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By Root 925 0

’s body, as his mind raced back to that night, to the one thing he would forever regret. He needed to repair the damage that his lack of thought and consideration had led to. He needed to prove himself as his mother’s son. After all, mothers brought you into the world. They then fed you, clothed you, showed you immeasurable kindness. They gave you everything they had. True his mother was a bitter woman sometimes, but that wasn’t important. All that mattered to Randur, in retrospect, was that the one night she needed him, he had not been there.

He had failed her.

“So,” Randur said, ignoring the last question, “what … I mean, how will you manage this?”

“Just leave that to the specialists, young man. Believe me, this isn’t the first time I’ve been approached to play about with the laws of the cosmos. I’ve been in Villjamur for … a lifetime. Women come asking to be made prettier, or slimmer, or younger. Men come asking me to increase their virility. I’ve had prostitutes ask me to stop the pain they suffer in their jobs, have their internal muscles numbed or senses stopped so doing their work does not hurt them. I’ve even had drug addicts crying out for help. I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve seen it all, and I say to them all—let me see your coin, and I’ll investigate if the technology exists.”

In a glass orb stationed in the corner of his primary workroom, Dartun watched the young man leave. The orb was linked to another on an external wall, surrounded by marbles as a decorative feature, and it displayed an exaggerated caricature slipping away along the backstreets of a black and white Villjamur.

So, this Randur wanted his mother to live a long time. Fine, that’s possibly simple enough—a few months or a year at the most. He might even make her outlive her son if he was lucky. Randur had some charm, some vague charisma that appealed to Dartun. He would help the lad, but knew that the treatments would not last, knew that it wasn’t a process good enough for himself. Dartun once possessed eternal life, thanks to the Ancients’ technology. Once a year he had injected himself with a serum generated by relic-energy, a relatively simple procedure considering what else he had achieved—but now he was dying.

He discovered that the Dawnir relic technology was beginning to fail him the day he cut himself with a razor. Some time ago now: there it was, a red line through his skin. Standing up against the mirror. Candle brought close to his face. A line of cut skin that filled quickly with blood. Red liquid leaked into the sink, little drops of his own death.

He was suddenly aware of so many things that could kill a person:

A back-hoofing horse.

Disenchanted young swordsmen with something to prove.

Mishandling a relic.

Poisoned food.

There were banshees waiting at every corner.

He gathered as many of the relevant relics as he could find, spent sleepless nights in distant places until he could figure out what was going on and so prevent his aging, utterly convinced that he could find some solution.

Some cure for his forthcoming death.

And he hadn’t yet. At the time he wrote down his thoughts in a journal, wondering about the words lingering after he had gone:

So how is it that I can still communicate from beyond the grave? How can I talk to you now? Words on the page, no less. Is this how we live on, in these little gestures? These trails left throughout our own existence—a note here, a pissed-off lover there? Something poignant we said to someone. Advice we gave. A joke we told.

Little pieces of ourselves donated to the world.

Is this what makes me live eternally?

Spurred on by these thoughts, and by the visit of Randur, Dartun went deeper into his labs to look at the Shelley tanks.

A darkened room in the deepest corner of his order’s headquarters. To one side seven corpses were laid out, claimed from the streets of Villjamur by good old Tarr, but he had hopes for the ones in the Shelley tanks: they were not dead to begin with. The tanks were arranged in two rows, the bathtub-like metal basins filled with regeneration