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There’s a pendant on his chest. A plain black thing, so simple, unlike everything else about him. It’s shaped like an arrow, but not quite. The hands that made it were tiny and clumsy, the edges rough, badly handled, crooked. A line of fading grey, once blue as the summer sky, is woven around the shaft, like a delicate crease of ivy, supporting the crumbled form of the arrow rather than suffocating it.
He used to fiddle with it more often than not, finger the point of the arrow long after it had gone blunt, shape the outline of the blue flame curling around it tightly, almost protectively. The habit died with time, as everything else did. His pendant lays against his heart, an ever-lasting memory of times long gone, of years happy and carefree.
“Time is an illusion, youngling,” says the man sitting on his sofa. “You shall not let it win.” He touches the spiked strands of his hair, a nervous habit he picked up some time after Max’s second century. His face, all heavy lids and sharp lines, looks startlingly young; no older than twenty five, some would say.
“You’ve told me before,” Max reminds gently.
“Before doesn’t exist,” the man insists. “Time is an illusion, you forget. There is no before.”
Max looks at his wristwatch. Five minutes till midnight. He sits down next to the man and touches his knee, a gesture tentative and small, not to startle or invade. “Papa,” he says softly, and something in his voice must stir memories dormant and crusted, for the man looks at his son, and for once his eyes aren’t glazed or unfocused.
Still handsome as ever, those cat-eyes wear their years proudly, a token of strength and wisdom and power. Legends say that if the man pleases, you can see the world young, you can see the days old and forgotten in the dark depths of his gaze. He rarely glamours his mark anymore, for reasons unsaid and unknown.
Blue hands cold with determination, Max reaches into the collar of his navy shirt and pulls at the chain around his neck, warm from his body heat, always warm. He’s never taken it off in the past five hundred years so when it stops touching his body, there’s an odd feeling of something missing, like an arrow-like seal of ice has been touched to where it lay before.
“Do you remember?” he says, and even though it pains him to do this to his father, he holds out the blue-woven arrow in front of him, the chain clutched in his fingers with a deathly force.
The man lets his eyes linger at the crooked shape for a silent moment, and hope blooms in Max’s chest like a foolish green sprout among miles of stony pavement, but then the man is shaking his head vigorously, eyes clamped shut to protect from the view he does not wish to see. He shakes and shakes a denial for what seems like minutes, before the man slowly stills, throat working visibly as he swallows down whatever words he has to say.
“Papa,” Max tries, but the man interrupts him.
“I cannot,” he says, “I cannot remember, youngling. Past does not exist, for time is an illusion. I cannot remember.”
Max looks at his watch. There’s three minutes, still. “I am your past. You’ve raised me for nearly five hundred years. Does that not mean anything?”
The man opens his eyes slowly. They look hollow, devoid of emotion. It breaks Max’s heart all over again, if not scares him for the future that awaits him. He’d always thought that he would not let the years take their toll on him, that he would stay sane and live because his father always told him that if anything kills him, it must not be time.
Yet now, watching the man succumb to his greatest enemy shatters all of Max’s beliefs. Time took away everything that his family was and now it was destroying what was left of it. Slowly.
“I want you to have it,” Max says and he realizes that his voice is trembling, but he does not care. Before the man can protest, he cradles the arrow in his blue palm and holds it up on display. “Not as something that Rafe made when he was ten. Not as a token of dad and you. Just as a piece of jewelry, okay?”
The man looks at him with tired, resigned eyes and lets the chain be wrapped around his neck. Max wipes his tears with the back of his hand, and his watch beeps, signaling the arrival of midnight. He hugs his father, and he preserves every second of being close to him, because no matter how much he is told that time does not exist, his next words are a seal, a promise of an ending that will come sooner rather than later.
“Happy nine hundredth birthday, papa.”