Chapter 10

Only after ten days did I finally take up the pen.

It had been painful while writing it, but once it was all written, the emotional aftermath I had to endure hit far more fiercely than expected.

In truth, I had no intention of picking up the pen today either, but while gazing out the window at the falling rain and longing for him, a sudden thought brought me to sit at my desk.

Have I not become truly human? To grow lethargic while chewing over the pain of loss, and to fret so anxiously in a desperate wish to protect a love I have repeatedly done nothing but lose—is this not a remarkably human sensation?

Had Ilie been beside me, it was a moment I would have wanted to brag about. Look. Because you became my world, I have grown this human. Then he would surely make those clear, pale blue eyes sparkle and smile as brightly as sunlight.

Looking at his diary inside the glass case at the corner of the desk, which had walked with me across vast ages, and at the ring on my finger that would continue walking with me into the future, I smiled and opened my notebook.

I debated heavily whether or not to write about the fourth and fifth incarnations of him.

Because I encountered the fourth him amidst the various upheavals of the early twentieth century and our time together was exceedingly brief, while the fifth him—who could be considered relatively recent—somehow recognized me almost immediately from the start.

Was the curse failing to break with time, growing stronger instead? Was the memory of me engraved into his soul going beyond an engraving, creating fissures and festers? I recall wondering such things.

Unlike previous centuries where forgery and disguise were easy, from the twentieth century onward humans found it easier to prove and record existence to identify individuals; thus, I also harbor some concern that the records I leave behind might unearth everything about his past incarnations.

Yet I decided to write after all. For unless I record every incarnation of him I have known, this memoir—no, this memorandum—can never be complete.

In 1894, having wandered aimlessly after letting go of the third him and arriving at the Alps, I spent several days before Michael’s gravestone and then headed back into human society. Specifically, it was a period when I focused on buying and forging identities to solidify my existence as ‘me.’

Because lacking an identity to prove had begun to grow inconvenient, I had to manufacture credentials so I could live stably among humans. Before the relentlessly progressing world became an era that acknowledged existence only if one proved oneself ‘human,’ I had to somehow anchor my presence in the world.

Well, perhaps I simply wanted to welcome him with a bit more dignity on the day he came to me again.

I retrieved assets I had concealed and entrusted under various identities, met different kinds of humans to seduce, persuade, and brainwash them. I did everything necessary to embed myself fully into human society.

Humans, regardless of gender or age, have a peculiar weakness for alluring appearances and wealth, so while it took quite a bit of time, the process was not particularly difficult.

After passing the turn of the century in such busyness, by the time I greeted the twentieth century, I existed in the world as a human with a solidly established identity.

The twentieth century I greeted wearing a perfected human veneer was truly an age of upheaval and chaos.

Humans harnessed light to banish the night and beamed invisible radio waves into the sky to intercept voices from immense distances. It was Europe’s golden pinnacle, where the upper classes enjoyed wealth and luxury reaching its zenith in greeting the new era, and the middle and lower classes strained themselves to exhaustion keeping pace with a world developing by the day, their eyes gleaming nonetheless.

Yet that splendid abundance called the Belle Époque was, in truth, nothing more than a flamboyant display of fireworks just before a massive volcano erupted.

As prosperity deepened and convenience multiplied, humans began to harbor a desire more virulent than mere greed for wealth and pleasure.

That was ‘greater efficiency, greater convenience.’

Humans craved ever faster speeds, taller buildings, and more powerful weapons. Across the whole of Europe, imperialism sprinted forward without limit.

Progress. The humans’ yearning for it seemed rather grotesque to my eyes, having calmly walked through countless eras of inconvenience and toil.

Sure enough, once the ambitions jutting sharply from every direction began to collide, sparks flew in an instant.

In 1914, a single gunshot echoing in Sarajevo brought that precarious abundance crashing down in a heartbeat. Splendid civilization transformed overnight into an enormous slaughterhouse, and young men who had sung of romance and freedom were shoved onto front lines draped in thick mists of blood.

My encounter with the fourth him, Lucien, took place during that horrific era as well. In the midst of the First World War, at the edge of hell.

During that period, I was wandering Western Europe. True to my long experience, I grasped the flow of the war by following two steps behind places where artillery fire had already passed, rather than staying in quiet villages where anything could happen at any moment.

It was an inevitable choice for an existence that had to constantly observe, throughout my living days, which country, which system, and which identity would be safest to maintain myself.

Was it 1917, or 1918? Since I remember birds flying down, mistaking drops of blood scattered over bleakly parched earth for fallen berries, only to peck at the bare ground before departing, the season was likely autumn.

