Death Do Us Part
A Short Story
The man had always refused to give himself a name, because none of them ever quite seemed to fit. And it wasn’t that he’d never tried — he’d once spent three decades with the same face while he was fighting in the ninth Roman Legion, but he’d been forced to wash that one away after he’d found himself wanted for desertion. He’d opted for something a little less conspicuous after that: darker eyes, shorter hair, a slightly paler skin tone — he’d kept that feature around until the late Renaissance, if he remembered rightly.
The point is, he’d never felt comfortable keeping the same name once he’d discovered what he could do; it was like naming a wave just before it crashed and became another unrecognizable part of the ocean, without form or substance. Better to pretend it had never existed, knowing that while those droplets are still floating around in the ocean, they’ll never reform in the exact way ever again.
That’s how he’d always felt about Shifting — particularly in those early years. He may technically have been the same person underneath whatever new body he’d designed for himself, but he’d never found that easy to believe when he saw a stranger’s face looking back at him in the mirror. Imagine waking up one day, your consciousness lying beneath another man’s skin, the world only accessible through another man’s eyes — would you still consider yourself the same person as the night before?
That’s why he’d never liked the word ‘shapeshifting’ — it was so much more than his shape that he was losing every time.
His current face, admittedly, was one of his favorites. Bold, rich brown eyes rested on a pale, chiseled face that was much thinner than he usually opted for, with a fairly small nose sitting just above his thick, bushy beard. The hair was shoulder-length and black, brushed over to the left with a deep flow that he’d carried over from one of his Enlightenment-era looks. Though he didn’t need them, he’d found himself a pair of rounded brow line glasses that he’d grown rather fond of since adopting the face about four years ago.
It was around that time when he’d first moved to Fort Ilyad — an elusively remote island just off the Scottish highlands, where he’d bunkered up in an old-timey white cottage after his last face had caused a little too much trouble in the 7th Arrondissement. He’d figured the solitude would prove beneficial, give him some time to wind down from what had been an abnormally chaotic century, but he’d never expected to fall so hopelessly in love with the place he’d found.
The entire island came in at just under 180 acres, with a grand total of six people (himself included) living upon it. There was an older couple, Ian and Gwen, whose rustic manor sat comfortably upon Fort Ilyad’s northern cliffs, overlooking the crystal waters of the north sea from the front and the deep valleys that separated them from the rest of the island’s inhabitants from behind. The others had only ever introduced themselves as ‘the Larkins’, two younger newlyweds who’d blown their lottery fortune on a new-build mansion on the island’s port, moving in with their adopted daughter about nine months ago.
They seemed decent people, but people had never really been the man’s strong suit. He much preferred to keep himself to himself, rarely leaving the woodlands that surrounded his modest cottage except for a quiet shopping trip to the mainland when the ferry came into port every two weeks. It was a life he’d grown incredibly fond of, alternating his afternoons between quiet, solitary hikes through the endless woodlands and lengthy painting sessions upon the clifftops — a skill he’d learned from Édouard Manet during the many summers they’d passed with his wife in the early ‘70s.
The entire thing was a much-needed change of pace. His previous life had been somewhat of a blur, spent between the extreme throws of hedonism and the painful grips of reality, with the sharp talons of immortality finally catching up with him. There’s only so much one person can do with eternal life — which he’d quickly learned is nothing more than a shortcut to feeling less alive. So he’d spent the past few centuries doing things that his mind wouldn’t allow him to remember, let alone his mouth find the courage to speak. It turns out there are very few places a person won’t go when they know they can simply change their face and escape the consequences.
It was late winter when he first spotted a fresh face on Fort Ilyad. He’d spent the early morning taking a stroll along the cliffs, as he always did on Thursdays, absorbing the landscapes and trying to remember why he’d ever decided to spend his lives anywhere else. It had been a particularly cold day — he remembered that much. Armed with his thickest coat and wrapped in a deep blue scarf, he must’ve spent three or four hours up there before he caught sight of the woman who lurked about half a mile behind him.
She was much too far away for him to make sense of any of her features, and even further away to decide whether or not he recognized her, but something about the woman had immediately struck him as distinct. Her figure was perched atop a jagged rock on the summit of another cliff on the other side of the valley, holding something firm in her grasp. But before he found a chance to examine her closer, or even call her over, she stood without warning and began her descent of the cliffs in the opposite direction.
It wasn’t often that he found himself so fundamentally thrown off balance by other people’s company, but the way he’d caught her eyes locked onto him from such a distance had admittedly shaken him up. It didn’t help that the bright sun had been shining right into his eyes, but he was certain that the woman was neither Gwen nor the Larkins’ daughter — both of whom were much smaller and stockier than she’d been. Regardless, the man attempted to put the woman out of his mind and continued with his walk, but the rest of the day passed wearily in the shadow of his encounter.
