The Wrong Kind of Immortality

They arrived at the meadow to find Eleuthera already seated on the blanket, three cups of tea poured, watching the southern sky with the attentive stillness of someone anticipating a show.

“You’re early,” the goddess said.

“You told us to hurry,” Eirene replied.

“I told you it would be worth watching. The hurrying was your interpretation.” She picked up a cup and sipped. “Sit. It hasn’t started yet.”

Orestis set the bag of salted caramel popcorn on the blanket. Eleuthera’s eyes lit up. She reached for it immediately.

Eirene sat down and accepted a cup of tea. Orestis joined them and said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

Eleuthera waved a hand. The viewing fold opened, resolving into a bird’s-eye view of the Thorngate corridor.

The pass was a narrow cut between two peaks, its floor strewn with rubble from weeks of fighting. Two armies faced each other across the corridor. Logrion held the northern approach—aura-enhanced soldiers in mountain gear, two Exemplars visible near the front lines. Kallistrate held the south, their formation thinner than it should have been. The gaps were obvious even from this altitude.

The anti-gate ward field was already active—standard procedure for any engagement now.

It looked routine. Another assault on another pass. Two low-to-mid range Exemplars leading the charge. Nothing that would warrant a goddess’s attention.

“Why is this one special?” Orestis asked.

Eleuthera smiled and pointed. “Look at the soldier near the left flank. Third row from the front.”

Orestis looked. A cloaked figure, unremarkable at first glance—mountain gear, hood up, blending into the ranks. Nothing about his posture or movement distinguished him from the soldiers around him.

Then he noticed the weapon in the soldier’s hand.

Dark metal. A broad, curved axe head, its upper edge extended into a long, tapering blade that turned the weapon into something between an axe and a sword. That particular design was widely used throughout Logrion, adopted as a mark of respect for the artefact it was modelled after.

But this was not an imitation; it was the original. And there was only one man who carried it.

“That’s Logrion’s king,” he said quietly. Eleuthera was right; this would be worth watching.

Eirene looked at him. “How can you tell? His aura is completely hidden.”

“The weapon. That’s Skarjern—the royal weapon of Logrion. Forged from an alloy called dyrstal.” He said, eyes still on the cloaked figure. “It’s the only weapon created by mortal hands that can rival divine artefacts.”

That drew Eirene’s interest. “Truly? What makes it so special?”

“Dyrstal conducts aura directly through the material—not as external reinforcement, but as a true conduit. And it has no upper limit. The more aura you channel through it, the more it amplifies. A Stage II user wielding a dyrstal blade could project aura arcs at range—something that normally requires Stage III at minimum. A peak Exemplar like the king…” He trailed off. “There’s a reason the metal is a national treasure.”

Eirene considered that. “If it’s that valuable, why hasn’t anyone replicated it?”

“The alloy was a fluke. An early master smith produced it by accident and was never able to reproduce it. Dozens have tried since. None have succeeded.” He paused, then glanced at Eleuthera. “Actually, I’ve always wondered—why didn’t Koldar ever help them recreate it?”

Eirene looked up. “Koldar?”

“The Blacksmith God,” Orestis said.

“He wanted to,” Eleuthera said, reaching for more popcorn. “But Veranthos stepped in.”

Orestis scoffed. “Figures.”

Eirene looked between them. “Why would the God of Magic intervene?”

“He’s something of an elitist,” Orestis said. “Dyrstal in the hands of every aura user in Logrion would collapse the power gap between mages and aura fighters. Stage II soldiers projecting aura arcs, fresh Exemplars hitting with force that rivals peak Sovereigns—Veranthos couldn’t allow the prestige of mages to fall like that.”

