Work Text:
The Curse of the Wandering Titan
Cherit drifted through the halls of Sophie Casterwill's mansion. The death of night had descended upon the world, but it would not be apposite to say that the ancient Titan was half asleep has he wandered the corridors. He had no need for sleep, and, without his amulet, that feat, or anything resembling it, would be physically impossible.
The Yama-Titan's fingers were curled around the handle of a candle holder. He was fortunate, he supposed, to be in a Casterwill mansion. Much like the gorgeous churches and cathedrals which dotted the city of Venice, they were an anchor to antiquity, that antiquity that had once been the present for him. Candles were ancient, and they were far more comforting for him than these electric fixtures that the humans now used to extend their days. Ideally, he would have a torch, but that was too much to hope for. But a candle in an antique holder like this one was common enough in the home of the heiress of the Casterwill family.
Perhaps 'half asleep' would be more apt than he had realised, Cherit thought. After all, he himself had little idea regarding his purpose in drifting into Sophie Casterwill's library.
Casterwill…Casterwill. Cherit had, unlike his brethren, not known the rest of his amulet since being called to Earth. His memory had suffered as a result, not to mention the weathering caused by the mere passage of time. Or perhaps, not quite 'mere'. To humans, much changes over a year. They would have no apprehension of the timescale upon which Cherit operated.
But the memories, he knew, were not gone, merely hidden beneath thousands, millions, billions of others. He remembered his earliest days walking the Earth. He remembered his first Seeker.
Casterwill. Lord Casterwill.
The visions would come and go, evaporating as dreams would for a human upon awakening, like a puddle in the desert. But he knew he had once been bonded to Lord Casterwill. He had been a witness to the genius and nobility of that ancient sage, warrior and hero, in a manner more intimate, in kind, and not degree, than anyone else. But most of these details slipped his mind after the millennia spent walking the Earth. Cherit remembered that Lord Casterwill had been his friend, his Seeker, but not much else.
He sighed as he searched the back of his mind once more for these memories he knew were not there, like a student desperately searching for his homework in a stack of paper that he had gone through seventeen times. Except that Cherit had long lost count of the number of times he'd attempted to jog his memories about Lord Casterwill.
His tired, slowly-flapping wings knocked over a book on one of the shelves. It landed with a soft, gentle thump on one of the cushioned armchairs.
Cherit looked around in the dark, faintly making out the outline of a coffee table next to the armchair. He set down the candle, and, with the slightest application of his power, ignited it.
Although igniting a naked flame in a library of precious ancient manuscripts is generally considered an unwise course of action (and with good reason), Cherit, for some reason, felt compelled to investigate the tome that Providence had seen fit to select for him. And somehow he knew that to do so with the tools of modernity would be sacrilegious.
He picked up the book, and blew the dust off, as he sat on the armchair.
The Catholic Encyclopaedia. Volume 9.
He flipped open the cover.
1913. This book was ancient. At least by human standards.
He turned to a random page.
A single word caught his eye.
Ahasuerus.
In his millennia spent travelling the Earth, he had accrued a knowledge of a plenitude of ancient and modern languages. He had studied the cultures and myths of a thousand civilisations. He had heard all manner of whispered legends in dark corners of taverns. Many of these were eroded by time. But one remained, one burned at the forefront of his mind, ever haunting him, refusing to be forgotten.
Ahasuerus. The Wandering Jew.
Cherit, despite being able to recite the legend from heart, read the passage, perhaps to comfort himself, or perhaps to remind, or perhaps to torment.
This legend has been widely popular ever since its first appearance in a German chap-book of 1602. There it is told as follows: When Jesus bore his Cross to Calvary, he passed the house of a cobbler, Ahasuerus by name, who had been one of the rabble to shout, "Crucify him." Sinking beneath his burden, Jesus stopped to rest at the threshold of the cobbler, but was driven away with the words; "Go where thou belongest." Thereupon Our Lord gazed sternly at Ahasuerus and said: "I will stand here and rest, but thou shalt go on until the last day." And since then the Jew has been roaming restlessly over the earth.