It was three weeks later before he saw her again, on a snowy evening in the depths of December. The island’s peaks had begun to gather plenty of sleet and ice, which made his early-morning hikes across the cliffs more or less impossible, forcing him down to the coast in search of a little solitude. The shores were layered with sporadic formations of rocks, along which he climbed gingerly away from the green fields until he came to a spacious cavern in the island’s walls. Sunlight reflected off the surface of the ocean and into the cave, lighting up a deep expanse that seemed to fall back endlessly into the heart of the mountains, lined with pointed stones and dripping moss.
The man traversed across the rocks until he was close enough to enter the cavern, gripping tight to the few natural indents in the walls that allowed him to stay on his two feet. Once inside, he took a seat on the damp floor and caught himself breathing in the oceanic landscapes that emerged from the area he’d just come from. The door of the cave served as a dark frame for the beauty of the sea outside, with the jagged rocks highlighting just how still the waters lay at this time of year. He made a mental note to bring his canvas down here.
As he’d suspected, the caverns stretched deep back into the island and quickly opened up into an expansive network of natural tunnels and openings, through which the man saw huge valleys that ran hundreds of feet below him. The pure scale of the system took his breath away; it was an entire world, the space for a whole city of people underneath the island that he’d been calling home. But he was wandering too far from the entrance, and light was running dangerously thin. His eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness and he continued through one of the tunnels, ensuring to map the route in his mind.
The experience reminded him of a life he’d lived several centuries ago, when he’d spent a few years working in the coal mines during his brief stay in Manchester under Victoria’s reign. Even then, when his days had been filled with such labor that now seemed unfathomable to him, the existence of such a sweeping, comprehensive world beneath his own had both excited and terrified him. The hidden beauty had just been another reminder that we truly knew nothing about this planet, and despite the endless years that he could spend roaming and seeing the world through fresh eyes, its scale never failed to amaze him.
Eventually, the light that shone through the cavern’s opening was diminished completely, and the man was forced to postpone the rest of his venture until he found a flashlight to give him some guidance. Putting to use the sense of direction that he’d often prided himself on, the man turned on his heels and prepared to retrace his steps towards the entrance, when a faint sound in the distance caught his attention.
It was nothing more than a weak splash, the sound of something dropping from the cave’s ceiling into a puddle on the ground, but it took him by surprise and his instincts guided him to look over his shoulder.
There, no more than 20 meters away from him, two sharp blue eyes peered through the pitch darkness.
Earlier in his life, his mind would’ve screamed at him to turn and run as fast as he could — but over time immortality has a way of changing your survival instincts. No matter how much he’d tried to bury the arrogance and self-righteousness of his previous lives, he’d never been able to destroy them completely. When you can’t die, it’s hard to view anything as a real threat.
The man took a cautious step forward, holding his weight on his back foot to ensure he didn’t slip off any kind of ledge, with all light basically extracted from the tunnel. The eyes held their position, staring right into his own, unblinking. He’d never been particularly good at reading others (his mind had often paid more attention to himself) but as he looked into those eyes, he could read them more clearly than he could hear his own thoughts.
They were filled with more depth, more emotions, more experience than he’d ever seen in another’s eyes besides his own. Both brand new and infinitely old at the same time, brimming with a million years of life and reflecting the birth and death of entire civilizations that had fallen in front of them. And he knew at that moment that those eyes were seeing the same eternal consciousness as in his own.
In the same way he’d read those piercing eyes in less than an instant, the man was also overcome with absolute certainty that he’d seen them before, albeit from a distance, three weeks prior upon the cliffs. He was forced to look away, desperate to break away from whatever primal connection he’d stumbled into, and that was when the woman took her chance. She was gone in an instant, darting through the shadows even further into the darkness where she knew he couldn’t follow.
He wanted to chase after her, to hold her down and demand to know what she was doing here, but some greater force was keeping his feet welded to the ground beneath him.
It couldn’t have been her.
Their last encounter was further back in his memories than he could even access after so many years of life, but he’d spent centuries thinking about the way her eyes used to grow and fill with life whenever they locked onto his. They were different now, a rich emerald green in comparison to the pale blue ones he remembered, but the soul behind them had been exactly the same.
But it couldn’t have been her.
The man tried to put the thought out of his mind, to bury it behind countless lifetimes of long-forgotten memories, before making his way back to the mouth of the cave and climbing out into the fresh air once again. The rest of his day passed like any other, albeit a little colder, and the long winter afternoons began to bleed into one another as he found himself obsessed with meeting her again.
Mapping the caves became the most important part of his days; he’d travel down there shortly after sunrise and rarely would he emerge again before it set again the following evening. The process took months of hard labor and exploration as he made his way through the complex systems, often weighed down by the backpack of food he’d need to make it through the night, tracing a detailed map of the caverns as he progressed. He quickly learned to set up makeshift campsites in the larger tunnels where he could safely spend the night, leaving piles of supplies in the well-lit areas that he could access on the rare occasion where he got lost.