“That’s almost exactly how it went,” Eleuthera said, sounding faintly impressed. “Though Veranthos didn’t frame it quite so bluntly. He argued that part of dyrstal’s value was its rarity. If it were common, it would lose its legendary status. Allowing it to remain a mystery would elevate the metal beyond mere function—make it symbolic, aspirational. He had all sorts of reasons. Very eloquent.” She ate another piece of popcorn. “In the end, he convinced Koldar to leave dyrstal as an exclusive possession of the royal family.”

“And Koldar agreed?” Eirene asked.

“Koldar is a craftsman. He cares about the work, not the politics. Veranthos made it sound like he was protecting the work’s legacy.” The goddess tilted her head at Orestis. “You seem to know Veranthos well. Have you met him?”

A pause. Not long. But deliberate.

“In a different life,” he said.

The words sat in the air. Eleuthera’s expression didn’t change, but her attention sharpened. Eirene went very still.

Well, I did say I would tell her.

Orestis turned to look at Eirene. “I was involved in a magical accident—in the future. It sent my soul back into the past, into my younger body. Everything I know—everything I’ve done since waking up as a child—is built on a thousand years of experience that hasn’t happened yet.”

Silence.

Eirene’s expression didn’t crack. She didn’t gasp, or pull back, or demand elaboration. She sat with it—the way she sat with every piece of significant information. Processing. Connecting. The inconsistencies she had been cataloguing for months—the knowledge that didn’t fit, the certainty that had no visible source, the way he spoke about systems and gods and magic with the familiarity of someone who had lived inside them—all of it clicking into place.

“That explains a great deal,” she said.

“It does!” Eleuthera leaned forward. “Is that how you know me? Did we meet in the future?”

Orestis gave the goddess a flat look. “I couldn’t keep you away. Why do you think I’m so good with wards?”

Eleuthera’s eyes widened. Then a grin spread across her face—bright, delighted, entirely too pleased with herself. “Did you ever manage to make one that worked?”

“Obviously not. Your divinity is just as broken as it’s always been.”

She puffed up visibly. Then she turned to Eirene with an expression that could only be described as showing off. “Did you hear that? Even with a thousand years, he couldn’t block me.”

“I heard,” Eirene said. There was something quiet in her voice—not shock, or confusion. Something closer to relief. As if a weight she hadn’t known she was carrying had just been set down.

Orestis watched her for a moment. He had expected more questions. Instead, she was simply absorbing it—filing it into the framework she had already been building, adjusting the shape of everything she knew about him to accommodate this one enormous truth.

She doesn’t press. Maybe that’s what makes the truth easier to give.

“We can talk about it more later,” he said. “The battle is starting.”

Through the viewing fold, they saw the two Exemplars led the charge—aura flaring, weapons drawn. Logrion soldiers followed in disciplined formations, pouring into the corridor from two approach vectors. Kallistrate’s defenders met them with shields, spells, and the desperate coordination of soldiers who had been fighting retreats for weeks.

The cloaked king moved with the left flank. Not leading—blending. His suppressed aura made him invisible among the rank-and-file soldiers. He advanced steadily, keeping pace with the formation, drifting closer to the centre of the engagement with each step.

Minutes passed. The fighting intensified. Spells detonated against barriers. Aura-enhanced soldiers clashed at close range. The two Exemplars engaged Kallistrate’s senior mages, forcing them into defensive positions.

Then a gate opened high above the valley, above the anti-gate ward field’s ceiling. The Sovereign finally arrived to reinforce the base.

He flew down quickly, spell formations already blooming around him. His arrival shifted the battlefield’s weight immediately—Kallistrate soldiers rallied, Logrion soldiers braced.

The Sovereign engaged the two Exemplars using the same precise and disciplined fighting style Orestis had observed before. The Exemplars held their ground—barely. They were outmatched but not overrun.

Through the chaos, the king kept moving closer to the Sovereign’s location.

Orestis watched the gap shrink. The Sovereign’s attention was entirely on the Exemplars. He had no reason to notice one unremarkable soldier edging through the melee below him.