An era when the gunsmoke belched out by humans butchering one another eclipsed even the sun. An era when another Grim Reaper, known as the Spanish Flu, hovered over the muddy mire fertilized by corpses, ever seeking a chance to hook its scythe around their throats.

If humans were not killed by bullets and blades, they expired from fever; those who survived in that hell spent days overwhelmed simply by maintaining their sanity and filling their bellies day by day.

Around that time, the place I arrived at was a plains village near the Somme River in northern France.

Though still marked on maps, at the time I arrived, it possessed no shape worthy of being called a village. Bell towers decapitated by artillery shells, an abbey severed at its midsection, and houses reduced to mere skeletons without walls lay sprawled amidst rubble and ash.

In wheat fields rotting away with no one left to harvest them, scavenger birds drawn by the stench of carrion swarmed instead of small birds after grain, and the rainwater pooled in every crater could not reflect the gray sky, dyed only in crimson.

Stepping into the ruins where all had already fled, I slowly surveyed the village with a touch of sympathy and a touch of disdain.

I was not particularly searching for casualties. I was merely looking for a place out of sight where I could kindle a fire to rest my body after days of ceaseless walking.

I discovered him around the time the sun began to slope downward.

I was inspecting the monks’ living quarters to the right of the abbey’s shattered waist, which had remained relatively intact. Finding that even this undamaged space was ill-suited for lighting a fire, I stepped out into the hallway again to search for a fireplace or brazier.

The moment I reached the underground entrance—whether leading to a food larder or a mortuary—a faint scent of blood drifted up from below stone stairs soaked in rainwater that had seeped through collapsed cracks. It was neither the scent of dead blood nor rotting blood.

Having assumed every living thing had departed, I had been walking carelessly, but the instant I caught the sign of life, I froze in place and strained my ears.

Through the gaps in the howling wind outside, an exceedingly faint, intermittent breathing reached me. It was the sound of a human on the border between life and death pumping oxygen into his body with all his remaining might.

In that instant, I instinctively calculated how much time had passed since I had seen off the third incarnation of him.

Even before confirming it, foreboding surged. It was an animalistic intuition, reflexively recognized because my nose caught the scent before my eyes could see.

The moment I felt it was a scent I knew, the moment the thought struck that it was a scent engraved so vividly in my nose, I bolted down the stairs like a soldier running for his life through the thick of artillery bombardment.

When I stepped down into the space devoid of sunlight and filled only with darkness and dampness, the first thing that caught my eye was a rifle with a twisted barrel. The owner of that hunk of iron became visible only in the following moment.

In a corner packed with dust-laden crates, a soldier huddled tightly into a ball matching the size of the boxes as if mimicking his surroundings, watching me with eyes half fearful, half welcoming.

The ominous premonition was right on target. Meeting his eyes alone was enough to know.

Even with a face blackened and coated in blood, dust, and mud, those eyes—so transparently blue it was hard to believe they were amidst such carnage—shattered me in an instant with a single glance.

Of all times.

Of all times, why be born into such an era, in such an environment? Of all forms, why like this? Of all places, why here?

While I gathered the breath of longing that had burst forth before I could hold it back, aimless resentment boiled within my parched chest.

“Where are you wounded?”

Perhaps sensing anxiety in the gaze scanning across his blood-soaked uniform to find the injury, he—who had remained on guard against me, clutching a notched dagger even in a desperate situation where his life hung by a thread—slowly loosened his grip and answered like a groan:

“Run… away.”

“Let me examine you.”

“Bombardment… there might be another bombardment.”

Left all alone in the ruins, even when facing the only person who could help him, he spoke solely in the language of the battlefield as a soldier. That was so deeply pitiable that my brow furrowed again and again.

“Before the search party arrives, hurry, evac… ugh. Hurry and go…”

Would you be here if you wanted to? Would you not want to flee, not want to live? A young boy who has barely lived a handful of years, why do you not cherish your own life?

Unwinding the frayed bandage over his thigh, turned nearly black with mud and blood, I kept thinking such thoughts. I felt a pang of anger.

“Do not move. The wound will tear open.”

The injury was not fatal. At least, not by my standards. Since it was his leg rather than his abdomen or chest, even if it festered or rotted in the worst-case scenario, it seemed I could save him so long as it was amputated.

Upon unwinding all the bandages, I found a laceration on his thigh that appeared torn by flying debris from an explosion. Fortunately, the bone did not seem fractured, but it was a deep wound where the muscle needed to support the leg was visibly mangled even to the naked eye.

Mine was a life spent absorbing human knowledge for most of an existence where time was surplus. Medical knowledge certainly resided within my mind. If only I had the necessary supplies, I felt I could manage somehow.