The project lasted until the following spring, and while he must’ve spent the majority of his life tucked under the surface of Fort Ilyad, he never once encountered the woman again. He often wondered if she was watching from the shadows, following his movements and keeping herself hidden, though he’d never managed to draw her out from the dark. He’d even once feigned an injury to see if she’d emerge to his aid, but nothing greeted him except the deafening silence of the chasms.
He still ventured down there sometimes when the solitude of the outside world was a little too much, comforted by the knowledge of her presence in the shadows. But his visits grew more sparse and sporadic as the months progressed, deciding instead to make the most of the summer months and continue his long hikes throughout Fort Ilyad’s beautiful landscapes. The encounter slowly began to fade into his memory, though it was among the few that never drifted away into the forgotten.
The ice soon began to grace the clifftops once again, and the man’s fifth winter in Fort Ilyad had arrived. The cold was even sharper than he remembered, confining him to his cottage on most days and turning the outside world into a place he’d only visit on those rare afternoons that reading by his fireplace didn’t satisfy his thirst for exploration. His nights were spent with a warm coffee by the typewriter, where he was working on a novel (under the guise of fiction) about a particularly eventful life he’d lived in the Byzantine Empire. The process had even brought him closer to his neighbor Ian, who’d spent his early years as an acclaimed writer of historical fiction.
It was on a particularly stormy night that he was dragged from his creative trance by a soft knock at the door. He scribbled a quick note to remind him of where his story was going before finishing off his coffee and making his way towards the hallway, where the silhouette of a tall, slender woman shone through his blurred glass window.
Seven people on the island, three women, and two of them were much smaller and stockier than that.
Opening the door finally gave him his first clear glimpse of the woman he’d first seen atop the cliffs almost a year ago, and whose stare had transfixed him in the caves just weeks later. Her face was subtly cold, with round green eyes that immediately locked onto his and forbade him from looking directly at them, like the sun during an eclipse. Wavy brown hair flowed from underneath her hood, tracing its way down her back and tangling into her thick winter coat. She was both exactly as he remembered and completely unfamiliar.
“Can I come in?” she asked, the faintest waver in her calm voice. He could do nothing but stand there, frozen in disbelief and unable to bring his voice to life. The face was so different from the one he remembered, almost entirely disguising her within this new body — but then so was his. A million questions raced through his mind, but none of them could break through the intoxicating mixture of overwhelming comfort and cold apprehension that kept his mouth soldered shut. “Theseus?” she pressed.
It was a name the man hadn’t heard for what must’ve been a thousand years, and the way it sounded coming from this unfamiliar voice thrust him back to reality.
“Yeah. Come in,” were the only words that he managed to press through her lips, but she grabbed the invitations by the horns and shuffled through the doorway beside him. Her coat dripped on the man’s Persian rug, but he barely even noticed. The knowledge that she’d found her way back to him after all these centuries was enough to render him completely speechless. It took longer than he’d like to admit before he caught himself and followed her into the living room.
The woman had already made herself at home, perched on the edge of the oak desk upon which he’d been previously writing the new manuscript — only moments ago, yet confined to a world that he knew would never be the same again.
“That’s not how it happened,” she noted, tracing her finger along the pages of his story and smiling at the memories that belonged only to the two of them. Thousands of years ago, shared in an empire that had both risen and fallen before them. More silence ensued. “Did you forget to Shift a mouth this time?”
“No,” he answered. The man was completely aware of the mundanity of his speech, but it didn’t seem particularly important. “How did you find me?”
“It wasn’t easy,” she admitted. “But I found you in Paris.”
The realization of her answer shook him; not many people can accurately claim to have been a different person earlier in their life, but that couldn’t be more true of the man’s time living in Paris. Immortality is long — infinitely longer than the longest amount of time a mortal brain can even imagine — and not even the strongest of characters would be able to uphold a spotless moral compass for that long. Eventually, curiosity gets the better of you. What exactly can you get away with in the complete absence of consequence? How far will people go when their actions can’t be punished? The man had answered those questions for himself in Paris, and the realization that she knew about that time in his life conjured more shame than anything he’d done there.
“That wasn’t me.”
“Nor was it me.” Her response confused him at first, but as he looked upon her new appearance, comparing it with the face that looked back at him in all their memories together, a line of reasoning began to take place. He’d changed since then, why couldn’t she have? They were both Shifters, after all, blessed with eternal life and cursed with the ability to watch it play out. “I’d been following you for a while,” she continued, “but I caught up with you in Paris. The person you’d become… it wasn’t the right time. But I stuck behind you, I followed you here, I watched you from the shadows until I knew you’d left that person behind.”
