The Choice Immortal

At first glance it is hard to tell the age of the man standing by the corner. The wind plays with his dark hair, not yet faded with the grey of age, but his eyes are old, old as the stars, old as sorrow. His gait is upright, his bearing kingly, but always you are drawn to the eyes, for his green eyes tell you not to believe the lies of his stance or face, or even voice. This boy is old.

Presently, he relinquishes his sentinel duty in order to approach a dark-cloaked, dark-hatted, well-shadowed man. The man turn apprehensively at his approach, but recognising him, as most do, he smiles, a thin-lipped, broken teethed, ill used smile, and invites him into a shop with a wave of his muffled arm. You can follow them.

Inside the shop is dank and dark, and like its owner, for so the dark man is, it wears a mantle of shadow, and hints at a thousand secrets. The man's voice is soft and gentle and by terms harsh and grating, he speaks of many things with our old/young man.

"It is of course the most dangerous way," the shadow-man says with a knowing smile like grim death a-waiting. The young man nods, impatient, he knows it.

"The question is though, will it work?" he asks edgily

Grim death smiles ones more

"If you doubt me boy, then leave."

The boy mustn't doubt him for he stays, and presently there is some haggling and coins that glint with more than sun change hands. Death goes to one of the shelves and removes one bottle, then another, slowly and carefully he shifts them together, adds a pinch of this, a quart of that, the parts of something long dead, the hope of one about to die. He smiles, and stoppers it. The lost wizard takes the murky concoction and leaves the shop as silently as he entered.

Outside on the street few people move, for the bright of day the streets are eerily silent, but if you look but a block away there is action and life, busy shoppers hurry to and fro completely unaware that so close by lies the dark goods supplied only by those with hearts of pitch and demanded only by those whose hearts are black with sorrow.

Our wizard, so obvious on the dark street of midnight-wares seems to vanish, to slide from view as he enters the lighted, nosy, bustle of a street at use. But you can follow him. He slips through the passer-bys, lightly, easily. You have to wonder, can he be quite human?

But just as you are beginning to doubt he halts. He stands, not to close to the window to draw attention, but close enough to see in. Through the pale glass is a restaurant, inside sit many people, ordinary people, eating and drinking, as one is wont to do in a restaurant. You have to wonder which table draws his attention, for there are many, at one an old woman and an older man are drinking tea from a fine silver service at another a man dressed entirely in black is scribbling furiously into a scrappy note book, you recognise him, a poet immortal. At another table sits a young women staring intently at a young man who gesticulates with his wand, at still another a purple cloaked witch cackling at the pin-stripped warlock, nearby a fetching young witch is sitting with friends and carefully not eating. All these you see and many more, but how could any of these hold our strange wanderers attention you wonder. Well so does he.

He glances away sadly, as if snubbed, and continues his impossible, gliding walk. Finally he turns off the major street, into a smaller street which becomes a road, then a lane and finally an alley, perhaps here lies the secret of his calm familiarity with the Street of Dark Desires. A narrow door leads up a staircase into a small room. Here our traveller is at home.

Or at least as home as one could be in such dull surroundings. For dull it is, here there is nothing for the eye to set on, nothing for the senses to feed off. All is still and grey and plain. Like a home the day before the new owners arrive, but worse, for the owners, or owner in our case, is here and does not care. The house seems to sense this and the sensitive listener can hear it sigh and mourn.

The careless owner sets down his dark package on a table and moves into the kitchen to set himself a colourless meal, the province of those who eat only because it is required.

He eats, neatly and compactly, cleans up with magic, and you have to wonder why with magic at his command he does as poorly as this. But the house, like its owner, are giving away no clues.

He stands up from his table and moves quietly into the next room. Finally there is colour, there is life. The floors are littered with clippings, the walls covered with photos, maps, report and old documents. One cannot help but wonder what sort of life it is that we have found here in this dusty room.

Carefully the lifeless one walks through the room with the ease of motion honed by practise. He begins at the far corner, with what, we learn, is the first clipping and slowly, religiously he reads. First one, then the next, then the next after that and so one. One wonders what he sees, why he bothers. It is of course easy to guess why lonely young men store pictures of attractive young women. But in this case it is different. In every picture stares starkly out the face of the same witch, and as if in mute testament to his good intentions we see her, her arm around our wizards shoulders, or waist. Looking at these photos you don't have to be a diviner to know that they must have been close. Perhaps then a jilted love, not uncommon in these days, or those past for that matter. What then of the papers?

