How The People Lived Forever

Long ago, in a world where magic and invention were still new, a king desired a thing that all  kings desire: immortality. But he was an uncommon king, in that he knew he could not achieve his dreams with merely armies or gold. So he sent for the oldest person in the kingdom to provide him with the secrets of lasting life. Fortunately for him, the oldest living person was a Magician. Not just any Magician, but the second Magician ever, who had learned long ago at the hand of the very first.

At the call of the man who called himself king, the Magician came down from her mountain workshop and made the long journey to the castle. When she arrived, she gazed upon the king and pondered what to do with him. And because she was very old and very wise, she knew the proper spell for this moment. 

She told the king a story.

“My Lord, once there was once a man who accomplished this feat, and he was a king just like you. I can tell you how it is done, but I cannot practice this magic myself, for I cannot pay the cost.”

“Damn the cost!” the King shouted. “I will pay whatever  is required.”  

“This is not like other magic,” the Magician said. “This spell is cast with actions but is maintained with words. As long as words are spoken, the spell goes on and on.”

“Then write down the proper words,” the king demanded, “and I will order all my citizens to recite them daily!”

“These words cannot be commanded, oh King, but if you do as I tell you it should be enough. I warn you, though, this will not be easy. You will undertake great deeds to cast a spell across the ages,” the Magician said, her voice wind through ancient trees. “A spell to last for 10,000 years.”

And so it was agreed. The Magician would teach the king the secret to eternal life, and the king would do as the Magician bid. She made him a list and slowly made her way back to the mountain.

The first task she set him was to feed the people. That one was easy: free breakfast each morning on the square. Then he was to heal the sick and shelter the weak, and so he built hospitals for children and started a program for people to adopt kittens. The Magician said to make the people prosperous, but prosperity has never been cheap, and so the king journeyed into neighboring kingdoms and brought back treasures. He was both fearsome and beloved. He gave his people safety, riches, and security, all so that he might live forever.

As king and kingdom aged, the stories people told grew. They said the king drained the ancient seas to deserts and brought water to the kingdom. They claimed he had climbed deep into the cracks in the earth to bring home iron and gemstones. They told that in his youth he traveled to the far off ocean to hunt the monsters of the sea and returned laden with black oil and silvery pearls. 

But the spell didn’t seem to be working. Still the king aged. Still he felt his body slow until, one day,  no longer able to rise from his bed, he called the Magician to his side once more. She looked the same: smiling, healthy, and very, very old. 

Infirm but still a king, he shouted at the Magician, “You claimed I would be immortal if I did as you had bid me, and yet I feel death approaching bearing the name, ‘old age.’”  The Magician took a deep breath. She knew his anger grew from fear, and so she chose to give him a gift.

She spoke softly in the dying king’s  ear. “My king, you will not die today. Listen for the words! The people weep for you. They tell stories of your deeds. Listen! These words will ring through time and echo for 10,000 years. Long after your kingdom has crumbled, after the people forget even your name, they will remember what you have done.”

In that moment, the king understood the magic of life and died a happy man, surrounded by abundance, while his people praised his name. His immortality was sealed. But this is not his story.

You see, the king had children, princes and princesses who now were kings and queens themselves. But they had watched their father’s failed search for immortality, and now they too feared death, which bore a new name called “obscurity.”

But what could they achieve? The monsters all were slain, and the neighboring lands were without threats or treasures. The people were fed, no one was sick, and every kitten had a home. Everyone in the kingdom lived in comfort, the monarchs most of all, and each morning the people praised the spirit of their long dead father.

Although they grew in age, they never grew from under his shadow. They became restless. They had nothing to do but fret and scheme.

And then the Alchemist arrived from the lands beyond the kingdom.

The Alchemist was not a Magician. Where Magicians make something from nothing, Alchemists transmute something existing into something new. This Alchemist liked to work with heat and pressure, and where the magician’s magic was soft and supple like the wind,  his alchemy was sharp and hard as a stone.

“Words are fickle, inconsistent, unreliable things,” he told the kings and queens. “They praise your father, yes, but who’s to know what they may say tomorrow? When compared with what I can offer you, words are just hot air.” 

Overcome by visions of immortality and unafraid of costs, they quickly agreed to a demonstration. They began with the eldest one.

He knelt eagerly before the Alchemist, ready to receive these teachings. The Alchemist regarded him with glittering eyes before turning his attention to the others. “Bring forth all the things he owns.”

They took the wealthy man’s treasures from the vaults. They took his rugs from the floor and the pillows off his bed. They gathered his crown and scepter, his book of stories, and all five of his swords and put the whole lot in a gigantic press built by the Alchemist. But they were far from finished.

They brought his shoes, his souvenirs from long past trips, and the tea set he hoped to leave to his grandchildren. His monocle, his bicycle, and magnifier were all put upon the pile. The certificate of his birth, the portraits of his children, and his business ledger seemed to be the final items.  

