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Age has made the pages fragile. Each careful turning of a leaf crinkling. A threat to crumble. You want to leave, I can feel it, but you're looking for answers. Answers from these dusty tomes that are in your hand writing. Somewhere in the ancient tomes that surround you with hazy memory and cobwebs of the past you want to find out the truth of your own existence. How you came to be pristine despite surviving eons. The people you protect have gone from simple farmers to inventors and artisans. The hoe and sickle replaced with machinery, horses with automobiles and swords with guns. And at the center of it all the ageless Lord protector. There are stories that you made a pact with a devil, or were granted a boon by a Fae queen or crafted a magical elixir, but you don't remember what happened. But I do, because I'm what happened. I hold the grief of years for you, the weight of decades turning to centuries turning to millennia, my body creaks, bones barely strong enough to stand, eyes gone blind but mind still sharp. Sharp enough to want an end. I am so tired. This body aches for release.
I have some of your pride to though. You knew if you were to confident you'd make poor decisions, that good advice would fall on deaf ears. Advice that helped your people, our people, survive famines and floods, that turned war into trading partners. You've forgotten so much of it though. That's why you started the journals. It was on your 150th birthday you realized you had forgotten so much of the first fifty years of your life. So you wrote down what you could, and I remembered every word, every emotion, every twinge of the heart and anxiety of the mind. I watched from the shadows at first. Now I listen to the turning pages, memory and imagination creating visuals where my time dulled eyes cannot. Your mutterings echo in the stillness of this hidden library as you try to remember why you did this to yourself, or how. It was desperation, you knew you were the best to lead. Not an arrogant thought, your long since dead brothers were either greedy or incompetent. Or both. But you were the youngest, the least likely to rule unless they all died, so you made sure you'd survive them. While they sought glory and wealth you craved knowledge and magic.
Despite the gentleness of your hands, the reverence you have for your own memories, the journal creaks as you close it. Your breath hitches as a funeral is remembered. Your first love, taken to early. A mere 50 years old when a strange illness of the lungs took her from you. An illness that hasn't taken any of your subjects lives for as long as mortal memory holds. A few deep breaths then you return the volume to the shelf. There's no tears, you lost that capacity around the 3rd century of this existence.
I shuffle from the darkness, knees and hips aching with each step. It's only thanks to my cane I do not fall. "Come for the truth again?"
You start as you see your face reflected back as if through a twisted mirror. As you see the same crown and signet ring. The same royal robes and fine shoes, the same coat keeping the dank and cold away. We are the same, except I'm bearing the weight of time. Paying it's toll.
"Who are you?"
"Everything you don't want." I find the chair across from you and sit. Weariness pulling every limb down. Weariness that no amount of rest has helped. That is all I do these days is rest.
"How did this happen? Did I make you? What do you mean, again?"
"You don't want to remember, so you don't." I don't judge you. It's always out of a love for those who depend on you. That's always the reason you leave me here.
"What happened last time?"
"The same as this time." But maybe this time will be different. You feel the weight a little to. Maybe a lot. "You wanted to know. You feared you'd done something terrible. Sacrified something that shouldn't have been. It wasn't the case. The ritual just called for obscene wealth as you needed a mirror made of diamonds and a goblet carved from a ruby. The lifelike wax sculpter of yourself was the cheapest ingredient."
"And you've just been here the whole time?"
"Yes. And you give me your memory of meeting me every time. Only after you ask if it's possible to end it. It is, just blow the candle out." I gesture to where it stands on the top of an elaborately carved stand. Blood red wax with an ethereal blue flame. it gives no heat and barely any light."
"Do you want me to?"
"By every star in the sky, yes." Hope, hope I haven't had in decades. You ounce believed the stars were gods, and since I hold everything you ounce were, I still do.
"I can't just leave them without a leader."
And so the cycle will continue. I wonder if in time I'd lose the ability to talk. Already my voice is raspy and thin.
"I'll remember this time, and come back, when I have a heir. Someone to fill the role or perhaps I need to change the role." You stand and the chair screeches across the floor impossibly loud. "I'm sorry. I think.... I think I'm ready, but it'd be selfish to just disappear. To end when so many depend on me."
I don't get up. As time passes I'm not sure I can. Cobwebs grow in the corners, a few rats venture in but quickly leave. Their animal brains know there is nothing for them here. They know this is an unnatural place. I sleep with such stillness the spiders even weave their homes around me. It's fine. I've not the strength to move.
Footsteps rouse me. Your footsteps, coming down the stair case to these hidden depths.
"But sire, I'm not sure I'm ready." A young women's voice. A true youth unlike you. "If you do this, it'll only be my word that I didn't do something to you. The suspicion will be there. "
"I have made it known I am leaving." Your voice, strong with weary resolve.
Two of you walk in and you both take in a deep breath of the still air. The young women asks, "Is he alive?"
"Yes," I manage in a pained whisper.
"But not for much longer." You by the candle. "This, the suffering and everything he experiences is the cost of my long life."
"It seems worth it for what you built."
"No," We say in unison.
You blow out the candle. For a moment I am middle aged man you were when this spell was first cast. And then I am wax again, unthinking, unmoving, a figurine.
The women watches with horror as your lifeless body ages through centuries leaving only dusty bones and a wax sculpture. The candle is gone, the ruby holder shattered. The how of the ritual is lost to time, though there's no saying that someone with resources couldn't find it again.