He reaches the end of his reading, and softly, quietly sighs, you sense he would weep, if the refuge of that sweet comfort were left open. But on the lines of his face you can see the pain too deeply etched for weeping. Too constant for storms of passion, dying promises, immortal regrets. One wonders, can you still feel sharp at this buyer of forbidden promises and magics unclean? For sympathy stirred is transgressions forgiven.

The wizard moves back into the first room and turn to a small closet, or cupboard, or perhaps trunk, indistinguishable from the grey that surrounds it. He reaches in and removes a leather bound tome. He sits back down at his chair to stare at his potion, slowly he opens the book to a page well creased, well read, well known. He reads the ornate script, quietly, softly, sitting alone in his darkening room. As he reads he fingers the potion, gently, delicately, like it were a child, or someone precious.

Watching, waiting for him to finish reading takes an eternity, surely he must have read it once, twice, once more. He looks up from the book and sighs, he pushes his well written companion away from him, takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, and finally lays his head in his hands. You can if you choose to this opportunity to move closer, to lean your elbows on the warn table even as he does and to peer intently at the elegantly curling script. Of course you look, who wouldn't? We may shun to talk of the Dark Arts, forbid our children to search, but to look at the written word does not harm, surely. The closely written text bears no title, but as you read you come to understand its meaning, it speaks of a potions but not of how to make it. You wonder, how dangerous must it be, how deadly, for such a book as this not to mention so much as the ingredients? Still you read its purpose. It is, when you read closely not so much an inherently evil spell as one that could be, and here you pause here to think, it could be twisted. It is, when the talk of ethics is over, a spell to bring to the drinker what he most desires.

The boy, for so he looks with those terrible eyes hidden, stirs, creeps away from his text silently, he sits up and swallows painfully. Can he mean to use the spell? You wonder, horrified, but you already know, you've seen the photos, the grim determination, the silent grief. Even death you can see would be better than this silent suffocating pain.

He smiles and stands, surely he intends to drink the potions, to be heroic and daring you cry. But he appears not. He pushes in the chair, returns the book to its cupboard. Slowly he crosses from one room to another, first to the tiny kitchen, where a few silent charms are muttered over food. Hungry? You yell, is this what our strange pale mage is, hungry not heroic? But before you have time to get really grouchy he crosses once more to the potion room as you have began to call it. But not alas to the potion. Instead he enters a small room, darker still than the rest, more cupboard than room and in the room is . . . a bed. You are disappointed, briefly, then calm, perhaps he is not a hero, just a man, a man with sad eyes. He straightens the cover of the already immaculate bed, does this man sleep, you wonder, so neat is the bed.

He walks back to the room with the table, but not to the potion, this time you are unsurprised, you can see that he does not play by the rules, does not play to the audience, perhaps, it is because he does not know that you are there. He moves to the photo room to glance once more at our strange silent witch, he touches photo, longingly, lovingly. The photos smiles at him and waves, a travesty to memory. He walks back to the room and sits at the table, suddenly, before you can stop him, he reaches for the potion and drinks it down.

He pales, swallows hard, clutches at his stomach, moans, you expect, any minute that he will die. But warlocks, out of long habit, have evolved into a hardy race and he is no exception, he does not die, instead he suffers.

As does she! Or so it seems through the swiftly the spreading, lacy patterned, otherworldly mist. He reaches out, longingly lovingly, for her he'd take the pain, but something jerks him back. Back to a quiet plane of grey. Grey mist, grey cloud, grey sand, indistinguishable. The tension surrounding you shifts and settles, far away a million men sleep, eat, are born and die. But on this plane there is nothing, the stillness of tombs settles, the ageless graceless tranquillity of linden trees, the harsh stillness of the strict pines, the full blowsy scent of rotting roses rise and fall with the breaths of our wounded mage. A voice, cold with command, still, silent, it laughs, and a voice of diamond slices through the air.

Then it is gone and you, you are alone, lost, confused. It is unexplained and unexpected. But slowly as the force of your surprise wares off and the lingering, malingering taste of the bitter potion is consumed by memory you begin to drift.

Tomorrow the doves will cry and a still breeze will pray across the Lands. And in a dark forest years from here a centaur will stare sadly up at the stars, for the Boy who Lived has chosen to die.

A/N: Please review!