Immortality can be born, learned, bargained, stolen, conferred, inflicted. There are a thousand roads to forever. And on those roads wait highway robbers like me.
My prey tonight is ordinary to look at, but she floats from the floorboards with every footfall. She balances a basket of freshly dyed wool on her hip; what should be mundane drudgery is a dance. Her loom dominates half the house, carved with birds and dragons as like as life. The tapestry underway would bring mathematicians and art curators alike to tears.
Like most immortals, she’s tremendously boring.
Greed fosters strife and infamy, heroes and villains. Those desires grind long, long lives to dust. Passion burns bright and consumes. One too many children grown old or kingdoms fallen to ruin, and despair takes them.
The ones who last are the ones whose desires could only be limited by time. A djinn breeds perfect angora rabbits. A vampire builds ever more elaborate clocks. An ageless emperor walks the rows of his mulberry trees with his head tucked underneath his arm, counting silkworms.
(Livestock is a recurring fixation. Pets, never. Pets are like mortal loves, but worse. You can get a century from a parrot at best, two from a tortoise. The ones who love their creatures go the same way as the ones who love their wives. But to surround themselves with a cheerful, undifferentiated morass of life? It warms something in still hearts.)
The worst was a Belle Dame sans Merci who solved sudoku in pen all day and night. She tasted like old plastic.
My dinner, all unawares, performs operations of shuttles and thread that I don’t bother to understand. She hums to herself. This tone-deaf dolt wants to be food.
I don’t expect trouble as I slip from the shadows. She was never a wizard or a warlord. This one has the looks of a bride, some divine spirit who left her palace for a square-jawed farmboy and had centuries to regret a few decades’ dalliance. A thing without enemies or defenses.
The years she would have spent spinning in this valley under the stars will be mine. She ought to thank me. Imagine this until the sun burned out.
The dark places grant me passage. The dark places are me. I am the hiss of wind in the leaves, skittering mouse feet, a sudden chill. Moonlight spills across her narrow jaw and delicate throat. She’ll snap like spun sugar.
I uncurl from the shadow cast by her delicate ear, ready to bite, to tear, to drink sweet, unburdened years.
And wicked barbs catch me like snapping jaws, slamming me to the floor.
Food fights back. I’ve been hurt before. But the electric buzz of an ambush is worse than pain. I’m too late to move with the blow. The shape I’m wearing is serpentine, and a wild contortion saves me from being pinned. I mean to rear up as something nastier, but walls crash down around me.
A trap. More impressive than I expected, but she might as well bottle the wind. I slip out of my shape and slither down a crack between the floorboards–
And tumble back into place with a wrenching squeeze.
That sinuous form I’ve put on to hunt feels bruised. I roll onto my back, tip the long stalks of my predator’s eyes back into my head for a closer look at her magic. What infernal design has she caught me in?
I am under a basket.
I am time’s revenge, the spawn of the beginning and the end, and I am imprisoned with balls of pink yarn and a tomato pincushion.
The pattern is intricate, surely woven with as much power as bamboo. But there are always shadows, and shadows are always roads. Up the side of the basket and through the—
Nope.
In the whispers between the spirals—
At the center of the ball of yarn—
“Are you finished?” she asks after my fourth fall. I hiss at her. “All right.” The basket creaks and bells out. Through the gaps, I see bunny-slippered feet.
I am under a basket, and some mere frippery of an immortal morsel is sitting on me.
I growl. She hums. I pace. She bounces. I become a beast, a python, a black flame. She pulls a hoop from the pocket of her apron and embroiders birds.
I slump and wait for daylight.
The sun’s shadows aren’t so deep, but they’re hard, darting things. Good allies. I’ll slip out and eat her when the sun rises.
The sun does not rise.
My minutes tick away, minutes that I the bastard spawn of father time am always terribly aware of. I am toothy and clever and I eat well. I don’t have to count the seconds the way weak things of my kind might, at risk of melting away. But. One minute. Ten. A hundred.
Three days pass under the unchanging moonlight.
“I’m finished,” I say with all the grudge a thousand swallowed lifetimes can sharpen. “Let me out. I’ll go peacefully.”
She stands and lifts the basket without pausing to answer, moving like a gust of wind. I was prepared to negotiate or fight, not for this efficient swiftness. I haven’t even put my legs back on to run when she scoops me up like an uncooperative kitten. Merciless moonlight takes the shadowstuff of me and makes it a rigid certainty.
She shoves me in a birdcage.
“I said I’d go!” I’ve never heard myself whine before. It’s a horrible sound.