When I lifted my head after inspecting the wound, he, who had been staring blankly down at his injury, lifted his head as well. Despair was visible in his eyes.

Just as my heart began to ache at the sight, he lowered his fever-blurred gaze as if averting it and spoke like a sigh:

“…Hurry and leave.”

Haven’t you seen it with your own eyes? Doesn’t it look hopeless? Now that you know, just go. It was a tone that seemed to voice all those unuttered words.

“Do you want to die that badly?”

At that, I grew angry again.

“You hid here because you wanted to live too, didn’t you? It’s because you wanted to live that you wrapped this filthy bandage, dragged a leg like this, and went through the trouble of coming down to hide in this basement, isn’t it?”

Startled by the sharp edge in my voice, he lifted his head, looked at me with slightly flustered eyes, and soon furrowed his brow and turned his head aside, as if embarrassed by the pride he had put on display.

“There will be no further bombardment. As for a search party, it doesn’t matter if they come.”

Only after seeing him quiet down did my temper settle somewhat; I slid my arms beneath his knees and behind his back to lift him, speaking as I did. Surprisingly, without the slightest gesture of pushing me away, he let himself be scooped up meekly.

“…Are you not a civilian?”

“I am not a soldier.”

“Which means you’re not an ordinary person either.”

It would be more accurate to say he lacked even the strength to push me away rather than that he accepted it, but in any case, nestled obediently in my arms, he put up no resistance until I opened the basement mortuary door, entered, and laid him down upon an iron cot.

“It appears there is an infection. We might have to amputate. As you know, this is an abbey, so there won’t be liquor; you’d do better to just faint.”

Unable to even imagine what it felt like for me to lay my living ‘him’ down in a place meant only for corpses, he nodded quite calmly, despite eyes trembling with fear.

From then on, I frantically searched the village, gathering and hauling what was needed. Monastic robes from a wardrobe—coarse and thick, yet stored cleanly enough to substitute for bandages—and clean water from an unbroken well tucked away behind the abbey were the most welcome finds.

After rummaging through broken houses for a long time and finally scrounging up two bottles of rum to use as disinfectant, I entered the mortuary again to find him weeping softly. Even sensing my presence, he could not stop.

Lying alone in the mortuary of an abandoned abbey, crippled by an injury that prevented movement, it was only natural that emotions would overwhelm him, so I said nothing. I merely stepped up quietly, set down the hauled water, and tore his trousers.

Still unable to stop his low sobbing, he muttered faintly as if to himself by the time I wiped away all the dirt and dust from the wound and poured the rum:

“I want to live.”

I did not reply.

“I really… I really want to live.”

Because only words a stranger who had met him mere hours ago ought never utter—that I desired it far more desperately than he did—came to my mind.

Thus began my brief seclusion with the fourth him.

Closing his wound took a full day, and three days passed before the scent of blood pooled in the mortuary from that time dissipated.

Even when he wriggled in agony, wailed, and fainted, and even when, upon waking from unconsciousness, the ongoing torture-like procedure caused him to soil himself involuntarily, I did not stop my hands.

I cauterized the festering areas, disinfected them, pulled out threads soaked in alcohol, and stitched, repeating the process over and over. While he was unconscious, I bit his leg to inject venom that numbed the pain and induced stupor, keeping my fangs bared throughout to smear it across the wound as I doggedly continued suturing.

It was a time when I had to become cruel for his sake.

Indeed, thanks to ignoring his screams and sobs, the wound that seemed impossible to salvage without amputation closed quite successfully. Yet the already damaged muscle could no longer support him. I closed it knowing this.

“You will not be able to walk as you did before.”

Because leaving the wound open longer posed greater danger, it was an unavoidable compromise on my part.

“…I see.”

He harbored no grievances either. As if merely grateful that, having passed out and awakened amidst horrific torment, he was still alive, he wore an utterly relieved expression even upon his exhausted face.

“Thank you.”

Even though his face, once blackened with dirt and blood, was washed pale by sweat and tears, and despite having suffered so terribly, he expressed his gratitude to me.

“I am Lucien. I wish to remember my benefactor’s name; would you tell me?”

Confirming that his words of wanting to live were no lie, an emotion difficult to describe in words blossomed in my chest for the first time in a very long while.

From that day forth, I became the master of that ghost village to protect the remainder of his life.

All day long, I rummaged through the debris of shattered houses to scavenge canned goods and dried meat, hauling them to the duty room in the corner of the mortuary; knowing smoke was dangerous, I nonetheless lit the fireplace to raise the temperature and boil water. Of course, for minimal camouflage, whenever I built a fire in the hearth, I also set fires across various ruins outside.

