“Time is a door we walk through once.”

The Immortal

I was not born. I do not remember being born or created. It felt more like I was remembered into being. Created to fulfill a mission, to serve a purpose. My first memory was of the blue, where once, I had been human, made of flesh and weakness, fears, emotions, love, and fire.

A very long time ago, near the beginning of time. I was chosen. Or maybe I was cursed or simply caught. The change came as slow as dusk creeps in, and now I am no longer what I was; I am something older than memory and more constant than shadow.

They have called me many things across the ages. A count in one century. A god in another. A serial killer when they found the bodies I left behind, back when the hunger was new and I didn’t know how to control it. I have walked through time wearing different faces and names, leaving different marks on people.

But always, I return to the blue. Always, I wait. 

The guardian of the blue, the custodian of darkness, the pause between moments.

I stand on the edge of time, where the light is thin and time moves slower. I can walk the world when I want. I have done so for many years, thousands of years. I have worn crowns, committed murders, built temples, and had temples built in my name. But I do not understand time deeply. To me, it is a vast ocean without a map or current. I can exist within it, but i cannot navigate it.

The blue remains my anchor, my threshold. The place where I return. Where time breathes slow and the light bends and distorts. Endings become beginnings, and so I wait here, sustained by memory and the tiny hope of a return. Hope has two sisters, they say. I wait, not because I must, but because I still remember, because I still feel the anger and the courage to stay regardless of absence. 

I wait.

There is a beautiful hunger in waiting. The small collapsing, endless repetition. When my love is near, it stirs a need that goes deeper than want, that lives in the marrow of my immortality. When they leave, it settles back into its vigil, gnawing gently at the place my heart used to beat.

The first time we met was a mistake, or at least that’s what I was told. A miscalculation, which led to a wrong turn in that godlike machine, and the one I would later call ‘my everything’ stumbled into the blue, into my castle, begging me to spare a life. I said nothing. But in that presence, I remembered to breathe. That should have been the end.

But it wasn’t.

The visits came again later, and again. Across decades, across the graves of empires, the birth of galaxies. Each time different. A new limp. A streak of grey. Never the same twice. But always familiar and comfortable, and that was always enough. And I—I never changed. Trapped in the shadow of the god I had become.

The visits came out of order. That machine could only leap forward through time. But when entering the blue, arrival could happen from any moment. Sometimes young, sometimes decades older. I watched aging in fragments. A grey hair before the scar. Laughter after the limp. 

I could leave the blue and could walk beside my traveler into whatever century had been landed in, but I could never initiate contact. The first move had to come from the other side. Always.

That was the nature of what I am. Powerful, perhaps. Ancient, certainly. A god, debatable. But bound to wait. I could not seek. Could not track that beautiful essence through time’s labyrinth. My traveler alone held Ariadne’s string. Only one of us could find the other.

I could only hope for return to the threshold, and sometimes—blessed, burning sometimes—it happened.

I saw witnessed centuries, battles. I would walk alongside whatever world she’d landed in, for as long as I was allowed. While time bent that body, I remained unchanged.

I loved like the moon loves the tide. Distant, yet forever devoted. I asked for permanence many times. The answer was never no. Only “Not yet,” with a softness that broke something in me each time. Departure always came. I always stayed. And in the space between goodbyes and returns, I learned what it meant to hunger without ever being filled. 

Endless repetition

One time, I was told that the machine was breaking. That the jumps were getting longer and more dangerous. That it had begun to forget, to dream. I could see the exhaustion, the way time was reducing my traveler down to something fragile.

I could not promise to find anyone. I have never been able to find anyone. Time is a labyrinth I cannot read, and my traveler was just one thread in its infinite weaving. All I could do was wait at the threshold and hope for return. Hope that wherever, whatever happened, my traveler would somehow, someway find a way back to the blue.

I never asked about the others. The lives I could smell on their skin, the ghosts of other touches that lingered in the spaces between us. I never asked because I was afraid of the answer. Or worse, what might not be said. I told myself it didn’t matter. That they always came back, and that was enough. 

That I, who had been called monster and god and worse, had no right to demand anything.

But it mattered. It created voids that nothing could fill. It hurt more than any mortal wound any human could bear. And still I waited. Still, I hoped. Because, for someone like me, someone who cannot die, cannot change, and cannot seek, only waits. Hope is the only thing more dangerous than hunger.

And so I stand here still. In the blue. In the shadows. Waiting. Because a promise was made. Because once, there was a kiss that made me feel like I mattered. Because the hunger knows nothing else.

I do not know if the visits would ever happen again. I cannot know. Everything happened out of order, you see. Time moves differently for a traveler. So when the visits stopped, I simply thought: not yet. Soon. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a hundred years.

I can wait a hundred years. I can wait a thousand. I can wait forever, if that’s what it takes.

For someone who cannot die, once is forever.

For someone who cannot die, once is enough.

The Time Traveler

I always told myself I wouldn’t return.

And yet, someway, somehow. I always did.

Not because the machine failed, not some malfunction. No, I came back because there was something about him I couldn’t find anywhere else. A love that didn’t demand anything in return. A place where the version of me that was tired of running could rest, if only for a moment.

