Chapter 33:

Titus was racked with unreasonable nerves. He slowly took down the second tent and started packing things up. As Alice worked next to him, he tried to search for the words to say.

It was weird. She pretty much knew everything already, and there were just a few pieces he needed to put into place. But it was a secret he had kept for so long that it felt like blasphemy to say it out loud to someone who wasn't already aware. Besides, the emotions that Alice was sending to him were so tangled he wasn’t able to read them very well.

He could tell that his ally was getting impatient. So, he decided to start at the beginning. "Yes, it has a lot to do with your [Agelessness] perk. I imagine the System saw that trait in me—not because it's a System trait, but just how I am—and gave it to you as a portion of my power. I am very old." he said. Alice just watched him impassively. "Elaine is as well. When we met, we were already ancient."

"How old is 'very old'? Do you remember the Middle Ages?" Alice asked.

Titus nodded. "I remember the founding of Rome, too. It was me and several of my friends. We decided we wanted to play gods for a bit, and we spent several centuries taking everything we had learned from countless lifetimes of experience and trying to run a civilization completely hands-off. Well, not completely hands-off, but with no direct leadership roles."

Alice gaped at him but didn't have anything to say.

"There were a few more of us at one point, but being ageless doesn't mean I'm unkillable. I just won't die of disease or old age. I recover from wounds unnaturally quickly," Titus said and gestured at several of the scars on his side that she had seen. "I think the only way for us to die is to be directly killed, usually in combat. Though some died from assassinations. Overall, not many of us that I knew died. We used to fight each other more, but the ones left now—we all come from different parts of Europe and Asia, some from Africa. We formed bonds, more like sibling bonds than allies or friends. We fight each other, but at this point, we usually avoid killing. It's more about political influence or territory. It has been the status quo for the last several thousand years."

"Several thousand years?" Alice echoed.

"Yes. When I met Elaine, she was acting as royalty to the Hittites. My people sacked her city and burned it to the ground. We fought. I captured her; she escaped and moved on to a different city. Our war lasted for a decade as I chased her across the countryside. She was a bit of a prize."

"Hittites? Are you talking about the late Bronze Age collapse?" Alice asked.

Titus snorted. "Yeah, though as confusing as it was, historians are getting a little bit closer to figuring out what actually happened."

"That was, what, 3,500 years ago?"

"A little bit less."

"Was Elaine the first you'd met of your kind?"

He shook his head. "No, she is one of the more recent ones, actually. The first one I met was when I was young. Younger, at least. I wasn't too far past my natural lifespan. But when my tribe rode down from the steppe into Eastern Europe—when what we now call the Proto-Indo-European language was being spoken."

"You were the steppe nomads?" Alice asked.

Titus shook his head. "No, from before that. But this was when you could first consider history to really be a thing."

Alice frowned. "That was, what, 12,000 years ago?"

Titus nodded. "I was probably... well, I really have no idea how old I was then. I lived many hundreds of lives. I was a shaman of sorts, the old man in the hut. I pretended to be much older than I looked."

"When did you stop aging?" Alice asked.

"I don't know. It's hard to say exactly. Lands have changed drastically since I was born. Africa was a jungle then, and we didn't have maps the same way. Some of the stuff I know, I only know because of archaeology. But I remember when I saw my first house or first building, I was already old."

"So Elaine is a recent 'acquaintance'?" Alice asked, putting her hands in the air in quotation marks around 'acquaintance.'

"Um, yes and no," Titus said. "I don't actually know many people from before because, well, there wasn't that much contact. Horses weren’t always bred strong enough to carry people. When the world became more interconnected, we really started to find each other. After the Late Bronze Age Collapse, like you said, we met up and held talks.

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"There were many people, many different sides. We fought wars for a while—small wars, but still wars. Eventually, we came to some sort of agreement where we would leave each other alone for the most part. There are only so many of us who actually understand each other. Who else can relate? So now we have just been living, doing our thing. Each of us has our own interests and pursuits, and generally, people stay in touch."

"It seems odd for so many powerful people with ancient cultures to get along so well," Alice said skeptically.