On the seventh day, gunshots rang out nearby. Reflexively opening my ears, I heard harsh German. It was a search party.

Lucien’s face turned deathly pale in an instant, and he bolted up as if having a seizure; I rose quietly and laid him back down in his spot.

“No matter what sound you hear, absolutely do not come out.”

“A-are you planning to go out? You cannot; you don’t even have a gun!”

With panicked eyes, he sat up again and caught hold of my clothes, but I pressed him down by the shoulders once more, keeping him lying flat, and stepped back.

“Didn’t I tell you from the beginning? I am not a soldier. I have no need for guns.”

“Do you think they’ll spare you just because you’re a civilian? Getting caught in their sights is nothing short of suicidal! If you die, what… what am I supposed to do?”

“I told you that from the beginning as well. I may not be a soldier, but I am no ordinary person either.”

Lucien merely mouthed a couple of times, looking as though he had so much to say that he could utter nothing at all.

“It’s fine, so wait here.”

I turned and left the room. Keeping my ears trained on him, I climbed the stairs and exited the abbey. Mingled with the thud of combat boots from a rear search party sweeping the bombardment zone for battle damage assessment, the trembling breaths of an anxious Lucien reached me.

Judging by the footsteps, the search party’s size was a single squad of six or seven men. They were crouched low, walking in a textbook dispersed formation to minimize casualties from potential remnant ambushes, but to me, that scattered formation was the ideal layout for wiping them out entirely.

As I had boldly promised Lucien, disposing of them was not difficult. From their personal effects, I gathered simple rations, cigarettes, a dagger, two rifles, and iron canteens, then returned to the abbey.

He looked relieved as though finding an airway at my return, but cast bewildered eyes upon the items carried in my hands.

Even so, he never asked in the end.

After that day, no more footsteps were heard searching the abbey, and our shabby hideout transformed day by day into something more like a human dwelling.

It was around the time two weeks had passed. Though a lingering fever remained enough to make him moan each night, his body had recovered sufficiently for him to move on his own.

“Why are you helping me to this extent?”

While I was carving wood gathered from nearby hills to craft a crutch for him to lean on so we could gradually leave the area, Lucien, sitting on a chair beside the fireplace and watching blankly, asked.

“No, before that… who on earth are you?”

Without stopping my hands, I merely flicked my eyes up to look at him. His expression was not grave. If anything, it was detached.

Looking at that characteristic innocent face, where every countenance of the past—Ilie, Michael, Émile—overlapped with vivid clarity, a chuckle somehow escaped me. Lowering my gaze slowly, I countered amidst the rasp of the blade shaving the wood grain:

“Who should I say I am for you to feel at ease?”

As if my response were unexpected, he arched both eyebrows high, wore a blank expression, and then gave a small laugh.

“That wasn’t a question one should ask the person who saved their life.”

Rather than laughing because it was funny, it was closer to an involuntary hollow chuckle slipped out as complex reflections crowded in.

“Indeed. In a situation like this, what good is knowing your identity? Even if you’re not a person but a ghost, what could I possibly do about it…”

He added self-deprecatingly. I did not bother adding any words.

After that conversation, once again, only the rhythmic scrape, scrape of the high-quality dagger blade retrieved from the German soldier’s person smoothing the rough wood grain filled the silence.

After that day, he no longer asked me for the reasons behind my protection.

The inquiry he had consciously made whenever I provided him with food—asking whether I had eaten—was also never brought to his lips again after that day.

The war receded and drew near in turn.

Artillery fire heard neither far nor near repeatedly broke Lucien’s sleep, making him tremble in fear throughout the night. His wound improved by the day, yet for some reason, the lingering low fever refused to break at all.

Around the time when I, watching over him each night with anxious eyes, made up my mind that I must move him to ‘a safer place,’ another Grim Reaper—not a smoke-belching lump of iron, but something else entirely—reared its head into the abbey’s basement, as if mocking my dreams of peace.

Inevitably, a night arrived when he suffered in terror even without the sound of artillery.

The low fever that previously failed even to bead into sweat became a high fever soaking his entire body, and the intervals between his nightmares drastically tightened.

Only then did I realize that I had never asked him his age. So intoxicated by the fact that I had pulled him back from the very doorstep of death, I had completely forgotten the curse he carried from the very beginning merely by being born as ‘him.’

Having sat glued to his side throughout the night, stroking his hair and soothing him that everything would be all right, the moment dawn broke and he awoke, I asked him his age.

“My age?”

Freshly stirred from sleep, he asked back with a haggard face, then soon answered quietly.

“I turn twenty-five in three months.”

Entrenched without even realizing it in the arrogance of believing that because I had saved him this time, things might be different, only then did I truly register the passage of time.

