Immortal Storm

I have always noticed that small, strange little detail; that all Immortals have white hair.

Sometimes I’m not sure I would have thought much of it, had I not been so young when I first met my original teacher. It was something that only someone young and naïve would notice so quickly; the unspoken question that I felt I couldn’t ask, but which I soon came to conclusions regarding on my own.

My first teacher, a memory of indestructibility and radiance even now, introduced himself to me as ‘Kazutaka Rei’; a name he had soon informed me was only half his birth name. There was always that strange compulsion with Immortals; something that compels us to keep only our first birth name, in my teacher’s case Kazutaka, and assume a new name to live by.

Despite a near perfect memory, I can never remember what my original last name was. Itsuki once told me that this was to stop us from trying to interfere with the lingering remnants of our family. Feeling more than omniscient compassion or a detached fondness for mortals never ended well, after all. But I’ll leave the explanations of Itsuki until later; I think I’ll need whatever strength I can gain from the beginning of my story for that particular meeting.

My first teacher was a tall man; worryingly thin, but with a strong presence that made the people around him immediately shut up whenever he opened his mouth to speak. To me he seemed a wealth of knowledge and no matter what questions I asked him, he always answered. Whether he answered all of them truthfully, I’m still not sure, but I like to think he was as honest as he thought he should be.

I’m straying from my point.

Rei was the kind of person who liked to sit and stare at nothing. Or rather, he stared at things I couldn’t see. He told me that one day I would be able to see the things that he saw when he seemed to see nothing; that I was too young to understand the simple beauty of what he did during that silent time was obvious.

Truthfully, I think I’m still too young. To a degree, I understand what he meant by what he said; I have been known to do something similar myself. But it has always been mortals who said so, and whether that was because Immortals knew, as Rei did, what my thoughts dwelled on, or if I simply did not show that side of myself except in the presence of mortals or those younger than me, I’m not entirely sure.

Still, about Rei. The very first distinguishing thing that I noticed about him was that his hair was long, and pure snow white. Just like mine.

During my young and innocent years as a mortal, my hair drew a great deal of attention; it was a novelty, something that most people couldn’t achieve until old age. Then again, the colour of an Immortal’s hair doesn’t look like ‘old white’, but more a ‘youthful white’. As you will be able to tell later, these descriptions are not ones I thought up, but ones I have used since Itsuki first said them in front of me. I’ll apologise for having acquired some of his mannerisms in advance.

I was never told anything about the attributes Immortals have in common, since it seemed like one of those ‘it-doesn’t-need-to-be-said’ things; something all of us should know without needing to be told. It was only the hair though; Master Rei’s eyes were forest green, where mine were steel grey, and he was tanned and I fair. By this I could tell that the hair was probably the only thing we all have in common.

Then again, in those days I could have assumed that all Immortals were male. I had not, after all, ever seen a female Immortal and I later learnt that they tended to be more solitary then the male Immortals. But of course, believing that always seemed wrong; it just didn’t fit.

And though female Immortals liked to stay on their own, the males were the ones who like to pair up for centuries at a time before separating and going their own ways.

I was never sure whether I agreed with this in the beginning. It seemed like such an alien concept to me. However, it soon became a part of my life. I paired with many different Immortals during my first couple of centuries, and it no longer seemed so strange when one of us would just one day get up and leave the other.

It didn’t feel like abandonment, as much as it had originally sounded that way to me, on either side of the line, and when we met again it was almost like we’d never been together and then separated; the way we would speak and tell tales and give accounts of whom we’d met and which worlds we had visited… the companionship is comfortable because it’s familiar and that’s not uncommon with partnerships like that.

But as I said, I learned these things later. Most Immortals, when they feel their end approaching (their self imposed end of course; ritual suicide is the only way I know of for an Immortal to end his life without the aid of someone else) they like to search out a new born child in one world or another. A child who they could sense had the powers of one of their own, the gift and curse of immortality, and they would bring the child up themselves, training them in the ways of the Immortals.

Most had lived for thousands of years, so what was another couple of decades?

Time is never the same for Immortals, since they stop aging when they’re around twenty years old. I was nineteen, and will remain that way now forever. I sometimes laugh to think that I will be a teenager forever. I remember how keen I always was to grow up, and now I’ll never become a real ‘adult’.

