The Old World Lives Anew!

Entropy

Written in November 2014.

I.

I will not lie. I forced myself to vow that much before I began writing this. The record is here with me, signed in my blood: "I, Caspar, formerly the Prince of the land once called Thun, make this pact under oath of blood, certifying that this manuscript is entirely truthful, recounted to the best of my memory." Very fine words, more suited to parchment than clay.

Too many of us are liars now. They cheat not only themselves, but our legacy. That is why I made the oath. I wouldn't lie to my own children, if they were still alive, and I won't lie to the children of my race for the sake of my reputation. Then again, I have nothing left to lose. When I die--if I die, my name will most likely be forgotten. And while I may find myself shamed, hated, and feared, I still have pride enough to consider that a tragedy. To be forgotten, that is.

You see, the events I will recount here were events I witnessed with my own senses. I was there. And I know things, the truth of things, that no one else could have ever imagined. Truth is far stranger than fiction.

But to tell the truth, first I must go to the beginning. The very beginning.

My eighth great-grandfather was Helios, high prince of Aurvandil. In simpler terms, he was the emperor, if only for a few brief centuries.

Through Helios' daughter, my lineage can be traced to Mentor, my father. He was a prince, but only in name. No, the political maneuvering--that was entirely my mother Rhea's duty. Unseemly in appearance, she was, but an excellent speaker, and possessing intellect far beyond my dimwitted father.

And now we have come to me. I was born three hundred years ago.

Perhaps the knowledge of our race will be lost to time; if that is so, as the humans seem determined to do, I will try to explain. I am an Immortal. We do not age as humans do, growing old and dying. In fact, we can live for hundreds, even thousands of years, unless we suffer an accident or illness. Being only three centuries old, I am considered quite young.

We Immortals and the humans we once enslaved are, seemingly by nature, sworn enemies. Even our blood will kill the other. Ours is thickened by quicksilver, and to it we owe our gray hue; to humans, a drop of our blood on their skin--or, Akhen forbid, into an open wound--will paralyze and kill them, though not until after they suffer from hallucinations and madness.

Human blood is red, and from what little we understand in our time, it has the element iron in it. In the days when we fought among ourselves, we fashioned all our weapons out of iron, as it burns our flesh like fire.

In the grand scheme of things, we had an advantage over the humans, who are smaller in stature than us and cannot, except in very rare cases, harness the power of magic. We enslaved them long before my time; it was very common to see men and women who owned slaves wearing gloves, to prevent harmful contact between the races. In time, wearing gloves became a symbol of wealth and status.

Another thing about us that differs from "mortals"; our women can have only one child. Since we do not die, this is not so very dangerous to our survival as a species, but it led to the practice of polygamy among our men, who wanted more children to choose from as heirs. The humans find this disgusting, and have used it against us since they took over. I do not excuse the practice, but you, remote posterity, most likely find it abominable, and so I feel you must understand why it was done. It began as a necessity, but soon grew into another symptom of the disease that plagued our civilization. For as more men developed whole houses of wives, collecting them like coins, the concept of love dwindled into nothing! It is in our nature to love, perhaps more so than in humans; we fall in love, and never fall out of it. Only those trained to control their emotions with magic can suppress the adoration we carry the moment we fall, and such training can take eons to master.