We had reached this place around autumn, yet winter had arrived unawares. Only a scant few months remained before he reached the maximum lifespan allotted to him.

“Come to think of it, we haven’t even known each other’s ages all this time. Adrian, what about you?”

For me, it was a moment of sheer despair, but he gently brightened, his eyes sparkling as though pleased at the chance to finally learn more about me.

A heavy breath sank into my chest. I had drawn in air, yet as if the atmosphere had turned to stone, a suffocating pressure crushed my insides.

“……Adrian? Are you unwell?”

Clenching my molars in silence as I tried to dispel the wretched sensation, I could not withstand those blue eyes searching my abruptly darkened face with concern, and in the end, blurted out in near-abandon.

“To be exact, I don’t know either.”

He wore a fleeting look of bewilderment at the senseless answer, then—

“Only that the year my memories begin is somewhere around the 1420s.”

Hearing my subsequent words, he let out a soft laugh, taking it for a jest.

“So that’s what Jesus actually looked like.”

Then he added in a playful voice:

“This face is far handsomer—how on earth did he come to be known by that other image?”

Melted by his tone, which had softened to the point of tasting almost too sweet compared to our beginning, and by his eyes curving into crescents, I, too, let out a helpless chuckle, as if shaking free of my heavy, tormented thoughts.

“I’m not joking, Lucien. I truly……”

“I understand, I understand. So once the war ends, recall every crucifix and have them remade. Looking at this, it’s far too great a waste.”

He went on laughing. It was a laugh born of genuine mirth, the kind I had not seen once during all the months spent in that place. Over a trivial joke, a silly piece of banter, he was truly delighted.

Though my solitary, seething chest felt torn apart, his face was so lovely to look upon that I could not bear to pour cold water over his joy. In the end, unable to utter any further truth, I simply laughed along with him.

In our underground bunker, carved out and holed up in solely to keep him safe, laughter echoed for the very first time only after the distinct finality of death had cast its shadow.

Fate was always so merciless.

Buried beneath the soil without knowing the war had long since ended, our conclusion did not differ much from before.

As he drew closer to the end, he remembered the contents of his nightmares, and a few days before his final breath, he finally woke up, clutched me, and wept.

Over those last few days, we once again shared long conversations that had accumulated during the years we could not meet. He spoke of the village where he was born and raised before being dragged to the battlefield, and I spoke of living in a world devoid of his presence.

Lucien listened with fascination to tales of his past lives, yet from time to time, tears would wet his eyelashes. Like all the incarnations of “him” before, he felt no fear toward the curse; yet unlike those predecessors, he voiced discontent for the first time with my life of merely waiting and letting go.

“My fate does not matter, for it is something I etched into myself. It was engraved by my own will out of a selfish greed never to forget you. But……”

It would have hurt less had he sobbed aloud and blamed me, but with tightly pressed lips and not a whisper of sound, he simply let tears roll down his cheeks. Watching him pained me so deeply that when I cradled him and asked, that was the answer he gave.

“That because of someone like me, your life has been filled with nothing but endless funeral marches and waiting…… that is…… truly a curse, isn’t it?”

Would his heart have found ease had I told him no? That this never-ending wait, this time spent walking toward the singular hope of seeing him again, was the sole reason I endured this tedious existence. Shouldn’t I have spoken those words?

I thought as much after the fact, but in that moment, I could not bring myself to say a thing.

For in truth, I believed that meeting him as he continually sought me out, bearing witness to his end, and being crushed by the agony of loss that never dulled no matter how many times endured was the very “punishment” I was meant to pay.

Choked into silence, I could utter nothing in the end. I merely shook my head slowly, gripping his hand tight. Pleading that he would understand through my expression, through my eyes, through my touch.

Five days after that conversation, he closed his eyes once again at sunset, as the world was dyed crimson.

“I do not know about my past self, but the me of today truly regrets the curse laid upon you.”

Having stepped out of the dark, musty monastery basement to perch upon a ledge of rubble, he spoke those words, and then—

“There is a saying: if you like a flower, you pluck it; if you love a flower, you water it. I believe that is how I feel. You may forget me, so I only wish you would finally find peace.”

“……Lucien.”

“I was so immature and selfish…… that I suppose it took repeating several reincarnations to finally realize such an obvious truth.”

“If in the next life I cannot be born as a being like you, forget me. Forget me and be happy, Adrian. I pray for it with all my heart.”

Gazing serenely upon the snow-covered landscape that blanketed the wretched ruins in white as though it were our relationship, he whispered such painful words, and then quietly closed his eyes.

For the first time, I did not weep while sending him away. He was too steadfast for me to pity him presumptuously, so I held back my tears. Even I could not explain why, but simply, in that moment, grieving and aching felt as though I would be slighting the depth of his devotion.

