided to keep his mouth shut. Cain was studying his face closely. “Is that what love is? To care about someone’s death as if it were your own? But…no. How is it possible to feel that way? You carry on living.”

“And there is where you lack your basic humanity. Other people have lives, too, Cain. My wife and unborn child had lives. They existed.”

“But other people’s lives just don’t matter. Their life isn’t my life. It’s not mine.”

Basil had never felt so utterly appalled with another human being. “You're what, fifty now? How can you be so void of wisdom?"

Cain dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “I’m here to inform you that I’ve decided to join you in your quest for immortality. Living forever sounds like a bloody riot. Not literally, of course. …Of course not literally.”

Basil stared. “What?”

“Indeed.”

Oh, how Basil hated Daedarus Cain.


Four years later, word spread that Cain had found immortality. What had taken Basil decades to find had taken Cain only a handful of years.

But if the Fae, loud-mouthed, gossipy creatures that they were, spoke the truth, it was a water-down version of immortality that Cain had achieved. A thousand years, the Fae had said. Cain had managed to extend his life by a thousand years, and at the price of his own fertility. It was almost laughable, Basil thought.

For what he sought was a purer form of immortality, something more than just a few hundred years tacked on to the end of his life.

He found his answer in a small leather-bound book he bought in Zurich for nothing more than the change in his pocket. It looked so old it might dissolve in his hands, with crumbling yellow pages and faded red runes embossed on the cover. The book spoke of rituals that invoked gods and ancient powers buried deep beneath the earth. It spoke of reincarnation.

Basil spent weeks modifying one ritual. He holed himself up in Elberon, working around the clock to pull the wool over the eyes of impostor gods. He would have the fates for fools. He would find everlasting life in rebirth and in the retention of memory.

He would have his immortality.

Still, decades later, Basil dreamed of that ritual. The night he turned away from convention Magics and instead to those esoteric rites lost to the passage of time.


He fell to his knees—

a flash of light cold cold light and ozone
night air--oh godhe was burning--smoke scent burning sm oke and choking
he can’tbreathe he can’tsee can’t th ink can’t

—lifted his face to the sky—

he is sinkingsinking sin kingdown ( pullmedown )
vanilla magic and sweet summerstorm
blank st ares and mist caressing leaf mould canpeoplebeimmor -

—and screamed—

a woman fell he killed her andkilledher and killed her again
sorry I’m sosorry Hailee forgive me

where is he who is he ? why is he -

And then it was over.


He died in the woods.

BANG

Basil watched from under a wisteria-covered trellis as fellow party goers milled around. Family and friends stood chatting in small groups, while some preferred to dance. Young children giggled as they ran and played, a blur of brightly colored clothing. He occasionally picked up snippets of conversation from a group of elderly women as they bragged about their sons and daughters and grandchildren and gossiped about the latest celebrity scandals.

Sitting on a bench while the other kids his age played was becoming increasingly awkward. Every once and a while, another child shyly offered to include him in their game of hide and seek. Each time they waited impatiently for his answer, and each time he politely declined.

Basil severely wished he had brought a book.

BANG

His Grandmother’s cottage was surrounded by miles and miles of old-growth forest. Basil loved nothing more than to explore that seamless transition between the gardens and the Cynefin, weaving between ancient oaks and elms. How could he not prefer the solitary solace of nature to his loud, smelly peers, with their beady eyes and chubby fingers and awkward, frail Magic?

It was at the edge of the gardens that Basil would encounter the word that would define his fate. “Grandmother, what does it mean to be immortal?”

His Grandmother, loving and kind with a wisdom in her blue eyes that went beyond age, gave Basil’s shoulder a gentle pat, “It means to last forever. Like the sun and the moon and the stars.”

“Can people be immortal?”

She laughed. It was a wheezing, worrying sound. Basil didn’t like it when Grandmother laughed. “I’m going to let you in on a secret,” she said, leaning closer and offering him a wobbly smile that he thought was supposed to look sly, “Everybody already is.”

“Really?” Basil asked with something weaker than mistrust and stronger than skepticism.

“Our souls are immortal, Basil, they carry on even when our bodies lie cold in the ground.” She pulled herself up from the bench by her cane, “And everyone, even the most evil of men, has a soul.” His Grandmother smiled softly, but her aged and weary eyes were grim. She turned and began the long trek back to the cottage, leaving Basil to ponder and dream and do as children do.

“That doesn’t count,” he grumbled, returning to his text and trying to forget all about the subject of immortality, which made his head hurt and his mind tie itself into a knot.

But the seed had already been sown.

BANG

His wife was dead.

BANG

The top story in the paper that morning was about the Cabal. ‘PRESERVE THE LIGHT: THE RISE OF THE SUN CABAL’ read the headline in solid black lettering. The article was full of lies and twisted truths, making the whole thing sound straight out of a story book. As if years spent gathering supporters and mapping out ideologies could be summarized in a handful of events and a few lines of text. As if Light Magi were good and pure and heroic and Dark Magi were the evil, hideous monsters that lurked behind every corner and waited beneath every child’s bed. As if real people with real lives weren’t in real danger.

Basil considered burning it.

Instead, he grabbed his coat and descended the stairs, disappearing into the crowded streets of Elberon. His next destination was Vienna, and he had a meeting at noon that he didn’t want to miss.

BANG

He died in the woods.

BANG

Cain was irate.

For all of the times Basil had faced Cain in battle, he had not once seen the other man angry. Now, Basil watched as he lost all semblance of control.

The Dark Harbinger let out a strangled roar, face contorted with inhuman rage. Basil could feel the fury in the air, in the ripple of Cain’s Magic and in the unnatural born, canescent light that strained through the trees.

There was a moment of pause, a moment of calm as the two faced one another. In that moment, Basil truly saw Cain for what he was. Powerful, passionate, and dangerous. A violent black hole, both monster and messiah, who could never be anything less than awful, than terrible, than cruel, who was prepared leave a scar as deep as the abyss upon the world because it is necessary to destroy in order to create. And how appropriate it was that he should only reveal his true nature in the darkest of hours; when all hope was lost and the gauntlet run.

There was a massacre ready behind those lambent red eyes and in that moment, Basil was truly afraid.

Cain struck and in one incandescent moment of violence—

BANG

He died in the woods.

BANG

He was born in the Mundane suburbs of Northern California, screaming in horror and rage and confusion.

---

Somehow managed to make Basil both more sympathetic and more monstrous than I originally intended.

Yeah, so more writing spam. Sorry not sorry.