To Live and Learn

He grew up in the city and worked hard as all the slaves did and went to the temple and celebrated the holy days as the gods had decreed when they had made the world.

He had never believed in gods.

Indeed, he had never needed to, for they walked the earth before his very eyes. They reigned supreme, they fought each other for dominance, they demanded subservience of the mortals, they commanded vast armies of demons, they held the power over life and death, and magic was theirs to command.

Knowing made believing superfluous.

Everyone knew that the gods existed.

So, when a band of robbers took all they had and murdered his family and stabbed him too and he awoke anew, covered in his own blood but with nary a scratch on him, he never questioned that the gods must have chosen him.

What for, and whether that was good or bad was another matter. Frightened, he left, he ran as fast as he could. He made another live in a nomadic tribe and kept his miraculous return to life a secret so the gods would not hear of his whereabouts.

Yet his face remained unlined, and his body was no longer as frail as mortal flesh was wont to be. What injuries were done to it, be it accidental or with purpose, would heal in a frightening display of blue light without leaving scars.

He left again when somebody noticed it. Many times he made lives and left them, staying far of the big towns where the gods trod, until he knew the whole land, and he didn't know where to go anymore, and he noticed that generations had passed and still his face was young.

He left the land of his birth then, traveling far and wide.

He collected languages like he had collected pebbles as a boy, and he learned of the reasons for their existence. He learned of stories, of myths and legends and parables, and he collected them too. He remembered the peoples that he met by the stories they told, the only thing that he could take with him wherever he went.

When he learned that it was possible to make words visible in simple drawings, he studied these too. His first pictographs were scratched into the dirt next to a river and erased by his teacher, whose face was deeply lined and darkened like weathered rock, because he had seen impossible six dozen winters.

While he learned how to carve and paint words, he stopped wishing to be mortal and untouched by the gods.

When his teacher died, he traveled even farther.