The king stopped. It was just beyond the artefact’s hundred-metre range by Orestis’s estimate—but close enough that a single burst of speed would bring him within it.

The king reached for the call-node at his belt, brought it up to say something. An order.

Immediately, four gates opened at different points across the battlefield. Each one disgorged a single figure, each figure clad in aura so dense it distorted the air around them.

Orestis cast a quick enhancement spell on himself and Eirene. She glanced at him in question.

“Perception enhancement,” he said. “At their level, we won’t see anything otherwise.”

She nodded, eyes already returning to the battlefield.

The four additional Exemplars moved into position across the battlefield.

King Hakon Skornevald cast off his cloak—it was less about theatrics and more about removing anything that might hinder his movement. And, Orestis guessed, because there was no need to hide himself anymore.

As for the Sovereign, he did not hesitate. He already had his hands full handling two Exemplars; there was no way he could handle six. He shot up into the sky to escape.

Of course, he still hadn’t noticed the most dangerous one—the seventh.

But that was about to change.

The moment the Sovereign flew up, Hakon launched himself into the air, his suppressed aura erupting as he gave chase.

The effect was like a pressure wave—dense and vast, rolling outward in every direction. Orestis felt the weight of it even through the viewing fold. Below, every soldier on both sides staggered. The six Exemplars braced against it.

Even the Sovereign looked back.

There was a moment—brief, vivid—where recognition, understanding, and horror crossed his face in rapid succession. He knew who was coming after him.

The king condensed aura beneath his feet for a fraction of a second, creating a semi-solid platform. He kicked against it to gain another burst of speed, narrowing the distance between them to under a hundred metres.

The Sovereign did what any reasonable person would do in his situation: he increased speed, pouring everything into acceleration. Then he swung his arm behind him—not a quick snap, but a sweeping motion, fingers splayed, the spell following the arc of his hand.

A crescent of raw energy erupted from the gesture. Not aimed precisely—hurled, the way a cornered animal lashes out. The wave screamed downward and across the landscape.

The king kicked off another platform, shifting laterally. The spell went screaming past him, close enough to heat up his armour. He corrected his trajectory again with another step, driving himself back on course toward the mage.

The spell kept going, part of the crescent striking a mountain.

The top two hundred metres of the mountain sheared off. The entire peak slid sideways, broke apart, and collapsed in a roar of pulverised stone that sent a shockwave rippling across the valley.

The remaining portion of the crescent headed towards the troops below.

But the six Exemplars were already in position, raising aura barriers. That had always been their true role: to shield the line, not to pursue the mage. The spell hit with enough force to cause ripples in their barriers. But they held without breaking. Two of the Exemplars moved to protect everyone from the falling debris.

“He was holding back all this time,” Eirene said.

“They all were,” Orestis confirmed. “With soldiers on both sides, neither the Exemplars nor the Sovereign could use their full strength without killing their own people. Now that he’s panicking, that consideration is gone.”

In the air, Hakon shot an aura arc just above the Sovereign’s flight path. The ray of compressed force was almost blinding.

The Sovereign veered hard to avoid the arc, his path now more angled towards the horizon instead of straight up. He cast again. A focused beam this time—a concentrated lance of fire dense enough to distort the light around it. It punched through the air fast enough that Orestis could barely track it even with the perception enhancement.

Hakon kicked off another platform, shifting laterally. The beam screamed past him once more—and struck the mountainside below. The impact carved a trench fifty metres long and twenty metres deep into solid rock. Molten stone glowed at the edges.

The king corrected his trajectory with another step, driving himself back on course. His expression did not change. His eyes remained locked on the Sovereign.

Hakon shot out another arc of aura, forcing the Sovereign to change trajectory as he dodged. It was intentional. Each of the king’s attacks pushed the mage’s flight path further from the armies. Herding him. Patiently. Methodically.