“You lied.” True. “And, well, you were going to eat me. I know a bit about things like you, but I’d like to be readier next time.”
“You’re plenty ready!” I scramble on rats’ feet up and down my domed prison. The bars are inches apart, but every time I try to slip out, I find myself stuck, body refusing the shift with a stuttering catch.
“Oh, I had warning, and I did have to spend three days sitting on you. I could do better.”
I sigh and settle into a single shape, something like the human most immortals mimic. I dangle my two stupid legs over the side of the cage for lack of a better idea.
So. If I’m not trying to escape, the trap’s hold on me lessens. Interesting.
“I’m hungry,” I say, and hope it sounds more like reason and less like whinging.
She laughs. I almost lose my human shape in hissing at her. “Sorry, sorry.” She shakes her head and sits, chin on hands and elbows on knees. “You’re like an angry little doll. All right. Answer me three questions, and I’ll feed you.”
Feed me what? I’m intrigued. But I don’t want to give in so easily. “Answer mine first.”
“Fair enough.” She gestures magnanimously. Her hands aren’t so delicate as the rest of her. Even immortal knuckles gnarl with work, but I wouldn’t have thought weaving would do all that.
She wants to be better prepared? So do I. “What did you hit me with?”
The laugh nearly bursts out of her again. She stifles it just in time.. “A tapestry comb! The nearest pointy thing to hand.”
Oh, my dignity. My human shape doesn’t have many features. My eyes are the same black as the rest of me, and I only need a mouth when I’m speaking or feeding. So I don’t think I’m giving away my frustration.
If I am, she’s too polite to say it. “My turn,” she declares instead. “Where do you come from?”
I don’t see why that helps her. But it’s her question to waste. “We’re born whenever one of you is. Most don’t make it very long. The old ones are just as likely to eat us as you.”
She nods. I consider my next question. It wasn’t the weapon that made her dangerous. Her defenses, then. “What’s special about the basket? And the cage?”
“Well, I got them from the same farmer’s market. Different vendors, though.” She chats as though we’re there, and she’s met a lightless and undying hunger while buying tomatoes and shaved ice. “The basket’s handmade? The cage is just a pretty antique. I was keeping a cactus in it.” She points to a planter on the windowsill, as if I might need proof of cactus.
She might be lying about the basket, but I don’t think so. Immortals are made of rules. I just haven’t found the right question. I cross my arms and try not to sulk.
“How often do you actually need to eat, and how much?”
I could be a pedant. That’s two questions. But it’s not a secret either. “There’s no math. It depends how long my prey had to live, what’s sustaining them, how much magic I’ve used, things like that. I eat when I’m hungry. How did you see me coming?”
She tips her head sheepishly. “Oh, Mother told me.” She twirls her fingers gracefully past my cage. I spin my human head like an owl’s, but nobody’s standing behind me. Nothing in this room is alive, barring the cactus. I slowly realize she’s gesturing toward the moon.
You get used to ordinary immortals, alchemists slugging elixir of life, snake cult priestesses, tricksters kicked out of hell for irritating the devil. One expects—I expected—the real deal to stand out from your Daoist sages and liver-eating ghouls.
She has to ask her last question twice before I hear her.
I refuse to ask for clarification, give her more openings for her sneaky little questions. The third time, I catch it. She asks, “What’s your name?”
Finally, my turn for a laugh. “We don’t have those.”
She hms thoughtfully. “I haven’t used mine in ages. We’re even.” She gathers herself like stray laundry and floats to my cage. When I watched her, I took those gliding steps for a frivolous flourish, but I don’t think she’s quite connected to the earth beneath us.
With the needle that embroidered endless birds, she stabs the pad of her finger.
Immortals ooze all sorts of things. Sand, smoke, mercury, venom. Three drops of liquid moonlight gleam on the floor of my cage. She does the kindness of not watching me lap it up.
It burns all the way down.
She’s exactly as dull as any immortal. She sleeps late, eats oatmeal when she finally stirs, and reads magazines with names like Birds & Blooms and Country Sampler. She listens to podcasts while she weaves and watches nature shows over housework. The moon never stirs from her window, and it’s as full now as that first night.
When she approaches my cage, I’m ready for another duel of questions. “Do you like the burnt or the raw sienna?”
I’m still in my tiny human shape, too disheartened to find another, and I feel myself blinking foolishly. Keeping a body too long builds habits. Hateful things. “What?”
“I’m trying to decide if I like the warmer color.” She displays strands of yarn across her palms.
They’re brown.