However, I still felt the years more like a mortal than a true Immortal, and I found it hard to believe that the centuries could move as quickly as those older than me said they did. My ‘first life’, before I awakened, doesn’t really seem all that long ago.

Still, I did not begin my education until I was twelve years old. My powers showed themselves early on; my psychic abilities driving my very religious parents to extreme lengths to rid their child of whatever evil spirit had possessed him. I can’t help but feel sad to think of that now, even though it was so long ago.

My mother killed herself when I was nine. A year later, I came home from school to find my home empty. I never saw either parent again. Now I was the orphaned genius. Genius… let me tell you, being considered a genius by mortals is nothing compared to the intelligence of Those Who Do Not Age, as I found out soon later.

The knowledge you can gain in a normal mortal human lifetime is very limited; a tiny grain of sand in the desert of the Universe, and in the minds of those who can live for an unlimited time.

Rei found me just after my final link to mortal humanity died. He took me in and despite my occasionally foul behaviour, managed to make a reasonable Immortal out of me. He committed ritual suicide, transferring his energies to me, when I turned nineteen and my full powers awakened. Unlike my mother’s unhappy demise, Rei’s passing was not a depressing one and I remember it in each year that passes.

I can remember all of the things my Master taught me; I can remember the fighting, in training and out, the arguments over who would cook and clean on different days, the countless books he presented me with, expecting me to memorise everything within them, even with my very busy schedule.

I stopped going to mortal school when I was sixteen, which was a great relief since I didn’t have to worry about that sort of work at the same time as all of Rei’s teachings and challenges. Those challenges had been the bane of my existence at the time, and had seemed both difficult and baffling. I began to stay prepared at all times, fearing another unexpected ‘visit’ to a place I’d never been.

For instance, he once dropped me off in the middle of an unfamiliar forest and told me to find my way home again. I was thirteen. It took me two months to find my way back into the right country, and a further fortnight to find my house. Those were the lessons that taught you observance as well as survival. You learnt to notice everything around you; to pinpoint exactly where you were, how to get home and what landmarks and stars were helpful in getting where you wanted to be.

Rei took me on a journey around my birth world when I was seventeen; he showed me everything he thought I should see, and everything I thought I wanted to be shown. All the while I was gleaning information from my teacher, absorbing his knowledge like a sponge and becoming all the more curious for it.

I do think he loved me… I’m sure of it. But whether he did or not, I needed to believe it; I had no one else then, after all.

Being alone is never quite as noticeable as when you realise that you have untold eons ahead of you. When you finally come to realise that as much as one person might love you, the next might not be so kind. And that’s what it is; an endless stream of people and places, of memories and promises.

Rei told me that this was his birth world. He had returned here, not to educate me, but so that he could die at peace, having travelled a full circle and ‘completed his soul’. I have it in my mind that if I’m not killed, one day I’ll do the same.

Studying alone was different to studying under someone. Not better or worse, just different; I no longer had any source of information for my kind, so I had to practice the things I already knew, and through trial and error discover my powers and strengths on my own. It wasn’t easy in any sense of the word. Eventually I began to start being restless. I would abandon my studies just to take a walk, or travel to a country I had already been to or hadn’t seen a certain side to yet.

This was, I now know, a side effect of the Immortal’s ‘Compass’. To put it in its simplest terms, it is an instinct that rules Those Who Do Not Age and forces them to move on. Basically, Immortals find it difficult to stay in one world for too long; that’s why a good handle on portals and Dimension Jumping is an essential skill.

I was thirty, though my body remained in the guise of a nineteen year old, when I finally had had enough of the world I was in and wanted out. Call it cowardly if you will, because I certainly thought so, but I had never before left my birth world. I had turned opening and closing portals into an art, but I had never had enough courage to actually move through one.

My years with Rei had taught me much about Immortals, and I had learned a lot about the world I was in, but I was interested to see what else I could learn using the powers I had been somehow gifted with. I’d had a good memory for things when I was young, but an Immortal has an unbeatable memory; it didn’t take long for me to drink in all the knowledge the world around me had to offer, and having nothing left to learn I endeavoured to find something else. Something new.

As afraid of change as I was; the allure of new discoveries and knowledge spurred me on, and it only took a few weeks before I had set my affairs in my birth world in order. It was time to move on. Time for a new place, a new time, and a new teacher.