As they all looked in wonder upon the great press, the midden pile inside, and the gigantic fire underneath, the Alchemist moved quickly. Before anyone could intervene,he seized the aging man and thrust him too into the press and turned the great screw. There was a tremendous heat and a pressure in everyone’s ears, accompanied by a loud hissing sound. And when it was over, there remained, visible in the steam, a tall, glistening monolith.

“Each of you, when your time comes, shall have the same,” breathed the Alchemist, “an enduring monument.” Its sides were tall and straight, its edges sharp, its skin hard. The children of a king gazed upon the body of their brother and felt that they had never seen anything so beautiful. It looked like it would last 10,000 years.

They each rushed to make their own. They pillaged the treasures left to them by their father. They piled high their finest things and squeezed them into everlasting plinths. They forced their people into service, bringing every object from around the kingdom, crafting taller and taller monoliths that grew to disrupt the clouds and cast shadows across the land. The people dug all the precious metals from the ground and pulled all the rare fruits from the trees, and the towers grew and grew. 

When each monarch’s hair grew silver and they in turn felt their time was ending, their final act was to press themselves into their everlasting edifices, becoming forever a part of their own legacy. And in this way, their immortality was sealed.

When at last, the monarch was gone, the people looked out on their depleted land. They knew they had lost something, but they were unsure what. So much time had passed, so many people had died and been born, that it was difficult to remember. The past and future both felt dark.  They saw their death approaching but with a new name known as “poverty.”

But the Alchemist was there to offer them something.

“Why should immortality be just for the rich?” he asked. “All of you should live and die like kings yourselves, lasting for 10,000 years!” His teeth flashed brightly as he laughed, but his hungry eyes kept drifting to the looming monoliths.

Having nothing to guide them but this new dream, the people were seduced. They had very little to start with, but they managed. They collected rocks and caught the insects from the air. They scavenged old things from old places and started making new things too: new fashions, new trends, new inventions. They hunted and explored, inside and outside, and each new thing they brought back was put into the press, heated and squished and squeezed into something hard and enduring. Their ideas, their work, their stories, and their sweat. Everything they had they put towards an everlasting future.

At first their results were small, the size of your finger, like a little talisman. They were strange things – beautiful, heavy, but easy to lose. The people became suspicious of each other, fearing theft, and kept their talismans always close to them, hanging around their necks, their heads bowing with the weight of these eternal fragments. Over time these masses grew, and the people now carried their burdens on their backs, the heavy obelisks bending their spines. Movement was slow, progress was difficult, and the streets were silent but for the persistent grinding sound of dragging stone.

And of course, as was now tradition, when people died their families pressed their still warm bodies into their obelisks, transforming monuments into tombs. And in this way, their immortality was sealed.

But the people still had children, as people always do, and these children grew up in a different world. Where their parents and grandparents had grown up in a time of treasures and abundance, these young people knew only the building of monuments and the sadness of watching things they cared for be crushed and flattened, as if this was the only way. 

When these people looked around their kingdom of looming towers, they despaired, for they now had nothing at all. Every rock and tree, every horse and house had been taken, and they were left with nothing but empty fields and silent monoliths with stretching shadows.

They sought refuge in neighboring lands, but no one lived there anymore. They went to the palace seeking help, but found only the Alchemist and his family, and so left again in disgust. The people felt helpless, and so they sat down in silence in the dark shade of the greatest tower and awaited death, now with a new name known as “starvation.”

This was the moment that the Magician chose to come down from her mountain once more. She was ancient now, but the people still remembered her and told stories of the magic she had wrought deep in the past. When she arrived, she looked upon what remained of the people and felt the sorrow that can only be felt by the old watching things change while still staying the same. But because she was very old and very wise, she knew the proper spell for this moment. 

She told the people a story.

“Long before you were born, there was a king who understood that the magic of eternal life is to have someone left after you are gone. So he fed the hungry, healed the sick, and homed the cats. He was great and also terrible, but his many deeds were done to extend the life of his people and their story. He loved himself, but in the end, he loved his people more.”

“But we have no more kings,” the people wailed, “and all the cats have long since fled.”

“Life is not like other magic,” she said. “The spell is cast with actions and lasts as long as your people live to speak your story. For it to continue, you must tell it together. You must heal each other, feed each other, and cast the spell of life.”

And so it began again, as it always does. The people rebuilt. The pillars became bridges and the monoliths hollowed out to make homes, and over time the winds wore away at their hard surfaces and blunted their sharp corners. The sick were healed, the hungry were fed, and the animals returned. The cats were warm and safe once more. But the people never forgot where they came from, or how their new kingdom had been built. Each year, the people from a land without kings or queens or monuments would gather and tell the story of how they once had nothing, but had all come together and survived. 

And that is how the people lived forever.