Having failed with both of his previous attacks, the Sovereign changed tactics—venting raw force from his hands and feet to drive himself forward while the discharge spread out behind him in a wake of destruction. Where the force touched the terrain below, it cratered. Trees were reduced to splinters. Rock formations that had stood for millennia were erased in passing.

The king drove straight through, Skarjern held out in front. The weapon split everything the blade touched, the sheer force contained within the dyrstal alloy disrupting mana formations on contact. Hakon’s aura flared around his body—a shell of condensed power that turned what remained into noise.

They were well past the range of Logrion’s ward pylons now—kilometres from the battlefield. And yet, the Sovereign still could not teleport. The suppression field followed the king, but the Sovereign did not know that.

Since teleportation didn’t seem to work, he tried opening gates in front of him. They collapsed before they could even fully form the aperture.

Orestis could see the panic set in. The Sovereign’s casting became erratic. Overcharged and unstable.

Lightning struck the ground, flash-boiling snow into steam and turning sand to glass across a half-kilometre radius. Spatial shears tore visible rents in the air—but simply aimed backward, not strategically placed. Gravity blasts cratered mountainsides.

The Sovereign was casting continuously now—not with precision, but with desperation. Filling the sky between them with a wall of destruction that anything else would have been forced to navigate around.

“He’s not even trying,” Eirene said quietly. It was obvious who she meant.

She was right. The king’s expression was neutral; focused, but without strain.

Every one of his movements was economical. Wide-area spells, he cut through. Concentrated spells, he dodged—kicking against aura to change his trajectory faster than the eye could follow. There was no wasted motion; no unnecessary expenditure.

This was clearly not hard for him.

The Sovereign’s features twisted into a grimace. He threw everything into a final gambit—a towering vortex of wind and lightning that spiralled outward around him. Not a spell in the conventional sense—a cataclysm.

The tornado stretched kilometres wide, its base tearing the mountain beneath it apart. Ice, rock, soil, and shattered trees were pulled into the rotation, turning the vortex into a grinding column of debris and electrical discharge. The sound was beyond thunder—a sustained, tearing roar that resonated through the viewing fold.

Orestis clicked his tongue. “Wasteful. He’s already seen that spells of this nature don’t work against the king. He should have used spatial shears to create distance.”

“Inexperience,” Eleuthera observed, without particular sympathy.

And loss of composure, Orestis thought.

The choice of spell was wrong on multiple levels. It blocked his vision and restricted his own manoeuvrability.

Within the eye of the storm, the mage was flying straight up—likely believing higher altitude would take him beyond whatever was interfering with his teleportation. A futile hope.

The king was leaping through the vortex, carving a channel through the spiralling destruction. Debris the size of wagons were cut through. Lightning shattered against his aura shield.

He emerged inside the eye of the vortex, directly below the Sovereign.

That was when the mage realised his mistake. The eye was wide—but it was a negligible distance to someone moving at superhuman speeds.

Even as the Sovereign released the spell, he tried to veer away, raising multiple shields between himself and the king—another mistake, not making the barriers cover him completely.

Hakon swung wide. The hooked blade reached past the barriers and caught the edge of the Sovereign’s robe. Hakon pulled.

The Sovereign was dragged downward—straight into a rising punch from Hakon’s free hand. The blow broke through the barriers. In the same motion, the king flared his aura. The flash blinded the mage. He flinched.

That moment of distraction proved fatal.

Skarjern came down, cutting him in half.

The Sovereign’s spells died all at once. Shields collapsed. Residual formations winked out. The tornado disintegrated—the debris it had been carrying fell in a rain of snow, stone and shattered wood across a square kilometre of mountainside. The air stilled.

King Hakon condensed aura beneath his feet and kicked off, turning back toward the base.

The Sovereign’s body fell away behind him.

When Hakon returned to the Thorngate corridor, the Logrion’s soldiers greeted him with cheers.

If you’d like to read more, I’m 6 chapters ahead on Patreon, along with extra lore and author notes.