Once again, silence ensued. The man didn’t know what to say. Here, not five feet in front of him, was the only person in the universe who understood what it meant to see the world burn away and rebuild itself century after century, a person whose permanent exit from his world he’d come to terms with hundreds of years ago. They’d shared more than his brain had the capacity to remember — but he didn’t recognize her.
“They’ve never been green before. Your eyes.”
“I thought it was time for a change,” she smiled. He struggled to do the same. They were different — not the same eyes that had stood by his side as they watched Alexandria burn all those years ago. These were the eyes that had lived for hundreds of years alone, reunited only by visions of their oldest friend transformed into a monster. He didn’t even know what she called herself now.
“What are you doing here?”
“I found a cure.”
In the years that would follow this encounter, the man would look back on those four words as the moment his life changed forever. Even as science advanced and humans got perpetually closer to a fuller understanding of the universe, neither had ever thought they’d understand the reason behind their abilities, let alone how to reverse them. A normal human life — it was all either of them had ever dreamed of. The ability to live with the knowledge that it wouldn’t last forever, that your actions actually mattered.
She explained the logistics of the cure, working through every detail of the science that they’d missed, but the man was barely listening. Because now, faced with the real possibility of sacrificing what he’d always considered his unshakeable curse, the prospect chilled him to the bone. To become human, to take accountability for the things he’d done and would do.
“I don’t want it.” The man took a step backward, pressing his back gently against the walls of his cabin, reminding himself that he did indeed find himself in the real world and not a dream. The expression that appeared on his old friend’s face wasn’t one of surprise, but rather disappointment and apprehension. As though she’d expected this response and already figured out her solution.
“I’m sorry, Theseus. You don’t have a choice.”
He was defensive now. “What, you’re going to kill me?”
“Nobody gets to live forever. It’s not right. You’ve seen what immortality does to a person, is that really who you want to be? We’ve already been given so much more than everybody else, more than we can even remember. It’s enough. We’ve gone too far.” He knew she was making sense, but he didn’t want to hear it. The man was seeing red, he could feel his life slipping through his fingers and he’d do anything to keep it, for it was all he knew. “I’m not killing you,” she continued, “you’ll get a normal lifetime like everybody else. Like we deserve.”
“And if I don’t want it?”
The next sentence came like a blow to his soul, and if her previous words were the turning point of his life, this was the denouement.
“It’s already done. Six months ago, when you fell asleep in the caves.”
Four Years Later
It took longer than he’d expected, but he’d made it.
Their last interaction hadn’t ended particularly amicably — he’d spare the details, but immortals don’t take particularly well to their lifespan gaining an expiration date. Words had been spoken that neither had meant, tears had been shed that neither had wanted, and truths had been brought to light that neither had anticipated. It was a depressing end to their story, rooted in hatred and betrayal.
It had taken years for him to realize that she’d saved his life that night. For the first time in centuries, Theseus noticed the sound of birdsong when he awoke. He smelled the sea salt in the air, and when he tripped over a thick root on his hike, he felt the pain shoot down his leg. His world had been opened once again to a flood of sensations that he’d forgotten multiple lifetimes ago. He learned what it meant to paint a truly beautiful picture, or compose an excellent piece of music. He began to travel the world again, rediscovering those wonders that he’d seen countless times before, but this time through the lens of a man who knew he might never see them again.
He thought about the future — all the things he’d never see, the people he’d never meet, the pain he’d never suffer. These became instead the burdens of those hypothetical ‘others’ that we know will walk the Earth after us, though we know nothing of their lives, faces, or even their names. The universe’s problems become theirs, and Theseus felt an immense weight lift from his shoulders.
It had taken four years before he tracked her down again. It was a long story — perhaps one for another day — but he’d eventually caught sight of her at a temple in Tokyo, where he’d followed her to an ornate apartment in the city center. It was outside this building where he stood now, the busy crowds of the Japanese capital swarming around him in the perfect disguise.
Not that he needed a disguise, of course. She might have been able to get rid of his endless life, but the ability to shift his appearance had stuck with him long after her exit. He’d tried plenty of new looks over the years, each one feeling fresh and exciting despite knowing that he’d worn them before. Right now, he’d settled on a more classic appearance with short blonde hair swept to the side and unremarkable eyes that felt to him so charmingly human. He’d told himself this would be his final Shift, and he stuck to that promise for the rest of his life.
It took six hours before she eventually emerged from her apartment, making her way across the road with two plastic bags in each hand and an unlit cigarette hanging from her mouth. She looked exactly the same as that unfathomably distant night on Fort Ilyad. Theseus spotted his moment, pushing his way through the crowds and allowing the background noise of life to wash over him as he thought about what he was going to say to her. Would she forgive him? Would she be happy? Sad? The truth was Theseus had no idea, and for the first time in his life, that was the most exciting prospect in the world.
