funranium | D&D Perspectives #6

Immortality gives you eternity to contemplate what you did wrong and no escape, yet it is a prison that is desperately sought by so many.

The first party that ran in my world dealt largely with themes of immortality, definitions of, methods to attain, and then what to do with forever on your hands. This is one immortal's fate.

Today, like every other day, such that there were days here, started the same way. Nero walked up to the glass, stared at it with an intensity that should have reduced it to slag, and asked himself okay, how the fuck do I undo this. Over and over again he asked this question. He had another mantra when he meditated once, but this was it now.

He rubbed his eyes and looked away. Nero glanced over at his heart clock on the shelf, made a quick calculation of beats per minute assuming he'd been calmly angry as usual, and figured that he'd just lost another four hours. Well, four hours if he were home at least. He'd never really appreciated how well it kept time when it was in his chest.

By the dates on newspapers and letters he had scryed, tomorrow he will have been stuck here for 53 years.

A lesser man would have gone mad in days. No one, save that insufferable Gaelennian Si'Ter himself, would have the temerity to call His Imperial Majesty, the Honorable Governor Sir Doctor Nero Kensin a lesser man. Some, notably his old confidants and subordinates, would claim rather forcefully that a man who declared himself to be immortal when first meeting them was none too sane in the first place.

The black elves had actually celebrated in the prison with him for his 150th birthday and told him that he didn't look a day over 370, but they were being dicks and talking relative to their rate of aging. Their sharp filed teeth glinted in the not light of this place as they smiled at their wit. Of course, his heart was beating on a shelf to help him keep time and he wasn't dead. Between these two facts, evidence suggested he actually was immortal, not that Nero'd ever doubted it for a moment.

They made every effort to make his prison as comfortable as possible. He had a bed that he'd never used. Sleep was a pointless effort here. No rest and no dreams.

Just staring at the Wall That Wasn't. That was their cruelest trick he thought.

It was the finest scrying tool he'd ever encountered. Better than the quicksilver fountain, better than the telescry at the Premia Observatory. He could see the whole world through this window. All of it. Anywhere.

But it was just as impenetrable as the other three walls put there by the black elves, possibly more so. He knew this well because he'd made it. Three walls of stone, one the edge of reality.

He'd never intended to go back after he thwarted that damnable necromancer but he expected to be flitting through the planes...not this.

Nothing to do but stare at the world and probe his own magics for a weakness. They were walls of his own making which made it the worst prison of all.