Immortality is a myth

A lie we tell ourselves every day

The fairy tale that promises nothing ever has to change.

The one we tell ourselves every night so we can sleep peacefully.

I once allowed myself that dream. A young girl full of life, enjoying the smell of spring roses even while running from every creature that was anything less than adorable. Even those abominable butterflies would cause me to flee with a giggle on my lips and flutter in my heart. My father tended to the garden, often telling me it was all that remained of my mother. How she would tend to it and nurture it. I naively believed him that doing such things kept her alive in some small way. That tending to her personal Eden held some great significance. The sentimental superstitions of a child are more durable a shelter than the largest fortress.

As is the way, illness found its way to our door. Being as small as I was, it inevitably found its way to me. I spent so many days in that bed, believing even as my muscles withered from lack of use that I would be able to see her garden again. That I could tend to it and keep her flowers strong and healthy. My father kept telling me, doctor after doctor that I would be okay. That I would feel better. That I just needed to be patient. As I looked into his eyes I saw only his love, not the growing desperation in his face. Not the tears he could barely contain in my presence. I could hear him speaking to the doctors outside my door but not the death sentence they had repeated to him over and over again. Every night I fell asleep, I would look forward to when I could visit her garden once more.

Even now I tell myself that these are my memories. That it was my childhood home and my own bedroom. A lie that I never died. The first memory I know to be my own was the cellar. The empty husk of my aged father, an empty scorched runic network around me. My bed and various toys scorched an seared, a scattered collection of bones resting in the center of it all. They were as dry and cold as the stone walls of the cellar. I gripped my arms in confusion and panic only to find them less yielding than I was expecting. Cold and rigid as the bones themselves. I ran out of the cellar into the rain, but I could not feel it on my skin. My only sensation was my body getting heavier with every moment. As I got to mother’s garden, it had been choked out by weeds. Not a single part of her Eden remained, her memory corrupted and dead.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

My first night of life that was truly mine, I curled up in the remains of her legacy and did everything I could to will this existence into some kind of nightmare. That I would wake up in my bed, healthy and happy. As I lay there in the rain, my body gaining weight with every passing moment. It must have been hours in that storm before he arrived. The man in the cloak. He never gave his name, but to a girl recently built from stones and memory his name didn’t matter. He picked up my dead weight as though it was nothing and carried me into the dry but neglected halls of my home and stayed the night by my side.

When morning broke through the window of what was once our living room, he spoke softly, “Many of us didn’t ask to be brought into this world. Whether you are flesh or stone, flame or ice. We were brought about through an act of love and found something that binds us to this world. Your father bound himself to your care. When others abandoned that charge he broke taboos and promises to make sure you had a chance to live.” The man smiled at me so kindly but his eyes were like glass. No light behind them of any kind. He placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “You are not what you once were, but your father kept his promise to you. You owe it to him to live the life he gave you to the full.”

I didn’t warm up to this stranger at first. I had no reason to, especially with such inhuman qualities. He informed me of my new nature and his reason for checking on our home. Enur, or Source Walkers, were once simple beings made of various elements that were made as companions and tools. Their minds and souls were defined by the runic networks that made them and were only as stable as the element that formed them. It was only when some of the Enur lived long enough to form new habits and their own memories that people realized they could do what my father did. That with the right resources and tools, they could make Enur of themselves or of those they had lost. Theoretically as enduring as life itself, a theory too tempting to those who feared death or craved power. And so it was labeled as a taboo and the knowledge buried. The practice labeled us as Ulur, Void walkers. Those who have left the void of death and returned once more to this world.

And so I began my new life in my old home, resting my eyes above my own grave in the ruins of all I cherished.