A Love For Eternity (LokixReader)

Chapter Three

(Your Pov)

Ah... fuck. It was your only thought as morning came, as you cursed yourself for such a rowdy night.

A rowdy night... with the gods.

How the hell did that happen?

The sun burned your hungover eyes, as you gazed up at an open sky. No fire, no friends, no leftover feast.

How'd you end up here?

You thought back over the past 24 hours, trying to decipher the truth. Finding the memory fuzzy and unordered. You knew you found the hunters, they thought you were mortal, he knew you weren't mortal...

The book. You sit up, looking around desperately. Finding a spellbook as your pillow. Thank you, mischief god. He had lent you the textbook as a means to further your learning, and hopefully find a way to cover your spells. Though you barely remembered the event.

In need of water, shade, and a hearty hangover breakfast after that night with the gods, you head off to find some sort of road. Travelling again, yay!

Over time, you refreshed your skills of magic. Moving through the book's beginner lessons easily. Occasionally you'd meet with witches or other users, and communed with them as you pleased. Few mortals could sense the spells surrounding you, even fewer able to read what they were. But they knew you were powerful, and that was enough to gain respect. You found that disguising your spells was the easy part.

You started practicing, and soon you became proficient enough that the times between your deaths were doubled. You could go forty years without dying now. Injuries happened, as they always would, but you didn't have to deal with the blackout periods until you were revived.

The gods never returned. Not really, at least. At times you thought you would feel their presence through magic, or you thought you could see signs of their return. But those always proved to be the result of nosey neighbors or bad weather. After such a night, you wondered if they even remembered meeting you. Well- perhaps Sif. She was the only one who didn't let the strong stuff burn through her instantly.

500 years passed from that night. The dark ages, followed by the renaissance. You travelled everywhere, and you learned as much as you could. When the year 1694 rolled around, you found yourself on the American coast. You had been burned at the stake once already, and carefully avoided humans. It was strange how they always fell into these patterns, and refused any explanation except witchcraft. Killing those who wouldn't bend to their ways.

Death was cruel.

Unfortunately, you've never known it. And you never will.

But your worst death? In 1694, you were found guilty of being the witch they burnt a few years prior. A mistake on your part, really. You should have been more careful when performing magic.

Because you had already been burnt at the stake and lived, the townsfolk decided on a worse punishment.

Drowning.

You fought every second of it. But somehow, they bound your magic. They tied you up just as before, and for a few moments you actually assumed you'd be burned again.

But instead, you were boarded on a boat, and sailed out to sea. By the time you reached the drop site, you had spent weeks without food. Tied, magicless, blindfolded, starving, and cursed at every second of the day. And now, tossed into the middle of the Atlantic, attached to a rock to drag you down.

You heard their shouts and jeers as you fell. You heard their cries of celebration. The witch hunters thought it was over. And you died.

The current death toll? 48 deaths over 1834 years.

What a time to be alive.

You survived. The spells always revive you. Over, and over, and over again. Whether you wanted to live or not.

You awoke some years later on the ocean floor. Your lungs had adapted to the ocean water, changing to be able to pull oxygen from the water you breathed. Your legs had been bound for so long that your skin healed together, forming a tail of sorts.

You were a mermaid. Very, very deformed- but a mermaid nonetheless.

Fuck mythology.

You didn't know this was possible. How would this even happen? It shouldn't. In no way shape or form should you have any way to get out of this situation. You shouldn't have a way to swim to the surface. Let alone to shore. But the water and bottom feeders had torn apart your clothes, the ropes along with it. The anti-magic charm the villagers had tied to you now laid on the bottom of the sea, detached from you.

If they thought you were a witch before, you'd show those villagers a horrid, evil witch. Curse them all. Your torturers and their pathetic little town made of sticks and stones. You'd burn it down.

You used magic to release yourself of what remained of your bonds. Your legs were still as one: but from what you could tell, it was a weak skin bond. Leftover scar tissue, really. Easily cut with a knife; or the more painful way, to be ripped apart with magic. You've done magic reconfiguration on yourself before, and you really did hate it.

You swam to the surface, choking on air as it dried your lungs. But it was better to do so now and allow yourself time to heal before the shore, than to postpone the adjustment. You couldn't survive on land if you couldn't breathe air. The days of swimming blended together, but inevitably you arrived.

There's a reason you hate dying. The blackouts. You always awoke after a death, but until then, you have no control over what happens to you. Days, weeks, months... And at times, it takes years before you can awake. And you have no idea how much time has passed, because it feels as if you simply closed your eyes. Your memory is on pause until the magic drops you back in reality.

So the 17th century passed, and you had no idea. The 18th, 19th, and 20th came and went while you laid on the ocean floor. You slept through so much change.

And you woke up in the 21st century.

Nearly 400 years lost.

Because some bastard figured you were a witch.

*

When you arrived on shore, you didn't expect the beaches to be so crowded. Even when you did find a place of privacy, it wasn't long until someone heard your muffled curses as you tore apart your skin with the sharp edge of a shell. Your skin was bloated from being submerged for so long, and when you cut away the skin, you failed to realise how much your body had adjusted. How your nerves and veins had spread through your 'tail'.

And when someone finds a 24 year old naked on the beach, skin swollen from their marine life, coughing and crying as blood pours from cuts on their legs, involving the authorities is inevitable.

Whoops.

But what could you do? You understood English well enough, even though the slang of the forming crowd was wasted. Towels were used to cover your form, as the blood loss took its toll.

As your eyes started closing, you could only hear one thing. One answer to the question that bubbled from your lips.

"What year is it?"

"2013."