My Ilie, my Michael, my Émile. The one I had thought would remain eternally young and frail had grown so strong before I knew it.

I buried Lucien behind the ruined monastery, in a corner of the graveyard where the monks were laid to rest. Laying him in a sun-drenched spot facing the sun, I pressed a long, lingering kiss of rest upon his cold forehead before covering him with earth.

Grasping tightly in my palm one of the two metal tags attached to the worn leather cord around his wrist, I departed from that place.

Clutching that solitary proof of identity certifying he had been someone’s beloved son and the radiant young man of a certain village, I set off toward the hometown I had once heard him speak of.

That his life had been far too fiery and earnest to be contained within a mere scrap of metal—until the moment I delivered that truth to his parents, who had waited for him each day feeling as though they were dying, I never once halted my stride.

Thus, drawing yet another step closer to humanity, I let go of the fourth incarnation of him.

***

It occurred to me that I had never mentioned the present time in which I write, so I took up my pen.

I began this chronicle in the autumn of 1995, and as I write this sentence, it is the spring of 1996. I am currently residing in Germany.

Once this record is finished, I intend to show it to him. When he comes looking for me once more, I will have him read all of this, and I will bestow eternity upon him as well.

I have resolved to do so. In truth, that resolution was the very reason I began this record.

It may be a selfish decision, but it is not a hasty one. Nor is it impulsive. If I must offer an excuse, it was his own wish.

My deliberations were long. For I know better than anyone the perils this existence harbors. No, perhaps no one other than me could ever know. To him, who became the sole joy and hope in this dreadful existence, I did not wish to impart the agony I already knew so well.

“That because of someone like me, your life has been filled with nothing but endless funeral marches and waiting… that is truly a curse, isn’t it?”

“If in the next life I cannot be born as a being like you, forget me.”

The fourth incarnation had shaken me first with such words,

“That might be the way to break the curse. It could be the only way to undo the curse I placed upon myself.”

“It’s what I want, Sir. It is what I truly desire.”

and had the fifth incarnation who followed not persuaded me with such entreaties, I likely would never have dared entertain the thought, let alone reach a resolution.

In his presence, I tend to soften to a pathetic degree and find myself unable to control such weakness, so in a sense, it was an inevitable outcome.

Once my deliberations reached a conclusion, I wandered in search of a method. Knowing not even a way to kill myself, I naturally had no idea how to share my immortality with a mortal. All the more so because I had never even imagined such a thing to be possible.

Being bitten by me does not turn someone into a creature like myself, contrary to common lore. To me, that is nothing more than an absurd myth, on par with claims that a stake through the heart brings death or that touching silver melts one’s flesh.

I, too, knew no method. I needed time. I needed corpses as well.

Thus, holding out resurrection as bait to dying mortals, I secured promises for their mortal remains and carried out repeated experiments. Naturally, the bodies I failed to revive were disposed of properly in accordance with the last testaments I had collected in advance.

By human standards, it might have been a cruel deed, but by mine, I had truly done my utmost to revive them, so I felt no guilt for those actions.

And a few years ago, I finally discovered the method.

The man who had yielded his dead body to me and awakened anew touched various parts of himself for a long while with a dazed expression. Filled with an emotion entirely different from his, I asked the disoriented man in a jesting tone:

What was death like? Did an afterlife exist? Did you meet the God you so longed for?

Blinking hazy eyes at my questions, the man slowly raised his head to meet my gaze, and touching his throbbing gums, answered as though talking to himself:

That it merely felt like waking from a deep slumber; he had seen and experienced nothing.

Feeling as though I had triumphed in a battle against the God to whom humans clung so desperately, I curled the corners of my mouth into a broad smile.

Afterward, serving a first meal to the human I had revived—no, to the first “kinsman” I had ever encountered since my existence began—I explained the life of a monster. How to live from now on, how to hide, which choices were dangerous and which were safe.

As it happened, he was a monk. While I could hardly call it a blessing, he was far safer than the countless humans I had attempted before. He was quick to understand, accustomed to solitude and isolation, and prudent in thought as well as conduct.

Having originally been human, he would know better than I how to blend among mortals, so I did not detain him for long.

Before departing, he asked my name. With a willing heart, I gave him the identity “he” had bestowed upon me. At that, he fell silent for a moment and asked if I had ever believed in a religion. I gladly answered once more.

“A long time ago, I did receive baptism in the very faith you followed.”

Looking down at the rosary he had clutched in his hand since before his death, he asked for my baptismal name. When I told him with a faint chuckle, his face darkened with all the turmoil I had expected, and he fell silent again.

