I was running again for the first time in a very long time but my feet carried me sure enough to where they always did. To where I had been safe and walked to and fro everyday for many many years. The shelter.

I was gasping for breath. My limbs were shaking and my heart was hammering in my chest but beyond my bodily discomfort something else more important was happening. My mind. My mind was working again, probably harder than it had ever had to before.

The facts were there. Weren’t they? His face had changed but I was certain, I was certain, that that old man was the same little boy I had seen all those years ago after... decades of his life must have passed. Even though my mind was aching and my body was weak, I had to think this through. Step by step, one thought after the other.

Calm. Calm.

Firstly, That man, he was that boy, I’m sure of it. I know it. If that’s so then that means that eighty or so years have passed and I hadn’t noticed a thing. But if that’s true, what about me?

I look down at myself, at my hands and my arms. They were filthy undoubtedly, but had they really changed? When was the last time I had really gotten a good look at myself? In fact, when was the last time I had actually felt... different?

If that kind of time had passed I would have felt my body growing weaker. My joints would ache, my muscles would struggle and my senses would have dulled. But I hadn’t noticed any of that. Ever since Elde had died I hadn’t taken notice of anything really and nothing about myself had really elicited any concern.

I soon started running my hands all over my body, trying to find anything different. Though I couldn’t see my skin clearly I could feel some bumps and marks that I have gotten from injuries over the years, but no definite wrinkles or apparent loose skin. I only found bones and skinny flesh until I made my way up to my face to find a massive clump of hair.

My beard. My hair.

I hadn’t seen beneath them since before the tower!

With no hesitation I scrambled into the shelter and started searching through my accumulated pile of somewhat useful junk that I had collected off all the corpses I had come across over the years, until I found it.

A razor.

I jump out of the shelter and shoot off quickly as I hurriedly begin making my way over to the river. The way was a bit different than what it had been since I had arrived here in the beginning with the dump growing over the years and some other changes, but the route was still mostly unchanged. I still occasionally came here when I grew desperately thirsty but today, I was here for a much more serious reason.

Time had surely passed but I didn’t register it at all until I finally made it to the river, my head too full with existential questions and confounding confusion. The river was flowing quite calmly today I had noticed as I arrived at the shoreline, an occurrence that I was grateful for given what I now had to face.

I knelt down at my usual spot and took a moment to take in my appearance. I hadn’t really considered it before but even if what I think is happening is happening, I can see it nonetheless.

I have changed.

I was no longer whoever I was before. I was something else, someone else, but that epiphany had to be pushed aside for later. I had a far more pressing concern coming at me head on right now.

With that moment of reflection over I took out my razor, grabbed a strand of hair from the long dirty and knotted beard on my face, held it up against my cheek, and sliced.

Then I found another strand and sliced again. Then another. And another. Until after an indeterminable amount of time, my beard and hair were all gone, now floating downstream out into the ocean... and I was looking down at a reflection of myself. One I hadn’t seen in a long, long time.

There were a few cuts from the razor and still a little bit of grime leftover that I hadn’t been quite able to scrub away, and it was true that it definitely looked gaunter than it had been before. But as I looked down at myself, my reflection staring right back at me from the water, my suspicions were confirmed. With no allowance of any doubt.

My face, it had not changed.

For almost a century, I had not aged a day.

***************************************************************************************************************

The revelation was mind shattering.

All I could do was kneel there in front of the water, looking down at myself. I looked bad, no doubt, but there were no wrinkles, no extra age spots, not a single grey hair had I found anywhere on me. I kept on looking at my face, searching for any signs of ageing, of any evidence of the passing of time, but there was none.

The numbing shock was there for a long time and even with the breeze now bringing chills to my face and the sun above me now blasting its heat at the back of my scruffy head, it still remained when I came to my unavoidable conclusion.

“I’m immortal.” I muttered.

This admittance, summoned a deluge and immediately a flood of memories and overwhelming emotions that had stayed buried at the back of my mind for many many years, untouched until now, reemerged.

Suddenly, I’m being thrown back into the memory of the tower, of me being on that table, at the mercy of the Wizard as he explains how he had cut up everyone else he captured before he eventually got to me.

...you all have absolutely no, as you might describe it, mana. None whatsoever…

...mana and all things are all inextricably connected…

...world shaking conclusion that the all encompassing mana permeation of matter…

Wait.

Permeation of matter. I hadn’t seen much of this world but I had seen some mana in action. Even Elde had talked about it a bit. How supposedly mana was the energy of creation and life that flowed through all things here, or so he said.

In fact, most people in Calzyn equated it to something like God’s Will or “ The Source '' as they referred to it here, where all mana originated from and flowed back into, which also happened to include people's souls too when they died.

I don’t know about all of that but if mana works how the Wizard and Elde described it then that means that the mana in this world is in everything, and permeates everything.

Even me.

But I have no mana. That very fact is the only reason I’m alive. If the Wizard hadn’t been so sure of that he would have kept me in that tower to cut me up and continue trying to figure us Earthlings out, but he instead let me go. So I can only believe that I really do have no mana, while I’m surrounded all around by it. A near transcendent source of energy that must, maybe, soak into me if it does indeed permeate everything.

I think.

But if that’s the case and if that’s what really happens then maybe, in some sort of way, I’m like an empty space that mana fills into. My absence of mana acting like a black hole, vacuuming in all of its immediate surroundings or in my specific case, mana.

But mana flows, Elde had been clear on that. It isn’t static, and if it really was I think something more drastic would have happened to me if all this godly source of energy was being sucked into me for years on end. So, if this energy that is being sicked into me has to flow out, thereby retaining its properties and remaining in the surrounding mana current (so to speak), it has to somehow escape the vacuum. For that to happen in a vacuum, if that is indeed what I am, a medium would be needed for the energy to travel through. And I’m not just a void of absent mana, I’m a certified living being.

So… maybe… for mana to move through me, in and out or back and forth - whatever it is, it’s hitching a ride on an energy medium, maybe even hijacking the energy that’s already moving in my body.

If I take that further, it might even mean that my body isn’t producing its own energy at all anymore because the mana is doing all the work instead as a means to remain flowing and escape the vacuum.

If that’s true, then my body and all my cells aren’t being used properly and are therefore not going through the cycle of living, growing, ageing and then dying of degradation.

Ergo, they don’t need to replicate to keep my body alive and functioning, essentially, I think, suspending my ageing.

I could be wrong. I’m no biologist (or a wizard) and I’m sure there’s flaws in my reasoning such as what happens when I get injured and then lose blood or living matter that my body then has to replace, but maybe some magically enhanced stem cells kick in, I don’t know. All I know is that it seems right and is the best explanation I can manage to come up with with all that I know so far.

Some time has passed and I, having worked all this out in my head, now see that the day is gone and the sun is starting to set. I have been sitting here on the riverbank since this morning, stunned motionless for a long time due to the shock from the revelation of my own apparent immortality.

I’m too tired to keep thinking about it anymore. So, after a long and exhausting day of recovering my awareness and discovering the world shattering realisation about my eternal youth, I got up from the riverbank, now illuminated by the glow of the setting sun, turned around, and made my way back home.