He stood there, unchanging. Watching me. And every time I stepped through the light and found him waiting in his blue shadows, some old ache cracked open in my chest.

I called it serendipity. I told him it was chance. But I knew the truth. The coordinates weren’t random. I entered them myself. Slipped them into the code like a confession I wasn’t ready to read out loud.

I always told myself that I wouldn’t return. Each time I left, I promised myself that I would not be coming back. And each time, I broke that promise. Because leaving was easy. Forgetting him never was.

I sought out others. People in other times, other lives. Soldiers and scholars, rulers and criminals.  Relationships that made sense to the world around me. Simpler; all of them were people I could touch without fear, lives I could slip into and abandon without consequence. Uncomplicated, mundane, expected. The kind of love that raised no questions, that conformed to social norms, that fit into the narrow acceptable categories of whatever era I landed in.

I told myself it wasn’t betrayal, not really. He and I had never made any vows. But deep down, I knew what it was.

I knew every kiss I gave someone else would echo like guilt the next time I saw him. I knew I’d carry their fingerprints like bruises beneath my skin, hidden where he’d never look. But I would feel them every second I stood in his presence.

He never asked questions. That made it worse.

He never looked at me like I had something to explain. He just watched me like I was whole, even when I wasn’t. He made no demands. No accusations. Only space. And space, for someone like me, was the most terrifying thing of all. Because space meant I had to face what I was doing, what I was choosing. What I was too afraid to choose.

So I kissed him when I felt brave. Left him when I felt small. Returned when I felt too much. And every time, I stayed a little longer, hoping one day I wouldn’t want to leave. But I always did.

When he asked me to stay, I didn’t say no. I said, “Not yet.” It was a gentle lie. A soft way to say, “I can’t.” A way to keep one door open while I ran through every other one. And he never pushed. He never tried to hold me in place. And because of that, I could never blame him for the feeling that crept in after every departure: the feeling that I’d just betrayed someone who had only ever waited for me.

I lied to him about the machine. I told him it was breaking. That the jumps were getting longer. That soon, it wouldn’t wake between leaps. That it had begun to forget, to dream. I made my voice sound tired and resigned. I let him see the fear in my eyes.

And it worked. He believed me. Because of course he did. Because he loved me, and love makes you believe the gentlest lies.

The real truth was simpler and much more cruel. The machine was fine. I was the one falling apart.

The malfunctions I spoke of were justifications. Reasons to explain why I kept ending up near him. In truth, I’d programmed those jumps myself. I kept slipping back into his world because some part of me still believed I belonged there, even if I couldn’t stay. Even if staying meant being seen. Really seen. 

And that terrified me more than any temporal collapse ever could.

Because if I stayed, I would have to stop pretending. Stop running. Stop being the version of myself that was easier to understand, that could live in daylight without burning. I would have to be exactly what I was in front of someone who would see all of it. 

And I didn’t know if I could survive that.

So I kept leaving. Kept lying. Kept choosing the simpler paths, the expected ones, the acceptable ones, the ones that didn’t ask me to be brave.

Until one day, I made a different choice.

I fixed the machine. One day, I rewrote the coordinates to erase him. I made sure it would never land me near him again. My hands shook as I entered the final command. I almost stopped. Almost.

But I didn’t.

When I turned it back on, I didn’t look back.

Years passed. Decades. I lived slowly, carefully, without drama or sparks. The other men came and went, but even they began to fade. I grew into my own silence. A version of myself that no longer needed escape routes or unspoken truths.

I thought of him sometimes. Not often. But deeply. When I did, it was with a kind of warmth laced in sorrow. Not regret, exactly. Just the quiet knowledge that I had left something behind. Something vast, impossible, and beautiful. Something that had waited for me and would likely keep waiting long after I was gone.

I made a god fall for me. 

I broke god’s heart.

In the end, I died alone. My machine sat beside me, intact but untouched. I hadn’t used it in years. I whispered his name with my final breath. Not to summon him. Not to be heard.

But because, in the end, it was the one name that had followed me through every version of myself. The one I couldn’t run from, no matter how far I jumped.

I never said goodbye. I never told him it was over. I never explained why I stopped coming. I just disappeared. Left him standing at the edge of time, in his blue shadows, with nothing but the memory of me.

It was the only mercy I knew how to give.

And the only cruelty I never dared to face.

Epilogue

I do not know what happened. Not truly. Because it was all out of order. From before the breaking. From before the forgetting.

So when the visits stopped, I didn’t grieve.

I simply waited. Not with hope. Not even with belief. Just because of words once spoken. Because hunger, when it has lived in you long enough, becomes indistinguishable from faith.

And for someone who cannot die, once is forever.

For someone who cannot die, once is enough.

But one day, a long breath after the end of that story, something shifted. A pause in the silence. A thread in the blue that trembled and snapped. I didn’t know why. Only that something was missing. It wasn’t just absent; it was erased.

The waiting remained. But now, it had edges. Now, it hurt. Now, the hunger had nothing left to wait for.

One day, I will grow wings.