I hiss. She shrugs and leaves me in peace with a few drops of moonlight from under her skin.
Every few hours after that, I change, choosing each shape for speed and sharp edges. If an opening comes, I will have it.
The questions come a few times a day (whatever constitutes a day in this house where the sun has no power). “Are those robot vacuums worth the trouble?” “Do you know there are people who put ketchup on eggs? Do you think it’s good? I’d hate to waste eggs.” “Have I got the shape of this beak right?”
I refute whatever she suggests. I hiss some more. I roll into a featureless ball and ignore her. But eventually even an ambush hunter gets bored. “What,” I finally ask, “is the matter with you?”
She laughs gently. “I know we’ve both got plenty of time, but it has better uses than that threadbare tale. Do you mean, why do I keep chatting?”
“Yes!” Infuriating creature.
“It seems rude not to.”
I’m glad I’m wearing a chitinous shape with no expressions to show her. My pointy mouthparts clack in frustration.
“Well, you’re not my enemy, are you?” She pulls her stool over to sit beside my cage, looking up at me with an easy smile. “Foxes don’t hate rabbits. It’s nothing personal.”
“It’s personal now!”
“Fair. And in more fairness, I don’t feel bad for keeping you locked up. You’d be eating someone else, even if you left me alone. Could you only eat evil immortals? Are there enough?”
“Plenty. But it takes work to track you down. I’d starve or be someone else’s meal if I stopped to vet for morality.”
“Ah, I’ll keep thinking.”
The next morning (morning by the clock, midnight by the window), she steps outside and returns with an armload of boxes.
She lives in perpetual night and still gets mail delivery. Deathless recluses aren’t rare. I once got into a daoine sidhe’s apartment under the tape of an Amazon package. (Model trains.) But he lived in Philadelphia, not an enchanted valley that appears on no map.
“How did you get those?” I demand.
“Oh, the driver’s a nymph. She does my shelf-stable groceries, too.” She unpacks black wool and some inscrutable weaver’s tool. The final box she carries to my cage. “I hope it’s comfortable. I tried to find nice things.” Her hand with its hard knuckles and pricked fingers slips between the bars.
I know it’s futile, but I lunge and bite. She doesn’t run me through with an iron comb or call her mother’s glass-sharp glow to pin me like a beetle. She just waits, bleeding silver, as my beak crushes the meat of her thumb.
Silence blankets us. My eyes, bulging, squiddy things, don’t want to meet hers. I let go. She doesn’t comment. Just sets down the dollhouse furniture in her hand. A bed, a table, and a chair. “I avoided plastic junk. The bed’s even soft! Well. Softish.”
This is grandly humiliating. I grind my beak and pretend she’s not there. She shrugs and walks off. I watch her bandage her hand. So she’s not the kind that heals quick.
The bed is softer than the bottom of the cage. Time’s hunters don’t care about softness. I don’t even really sleep. But when I let myself fall into shapeless shadow, would it be proving anything not to rest on the doll’s bed?
She’s gone most of the next day, returning with a basket of farmer’s market cheese and honey I hear all about. I don’t pay any attention until she lifts my cage and carries me out of the house.
Is she letting me go? I’ll spin around and wait for her to sleep. But. She’ll expect that, and the cursed moon will be watching, and–
Before I’ve worked out my answer, I’m swinging from a hook, looking down on a bed of moonflowers. “I thought you must be bored,” she says, dropping into a rickety lawn chair with a magazine. I test the cage, but the binding power is stronger with no window between her mother and me. “At least it’s a change of scenery.”
Three days of this, too. She reads. She embroiders. She tosses a drop spindle and makes miles of pitch-black yarn.
And she chats. “I wonder if the astronauts ever run into my mother up there.” “This article says cats domesticated themselves, did you know that?” “Do you remember when they started using escalators everywhere? Fifty years? A hundred?”
“Why are you like this,” I finally demand through needle-teeth in a weaselid mouth. She hms at me like it’s a real question, and I find it is. “You’ve got an eternity. I taste it in your blood. You’re one of the nastier monsters still walking the world, and your mother’s worse! And you’re—you’re… spinning!”
“Sometimes I like making my own yarn. It’s too much work to do for every project, just something special.”
I growl outright. “This! You’re going to do this forever!”
“Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, yes I am. I move every few decades, and sometimes I feel more sociable, but I’ve tried the alternatives, and…” She shakes her head. “The moon had a lot of daughters, once.”
“An army of you. Small mercy not to exist for that!”
