**I MARRIED A MAN WHO CLAIMED HE WAS IMMORTAL – I THOUGHT IT WAS A JOKE UNTIL LAST NIGHT.**
He always chuckled when I brought up our future, deflecting with stories of “past lives.” I thought it was endearing eccentricity.
Then he showed me the attic.
Dust motes danced in the single shaft of moonlight illuminating a massive, locked chest. “My memories,” he said, his voice suddenly low.
Last night, driven by morbid curiosity, I picked the lock. Inside, nestled amongst yellowed letters and antique trinkets, was a single photograph.
The man in the photo looked exactly like my husband, but he was wearing a World War I uniform, his arm around… my grandmother. ⬇️
My blood ran cold. The photo felt hot in my trembling hands. Grandmother Elara, the woman whose stories of a dashing young soldier were always tinged with a melancholy I’d never understood – that soldier was *him*. My husband, Elias, a man I’d known for only five years, had known her a century ago. The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow; the endearing eccentricity was a chilling truth.
I confronted Elias that morning, the photo clutched in my fist. He didn’t deny it. Instead, he sat, his usual playful demeanor replaced by a profound weariness, a haunted stillness in his eyes that spoke of ages lived and loves lost.
“It’s a curse, not a gift,” he confessed, his voice a low rumble. “I’ve loved, lost, and lived through wars and plagues. I built empires and watched them crumble. I sought to escape it, but immortality… it clings.”
A new fear, sharper than the initial shock, pierced through me. What if his immortality wasn’t natural? What if it was a consequence of something darker? His words echoed in my mind: “a curse, not a gift.”
Days turned into weeks filled with clandestine research. I discovered old newspaper clippings, meticulously preserved, detailing strange disappearances and unexplained deaths surrounding his various “past lives.” The pattern was subtle, almost imperceptible, but there was a dark, recurring theme: rituals, sacrifices, something ancient and sinister. Elias had always kept his work mysterious, but now I realized he wasn’t just an enigmatic artist; his art was a form of occult practice.
One stormy night, a figure emerged from the shadows of our garden – a wizened old woman with eyes like chips of obsidian. She spoke in a language that felt like ice on my skin, calling Elias by a name that sounded ancient and powerful. She accused him of betraying their covenant, of seeking to escape his destined role. A battle of arcane power raged around me, unseen forces clashing in the darkness. Elias fought back, but his movements were sluggish, his immortality seemingly weakened.
When the dust settled, the old woman was gone. Elias lay broken, physically and spiritually drained, the vibrant spark of his eyes extinguished, replaced by a hollow emptiness. He was not immortal anymore; the curse had been lifted, but at a terrible cost. He wasn’t the playful, enigmatic man I had fallen in love with; he was an old, weary soul, finally released from his ageless burden. The relief was bittersweet. His immortality was gone, but so was the life that we both knew. We were both left facing the prospect of an ordinary mortality, yet his memories stretched across centuries, a vast ocean of experiences compared to my short span of life.
The attic chest remained, its secrets now mine to discover, along with the reality of a future that was both breathtakingly new and frighteningly empty. The love remained, but could it bridge the gap between a woman whose life was just beginning and a man whose life was, in effect, over? The question hung unanswered, a heavy, lingering silence echoing the vast expanse of time Elias had endured and the even vaster emptiness of his future. The answer lay not in the past, but in the uncertain, challenging horizon of the years to come.