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Kayn asked him once what it was like to be immortal – the question of a child who truly cannot comprehend the answer. He had told him it was a bit boring mostly, which was true.
He hadn't mentioned the incomprehensible loneliness, interspersed with fleeting moments of infinite oneness – only to lapse into maddening solitude once more.
Kayn wouldn't understand. In all their combined centuries together, he never quite does.
And he never remembers.
But Rhaast does.
Or, perhaps it's that he never forgets. Merely finds himself reforged in whatever capacity Kayn needs.
Their first life had been sparked from the night sky itself when the cosmos burst open in a rush of night and dawn. They'd been born from stardust and hellfire, order and chaos, destined to meet and clash and meet again. Two halves of the same burning whole, a single soul split at the forging of eternity forever seeking itself.
They'd melded that first time, truly, into a glorious being of gold. And perhaps that is what sealed their fates.
A fall, splintering of weapon and body, and a subsequent rise millennia later.
He's not sure where Kayn's soul goes when they are torn asunder. Certainly not that first time that broke them both and left even Rhaast unmoored for millennia. But he's always found his way back.
As a hunter chasing down wayward souls. An acolyte with a thirst for power and an aversion to shirts. A son with his mind broken beyond retrieval under the glare of the moon – yet still intact enough for their souls to recognize each other.
An ordinal chasing godhood – perhaps the closest they've come to their beginnings.
And yet they fall every time. First, together. Though Rhaast fell long, long ago. And then, inevitably, Kayn's spirit leaves their cloistered union. Sometimes through acts of violence that even Rhaast cannot save him from. Sometimes through a foolish slip, giving his soul over in a way that he doesn't understand. In a way that Rhaast cannot prevent, when he watches Kayn fade from their shared vessel despite how he claws at the tattered edges of his soul to keep him.
He dreads those times the most. Fears that one day Kayn's soul will simply cease to be, subsumed entirely by Rhaast's own dominating will.
And yet, somehow the boy still finds him. Each life together a bit softer, though always too short.
This one is no different.
He's unsure how long it has been since they last came together as one. The boundless empty solitude ceases to have temporal meaning for him without a vessel to mark the days with its fragile needs.
Needs and their blessedly irksome presence, simply because of the one who has them.
As young and headstrong as ever – still a fighter, but not to the death. Not anymore. Still hungry to match Rhaast's own appetite, the other half of him.
Funny that he only feels sated when they're together.
In all the ways they have changed, they are still the same in all the ways that matter, the night sky above them indelibly marked by their birth and death and reunion.
Tonight they watch it together, their eyes tracking endless stars and galaxies above them. Kayn's voice, so familiar and beloved, asking once again about the constellations over his head. The ones Rhaast has shown him before, and before, and before, and will show him again.
He will never be tired of the telling.
“That one is called the crucible, where two souls were forged as one, never to lose each other.”
He will never tire of the rush of affection and awe – shy, as though Rhaast would not know what the other half of his soul is thinking. As if he does not say precisely what he means in every life.
“That's pretty metal,” Kayn speaks into the quiet of the night, his voice a puff of steam above them. “Ride or die, huh?”
A new way to describe it for a new life, one with a newfound unity between them not felt since their birth long ago. Not entirely inaccurate - they have ridden together, and they have died together.
Though, Rhaast supposes, perhaps if there were anyone else to understand immortality, it would be the other half of his soul and the night sky from which they were made.