Prometheus Bound by Earth

This is a short piece of fantasy fiction. Not profound, but my own weird take on an immortal.

Just because I’m immortal doesn’t mean I’m not terrified.

Most people have not given a lot of thought to the concept of immortality. If they think about it at all, they consider it a characteristic of the gods. But immortality is just one of many god-like powers attributed to ancient beings of worship, and many gods can, in fact, be killed. Or so the stories go. At the other end of the spectrum, immortality – in the common mind – is thought of as the absence of aging, the potential to live forever, perhaps even without disease, but subject to the same chance accidents and mischief as any other living being. Immortality, my immortality at least – and I know of no other – is not like that.

Immortality simply means I cannot be killed. I remain through all time pretty much as you see me today. I don’t age. If I eat too much, I may gain weight. But if I lack food, I don’t waste away into starvation. Though I feel hungry, even ravenous after a while, I simply get thinner to a point and then stabilize. If you cut me, I will bleed, but the cut will heal very quickly. A serious wound may stun me for some time, but I will quickly recover. Where it gets interesting is if my body takes too much damage. If you cut off my head, or draw and quarter me, I don’t regenerate. My separate parts don’t strive to reconnect. My flesh simply dies. If you throw me in the heart of a volcano, I burn like anyone else. Unfortunately, these things I know from experience. My body dies, things go dark, and the next morning, I wake up, naked, lying in the open somewhere near my point of demise. That is also how I first entered the world. I was never a child.

I don’t know how this works. I have no greater insight into it than anyone else, and only the wisdom – if that’s what it is – of an extremely long life. Plato thought I was a projection from some higher plane, a shadow of some unknown being, and my physicality just a shade on this Earth. Perhaps he was right, but this shade has no memory or awareness of any greater being beyond. Lately I wonder if I might be a player in some vast virtual game, but if so, the illusion is perfect and I do not know my score.

In between minor wounds and permanent damage, there is a twilight area, and that is what this tale concerns. It happened in a small village, then part of the Russian Empire, but the borders have changed so many times, I don’t know which country claims that land today. It scarcely matters; I have no intention of going back.

My miraculous recovery from a particular laceration, the result of a bar brawl, led the ignorant locals to a great deal of consternation. They accused me of being a Jew; an interesting charge, since I predate Abraham – Methuselah too, for that matter, though I never met either, and doubt much of that story. One shouldn’t take it literally. I am witness that the Earth is older than six thousand years. I did know Gilgamesh, but that is another story.

But, back to this tale: the villagers also accused me of being a warlock and a Satanist. My attempts to ridicule this religious confusion were not met with approval, and the local magistrate decided I should be buried alive, in a wooden coffin, with three hungry rats on my chest. Ingenious, I suppose. If you’ve seen films – fictions – of people buried alive, you’ll note that there is always some light, a candle or match or something. That’s an artifact of the media, I suppose. It is dark in a buried coffin. There is no light and no hint of light. The blackness is as absolute as pure blindness. The rats were hungry, but to protect myself, I killed one, and soon the others as they snacked on their unfortunate peer. I ate them instead, to curb the hunger.

I do not need air to sustain myself. I don’t know how that works, either, but though my metabolism – if I truly have one – will slow, I maintain consciousness, or at least a normal wake-sleep cycle, even in a hostile atmosphere, even under water. Again, that is another tale for another time.

I can’t tell you how long I spend in that darkened box. I can’t describe the panic of days passing trapped in total darkness. Eventually I clawed my way through the coffin, my fingers reduced to bloody nubs, flesh healing over deep splinters. Pain I do feel, just like anyone else – pain and panic and fear. The wet dirt poured into the holes, covering my face. I can still smell it to this day. Sometimes I think it never left my sinuses. Sometimes I still wake screaming, crushed in my dreams by a great damp mass. Eventually, I clawed my way through the earth as well, and I must have struggled to the surface, though I have no memory of it.

It must have been a year later when I regained some senses, shackled in a dank cell with a half dozen other lunatics. I learned the village had burned to the ground, but I don’t remember my complicity, if any. The cells smelled like the graveyard dirt. I was often not lucid, as mad as my cellmates, maybe more. Eventually, Napoleon’s armies passed though the region, and we were able to escape our cell. Madmen set loose on the town. My freedom was more a byproduct of the chaos of the time than a deliberate act, but I still have a soft spot for the French.

But despite my age and other experiences, some acutely worse, despite ten years in a Buddhist monastery learning to face this darkness, I cannot remain in a dark confined space and still retain my sanity. It is beyond me. It is not a power that comes with my immortality. I have no great powers, no mental healing abilities to match my physical gifts. I am as interested as you to see what – if anything – is happening within my head, but this story, that history, is why I cannot now or ever put myself in that dark tube and let you look inside me.

I told you it was short. I may do something with this character sometime in the future. I don't know.