Barely parting his lips, he asked if he might visit me in about ten years. Now that he had actually become what he was, fear seemed to have taken hold, for his lowered gaze wavered slightly.

From that day forward, we designated a rendezvous to confirm each other’s well-being every ten years. It was a moment that stirred a thrill within me, of a nature subtly different from the anticipation of being able to revive my Ilie, my “him.”

As he stepped out of the manor, he tossed the rosary he had been holding into the trash bin beside the door.

Watching that sight, I could not help laughing once more. I was no longer alone in this world. I had a fellow of my own kind whose safety I could confirm. That single fact had made a surprisingly human emotion surge within me.

After sending my first kinsman out into the world, I spent some time filled with jubilation. Once that emotion, which had surged like boiling water, settled down, I counted the days, waiting only for my beloved to return to me.

No—I am waiting still.

Several decades have already passed since I parted with the fifth incarnation, so the day of our reunion cannot be far off.

If only I could finish this chronicle before the day the sixth incarnation comes to me. Having grown quite human, retracing the past consumes so much emotional energy even for me that my writing does not proceed as swiftly as my heart desires.

The memories of Ilie consumed the most time, as expected. It was so while writing them, but even after finishing, I could not open the notebook again for a long while.

Not because they were the oldest memories, but because they were the most excruciating.

Every conversation shared with him, every moment spent together, meticulously retraced and tenaciously rendered—those words wounded me ceaselessly, as though scraping the nib of the pen against my bare flesh rather than across paper.

Though I lived for centuries believing I possessed no soul, the soul whose presence I recognized only upon losing him still aches whenever I recall him.

At such times, I sometimes regret having learned human emotions. Perhaps all the more so because I feel I never asked to learn them in the first place.

Yet when I consider that the reason I came to know all these things was to love Ilie and never forget my sin, cunningly enough, even that regret begins to feel like a point of pride. For even the emotion of regret was something he taught me.

Everything I received from him constitutes who I am today.

I have finished all preparations to receive him. I yearn for him to find me as soon as possible, so that I need never send him away again, nor spend time climbing into a coffin to bury myself in solitude.

*

With Daniel, the fifth incarnation of him who was different from our very first meeting, I crossed paths in New York less than ten years after the end of World War II.

My journey to America was merely a hunch. A feeling born of purely simple instinct that I ought to establish “myself” in that land as well.

Mingling with the pouring tide of immigrants, I set foot on the world’s greatest land of liberal democracy, and using the wealth accumulated over centuries, I firmly rooted a “human” persona named myself into that soil.

Money was the quickest and easiest means to earn trust in human society, so from that period onward, one could say I had become almost flawlessly human.

In 1954, when I met him, I was living as an art collector and an anonymous patron of young artists.

What accrues value with the passage of time is always knowledge and art, and having collected them over an expanse of time incomparable to human lifespans, recognizing artists who would create enduring value was an effortless task for me.

During that era, the places I frequented were not sleek galleries or grand museums. They were amateur exhibitions held in back alleys of bustling districts, near universities, or in bohemian quarters, organized by artists scraping together the spare change from their pockets.

The day I reunited with him was one such day.

The exhibition I stumbled upon that day was in a small gallery in Soho. Compared to the works yearning to be hung, the space was woefully cramped, and unhelped by the weather, the sky hung gloomy and overcast.

Scanning with interest the canvases lined up densely from the entrance, I stepped slowly inside.

The crowd was neither large nor small. It had that modest, bustling air where the owners of the canvases on the walls seemed to have each gathered their own circle of friends and relatives.

With the practiced demeanor of a passerby who had wandered in on a whim of idle curiosity, I slowly browsed the artworks.

Given the cramped quarters, the canvases hung barely a handspan apart, fully capturing the raw anxiety and excess typical of young people facing an uncertain future.

Some paintings lacked all individuality, merely piggybacking on prevailing trends in an attempt to catch the eye, while others were so overbearingly eccentric that they dulled any aesthetic resonance.

Then, at the deepest recess of the gallery, I reached a wall spanning roughly the width of my outstretched arms, where a single painting hung alone. Though the preparation time had likely been similar, it was the largest among all the paintings I had passed.

For the first time since entering the gallery, I halted in my tracks before a painting.

In color, composition, and technique, there was nothing exceptional. It was neither noticeably magnificent nor admirably delicate. Rather, it was unrefined.

As though pressed for time, the brushstrokes were rough, the palette monotonous, and the figure alone stood out with unnatural clarity against the backdrop, making the harmony poor.

Yet I could not tear my eyes away.

