The morning sun is peeking over the mountains, filtering through the boughs of black pine. Melek pokes his head out of the cave mouth blocked by the cold limestone slab left ajar to vent the sulfuric smell. 

The hillside holds its breath. Frost glitters upon the grasses. Somewhere beneath the earth, gnarled roots drink in silence. The mountain waits for the first kiss of sun.

So do its creatures.

So does Melek.

Melek sighs as he contemplates the long journey ahead of him. A faint puff of fog escapes as he exhales in the chilled morning air. His thoughts turn to the tumultuous events of the preceding weeks. He closes his eyes for a moment as he leans against the door slab, and once again he sees the face of his Nazil. Her shining black hair like the flowing mane of a mystical horse. Deep blue eyes like little pools of cool water, penetrating the soul.

For many weeks Melek could think of nothing but her face, how she looked upon him as he sat in her chambers that morning. The look of absolute terror that stunned him, like a thousand stabs to the heart with a spear of ice. Masked in her expression, a flicker of their lost love.For an instant he saw it: the flicker hidden beneath her terror. The old love, a silver fish rolling beneath dark water. One flash of reflected sunlight, then gone - leaving only ripples. It is a bitter and poisonous pain that courses through his being. A darkness of eternal night descending upon his soul.

This is his memory, transplanted to his brain. Yet it is also the memory of another person. Melek was a different man then, yet he was the same being. Hrant Darbinian and Melek Mainyu – both possessed of the same consciousness which is, in essence, neither of them. One retained the memories and thoughts of the other. Entwined together in the threads of fate. Forever locked in a great cosmic dance of divinity, spiraling into the abyss. For each of them, thousands of more voices ranging from a whisper to a chatter carried down through the centuries. 

The memories never truly vanished, they drifted beneath the surface like drowned cities.

Sometimes a face rose from the depths, sometimes a name. Sometimes only the smell of rain on distant soil or the feeling of blood drying on unfamiliar hands. Entire centuries hid beneath the currents.

He had only to grow still enough and the flood would begin. There were lives he remembered perfectly and could not name. Others he could name but scarcely recall.

Sometimes he inherited a fear before he inherited its cause.

Melek crouches at his mixing station, examining his distillation of the red alchemical oil from the rough antimony. He takes a small glass vial from a shelf of various supplies and pours some of the reddening oil into it.

The oil hissed when it touched the glass. Tiny crimson tendrils curled upward inside the vial like living smoke.

Melek watched them closely.

For a moment he thought he saw shapes moving within the vapor. Faces. Then they dissolved.

Capping it with a cork and wrapping it with a sacred cloth to insulate it and keep the sunlight away, he places the vial inside a small pocket within his horse leather satchel hanging at his side. The bishop noticed the vial once.

He said nothing.

Years later I would understand why.

Roughly four weeks later, Melek finds himself again in the place of his home, the village of Kumayri on the Akhurian river. He has no living family, and no one to have missed him while he was away. His small home considered abandoned, seized by the Oghuz tribe for taxes in arrears of several months. Even the church where he once worked as an undertaker was since abandoned. The minister who occupied it was elderly and had passed on while he was away at his cave refuge. The Oghuz had conducted several raids through the area in his absence, taking many of its inhabitants as slaves. 

Many homes stood empty. Doors hung open.Gardens had gone to weeds. Wind pushed dust through abandoned courtyards. A child's wooden toy rested where it had fallen months before, nobody had returned to retrieve it.

The village is empty of residents, only a few families remain to raise small herds of cattle and keep crops in the ground.

There is a rather large Byzantine monastery in the hills on the edge of the plains to the northwest of the village. It is there Melek assumes Nazli sought refuge after the incident with her father and Hrant and the subsequent raids by Tamerlane’s vicious armies. It was to this monastery he traveled, begging asylum for himself. An opportunity to find the girl he had once loved as another man. After a lengthy wait and very short meeting with the Byzantine bishop at the monastery, the bishop granted Melek a small room. It is dark and dank, but large enough to lie down lengthwise.

It was several days before he caught a glimpse of Nazil. She was working as a handmaid in the wool barn, among several large looms for making rugs and textiles to trade along the east/west road. While he is away tending to the sheep at pasture for several days at a time.

He saw her first through the warp and weft of a loom - just a fleeting glimpse.

A strand of black hair. A familiar profile. Then she disappeared behind hanging wool. For several moments he could not breathe. Melek resolved to win her affection again. If it required ten years, he would wait. If it required fifty years, he would wait. If it required another century, another body, another name— he would wait.

Patience had become the native language of immortality.

Melek succeeds in capturing her attention, and after a period of several months, they begin taking meals together again in the courtyard on the shaded north side of the main building. They spoke of trivialities, and occasionally of dreams of faraway places. Bustling market cities of her youth. Once she even spoke of Hrant, her one-time lover in the faraway market city of Pazarköy. Melek thrills whenever she speaks fondly of the man whom he had once been in another lifetime. He tightens his jaw to clench away the grimace when she spoke of her father whom Hrant savagely killed in the night, then ending his own life in the ditch behind her house.

Occasionally Melek attempts to persuade her to leave the monastery and travel to the market town of Pazarköy with him. She has called the church her home since her father died. Nazil had no other means of sustaining herself and paying the taxes levied upon residents of Eastern Anatolia in those times. The Byzantine monastery provided both refuge and steady work for her. They also provided moderate protection from the bands of raiders that flashed across the plains. Without the protection of the church, she would be swept up into slavery and carried off to some remote and terrible place.

One night as Melek lay upon his bed, he pulls open the satchel containing the vial of reddish oil, ensuring it is still intact. Melek whispered a special incantation over the vial, enchanting it with his continued intent. 

He removed the vial from his satchel and held it toward the candlelight.The liquid glowed a deep and unsettling red.

Somewhere beyond the monastery walls a bell rang midnight. Melek ignored it. His thoughts had already crossed a threshold from which they would not return.

There must be a way.

Every law has a weakness. Every lock, a key. Every death must surely contain an exception.

He turned the vial slowly between his fingers.The oil caught the light and seemed almost to pulse.

For the first time in many years, Melek found himself contemplating a future that frightened him. Not because it might fail. But because it might succeed.

He imagines a way to bend the laws of death and keep her with him forever. Simply unable to bear the thought of her death and separation from her forever across an infinite gulf of time.­