Titus snorted softly. "First, calling it 'getting along' is a bit of a stretch. Second, we fought a lot of wars before that. And as I said, we didn't really believe in mercy. So those we couldn't live with were killed."

Alice didn't have a response to that, and they rolled up the tent in silence.

"So this is what you meant by you sort of knew about magic last time?" Alice asked.

"We assumed we were cursed by gods or blessed, depending on where we came from and our experiences with life. But more recently, in the last several hundred years, we figured maybe we were just different sorts of people. Darwin pioneered that. Interesting man," Titus said. "I can't wait to show him how wrong he was and that it was magic, not evolution."

"Wait, wait, wait. One of you is Darwin?" Alice asked, stunned.

"Well, that's not his actual name. But he did want to present a theory that he had been working on for the last several hundred years. So, he came up with an alias. The name kind of stuck, though."

Alice shook her head. "I don't know what to say about that. How many more famous people are you?"

Titus shrugged. "Every one of us has been famous many times. It's unavoidable if you want to get things done."

There was silence for a bit more. Eventually, Titus spoke again about something that had been weighing on his mind. "I guess, in some ways, Elaine is right. If you have the [Agelessness] perk, you are one of us now."

Alice didn't respond right away. Eventually, she asked a seemingly unrelated question. "Do you have a name for yourselves? Do you call yourselves, like what, The Immortals or anything?"

"No," Titus said. "I don't think we ever got around to naming ourselves. We don't really agree on much."

Alice frowned. "When was the last time you met someone new? Who was the youngest?"

"I think Elaine might be the youngest. She certainly seems to care the most about the rest of us. By the time we met her, everyone else had long forgotten about family."

"How old is Elaine?" Alice asked.

Titus shrugged. "Not entirely sure, but probably only like 7,000 years or so."

"And no other ones like you have been born since then?"

Titus shrugged. "Maybe. We met some after Elaine, but they were older. There could be ones in hiding that we never met. We don't exactly advertise our presence, but we can usually pick out anyone who stands out for a while. So, well, I think the only confirmation has been the System."

"How so?"

"Remember the error I got when the System appeared? The negative age one?"

Alice nodded. "Yeah."

"Well, when I got my first thing, it had to do with a buffer overflow error. There was a lower level warning involved in my message."

Alice's eyes widened in understanding as she cursed. "Damn it! I must not have had the log level set low enough to pick that up in the overview. You're so old that you ran out of digits?"

"Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what numbering you were using, but it didn't seem like it was a years thing," Titus said.

"It was nanoseconds, I think."

"You were measuring our age in nanoseconds?" Titus asked incredulously.

Alice shrugged. “I just used a standard time library.”

"Well, it seemed like there was something that overflowed. The float or double or whatever you were using became negative."

"So maybe there's one younger than you, and they're in the tutorial," Alice suggested.

"It's possible," Titus said. "But of the ones I know, it seems like everyone's here."

"And now I'm one of you?" Alice asked.

"In a way. Once we get this all taken care of, I'll introduce you, assuming you want that. You can meet my family." Titus realized that might not have come across the way he wanted it to, but he let it lie. "They could be yours too, but you have a long, long way to go before you're ever not seen as a kid. In some ways, even Elaine is still treated with kid gloves."

"Yeah." Alice clearly had something else she wanted to say, so Titus waited for her to spit it out. "What was between you and her? Was there something more than just siblings?"

"There was," Titus said. "You've got to remember that before civilization, morals were different. Back then, people who were eleven would be considered adults in some ways. You aged faster and grew up faster. When Elaine was several thousand years old when I met her, she did not seem like a child in the same way that you do."

Titus didn't mention that almost anyone was a child to him, except for people he considered as siblings. So, he went with whatever the convention of the culture he was in at the time was. It wasn't something they needed to get into.

Alice fell silent, and Titus helped her up onto the ATV behind him. They took off, stopping every once in a while to deal with a monster and try to grind some levels. Even then, Alice didn't talk. She just sat there, and whenever he could see her face, it held a thoughtful expression as she considered what he had said.