In the center of the darkly smudged background, so indistinct that one could hardly discern what it was without imagination, illuminated faintly by a reddish-amber glow that seemed to come from a fireplace, the man on the canvas looked down at a book held in one hand.

The fingertips resting loosely over his crossed legs were bloodlessly pale despite bathing in the hearth’s warmth, and his lowered gaze and the black hair spilling beside it were rendered darker than any shadow in the surroundings.

There was no way I could fail to recognize it.

It was my face.

The instant I realized this, the smudged background—unrecognizable to anyone who had not lived it—instantly flooded my mind. It was the cabin in Luncani—no, our secret meeting place, so small and cozy we had fondly called it a cabin.

It was me seated in the armchair by the foot of the bed, seen from his vantage point as he always sat by the window.

Guided by instinct, I lowered my eyes to check the placard.

The Man in the Dream
— Daniel R.

It was the very moment my gaze froze, pinned to that unfamiliar name. From over my stiffened right shoulder, a quiet voice laced with uncanny familiarity drifted in.

“……Sir?”

It was a faintly trembling voice. A prickling chill crept up the nape of my neck. Drawing in a breath as though clutching my dropped heart, I turned my head slowly.

“Good heavens.”

Our eyes met. In an instant, the ambient noise of the cramped, bustling gallery receded into the distance.

The young man in a worn shirt tilted his head steeply to peer into my face, his hair gleaming like spun gold under the gallery’s yellowish lighting. His blue eyes, widened in astonished awe, seized once more the heart I had only just soothed.

“I-it’s impossible, how…… No, no. I knew it. I knew it! Ah, I’m sorry. I’m just so stunned…… But I knew I would meet you. Someday, I knew we would surely meet.”

The man—no, Daniel—poured out words breathlessly, his face making it plainly visible that he was struggling to suppress a heart about to erupt.

“You were surprised too, weren’t you, Sir? Because it looks just like a portrait. Well, I painted it exactly as I saw it in my dreams, so I suppose it is a portrait, but…… anyway.”

I could make no response. Facing him as he stood overwhelmed with emotion at seeing me in reality, trembling with an excitement he could scarcely contain—what could I possibly have said?

“I don’t know if you’ll believe me, but I truly knew I’d find you one day. I’ve been waiting…… waiting all this time. Ever since I was a little boy.”

To me, that moment was the point where our destiny twisted.

“Because it was far too vivid and persistent to be a mere dream.”

For some reason, he had known me even before we met and recognized me in an instant. He spoke as though he had long observed the nightmare that his past incarnations had remembered only when death drew near, gasping for breath as if vomiting up the truth.

In truth, that we had encountered each other in that distant, alien land after having met only within the European continent was astonishing enough to me. Originally, I had stayed in America only to solidify the identity I had forged there, intending to return soon to my manor in Northern Europe.

Just as the fourth incarnation had shown a change of heart for the first time, it felt as though our fate had finally reached a turning point.

“Il—”

Having nearly called out Ilie’s name by reflex, I managed to choke off my words on a caught breath and tore my gaze away.

“……Daniel.”

“Y-yes?”

“If you truly know me, then you must also know what needs to be done with this painting.”

At my low, whispered words, he glanced back at his painting with lingering regret, then lifted his head again.

“I won’t destroy it with my own hands.”

He then added boldly:

“You can simply buy it, Sir.”

It was a response utterly characteristic of “him.”

After a brief silence, I slowly turned my head. Those blue eyes that wrung my heart every time I met them curved faintly, anticipating my answer.

Whether it was a sigh or a breathy chuckle, I exhaled softly and took a pen from my pocket, writing down my address upon his palm.

“I will pay whatever price you name, so take it down at once.”

Daniel beamed as if he had anticipated it all along and nodded. Clasping his fist tightly against his chest, as though the hastily scribbled address on his palm were his very heart.

That very night, he came to my residence carrying the painting.

The moment his face, flushed with joy and excitement, appeared beyond the doorway, I unleashed without restraint the yearning I had struggled to suppress at the gallery. He, too, set down in a flash the centuries-old image of me he had cherished and threw himself into my arms.

Instead of tedious probing and cautious talk, we surrendered everything to instinct. For we knew without needing words. Even without confirming, we knew each other to be who we were, and without asking or answering, we could feel everything.

“It still feels like a dream…… You have no idea how long I’ve waited.”

It had always been he who sought me out and I who waited, but in that lifetime, it was not so. It was I who had gone to him, and he who had waited.

Though I knew not why, it was a change that left me no choice but to believe fate was truly shifting.

Of course, not everything had changed. I remained unable to let go of him, and he was still human.

It was a night when the fact that none of Lucien’s wishes had come to pass felt terribly fortunate, yet profoundly bitter.

***