Her face does something odd, the first expression I’ve seen on her that’s not calmly beatific. “Yes, well.” She winds her spindle. “I’m making tea. Would you like any?”
I don’t dignify that with an answer. She leaves me there, prison swinging gently in the breeze. The moon’s still watching, but at least I feel alone.
She’s possible to wound. She’s burdened with bruised memories, not that anything her age isn’t. Her magic rests on intentions.
Mulling over escape plans, I almost miss a shudder in the house’s shadow. Another of my kind. Following the same clues I did? Following me? We’re not friends, we eaters of time. I might learn something by watching her win. I creep to the edge of the cage.
And find myself looking into eyes bigger than I am, lenses of shadow deep enough to eat moonlight.
Old one.
This monster was born one of the first moments death was cheated. Those eyes have gods behind them.
I shrink small as I can and dash under the bed. Not because it’ll prevent anything that’s about to happen.
Because I won’t have to see what happens next.
I wasn’t born alone. Some hedge-witch cursed three brothers who scorned her daughter to walk the world alone, forever. Three small immortalities. Three formless shadows wriggling free of the poor wretches who’d lost their right to death.
Only I lived more than a month. I’m mean. Fast. And lucky. I remember the teeth that came for the others. Mean turned ruthless. I grew past those dangers of infancy.
And now I hear the slow scrape of sharpening claws, and I am trapped. The cage creaks above me, magic crumpling.
It’s in no hurry, the old one. I’m the merest appetizer. Do I bolt, or will I be flinging myself into its mouth? Better to end this on my terms.
I spring, rushing on a dozen slashing wings, air singing with the rage of my passage. I aim for its eye. It bats at me like the insect I am, but insects sting. It’s wearing cat’s claws, and oh, they tear. Two wings and a leg melt away, my beautiful years dissolving into the rough beast’s bulk. I falter in the air, pretend to fall further, and burrow into the flesh of the meaty paws that close around me, stealing back moments.
I’m not deep enough. It drags. It crushes. I hurt it, though. I hurt an old one, and I’ll take that satisfaction back to the mouth of time. I force my many eyes open, refusing to fall apart into darkness before I must. It drags my broken body from the borehole I chewed into it, pops me free and dangles me over its mouth.
And the tines of a pitchfork burst through it thick, winding neck.
It’s not a pitchfork any more than it’s a tapestry comb or a needle or once was a bloodied blade. It’s silver light. Pure mutability, antithesis of shifting shadow, guided by sure, rough hands.
The crack of its neck isn’t something I hear so much as an emptiness that opens in the world as the behemoth falls.
“Oh, I am sorry, I was sure it would take longer to find you!” The pitchfork is as ordinary as the spindle now, braced jauntily on her shoulder. “Sneaky thing. Mother barely spotted it in time. The good news is, I have a chest freezer!” I’m in pain. Following her trains of thought has always been beyond my skill as a tracker. I do some foolish blinking. “Well? Eat!”
Oh. Lucky I’ve no dignity left to lose. I dive into the darkness, swallowing ages, eons, eras, heady and rich.
“Never mind about that freezer. Good! I wasn’t sure I could get it in bags, and I never remember to buy the big gallon ones. Pity about the doll furniture, though. You know what, I’ll give it to the cactus.”
I look up at her. My vantage point is much higher than it was. I’m not the size of that beast, or even the moon’s daughter. But no, I wouldn’t fit in the cage any longer. “You could have done that to me any time,” I say, voice like syrup.
“But we’re not enemies! You’re just hungry. This one, though, you told me that the big ones will go after you, too! And.” She props the pitchfork beside the door. “I don’t like bullies.”
I could spring now. She’s probably ready for me to do it. Despite what I’ve eaten, I’ve not satiated. Not my nature.
“I do mean that apology, by the way, I certainly didn’t intend for it to get hold of you.” She opens the door. “You must need to rest. Turn into that cute little cloud!” The warm light of her salt lamps blurs her into silhouette. She’s nothing but shadow herself, changeable as her mother. She hung me from the eaves as bait. She’s mean. Fast. And lucky.
Inside waits the loom, where black, indescribable shadows race across the weft. She leaves the door open.
She takes her seat, turns on a podcast that reviews cereal.
Maybe it’s not such a terrible thing to be the right kind of boring.
I step inside.
| Malda Marlys teaches science outside Chicago and writes the sort of speculative fiction that requires too many qualifiers for the normal flow of conversation. An out-of-practice black belt, mediocre birdwatcher, and terrible knitter, ey spends most of eir time being bullied by housepets and adding to a monumental TBR pile. |  |