He had heard many embellishments and versions of this tale. Sometimes, it was said that Ahasuerus could stay under one roof or in one town only for a fixed time: three days, a fortnight…whatever it was, he would have to wander forever, from house to house, town to town, nation to nation. No family. No homeland.
Even without this restriction, Cherit knew how this man would feel, for he himself had felt it.
Ahasuerus, it was sometimes said, had a wife and daughter, but time took them away from him. Certainly, he could remarry, but he could never love his 'new' wife and children the same way he loved those taken from him all those years ago. And what little solace he would find in this new family of his would be quickly, to him, be taken away by the tyranny of time. Every blessed wedding curses him with many more funerals.
He would learn from the agony of this to forsake human contact, but eventually loneliness turns him back to his fellow man; compels him to love once more. But each flash of love is replaced, in what is to him the blink of an eye, by endless, bitter mourning. Each time he kisses another bride, he does it with the knowledge that he had made this very vow of eternal devotion of to every one of his wives before this, and that she, and their children, would eventually meet the same fate as all those before them, reaped by the scythe of time.
Perhaps he could have the joy of friends and family, but lose the sensitivity to the sting of their death. But he knows this is impossible; if their deaths did not pain him, he did not love them. And if he loses this sensitivity, with it he would lose his humanity.
Ahasuerus is not merely sundered from family, but nation. Jerusalem is sacked, the Temple is destroyed, and Israel dissolves into the sands of the desert, all before his very eyes. The civilisation of his forefathers, the eternal kingdom of the chosen people, crumbling to nothing, as he watches on, weeping, but impotent.
Perhaps he could reattach himself to the Roman Empire. It may not have fathered him, but at least its culture would give him some constancy in his life. But that, too, does not last forever. He had even outlived some of the languages he had learnt in his wanderings as the ages rolled on, oblivious to the sufferings of the eternal Wandering Jew.
Cherit had not come to the Earth to wait ten thousand years for Eathon Lambert. Time and time again he had allied himself with Seekers loyal to the cause of Lord Casterwill, his true Seeker. But Titans had been made for man, to feel and understand them more perfectly than they could understand each other. He may never actually have bonded with anyone other than Lord Casterwill, but he was still the closest companion of countless Seekers.
Faces, names flitted by before the eyes of the ancient Titan, all crusaders for the same cause and soldiers in the same war that Lord Casterwill had waged against the Nullifiers. And all of them had been slain by the same tyrant that bent the Wandering Jew to his knees, begging for mercy for those he loved, and for himself: time itself.
He could only imagine how much more painful this would be for him were he like the other Titans. But no, he knew he was different. Since Lord Casterwill had brought him to Earth, he had become more than his fellow Titans could ever hope to be: less tools of the Seekers, and more a person. The fact that he could not be reduced to an inert amulet, and that he would forever remain bonded to Lord Casterwill (who himself had been felled by the inexorable entropic power of time), helped nudge him in this direction.
He had truly loved each of the Seekers he had worked with. His empathy with the species had made his affection for and devotion to them even stronger. But soon he learnt, like Ahasuerus, that each new friend meant one more eventual funeral.
And, like the Jew, whenever he sought to evade man, towards whom he was directed, for whom he had created, his nature, and his sense of duty, compelled him to return. Chaos was always making inroads, and there would always be Seekers who needed his help…and friendship.
The Titan had seen the cultures of the world, how men believed they would always live that way. And he would think, sadly, sympathetically, from the shadows where he had been resigned to live in, if not to avoid new friends, then to prevent the Secrets of the Seekers from being known to the world, how mistaken they were. Tribes, nations, kingdoms and empires had all fallen before his eyes, their cultures dying with them, their survivors assimilated into foreign worlds and forced to learn new tongues, having outlived their culture, civilisation, language and nation, things supposed to last forever. Like Ahasuerus, he had learnt that no nation or culture was truly eternal. They would last long enough to provide the constancy a single generation required, but never long enough for immortals like them.
True, Eathon had, remarkably, not died before Cherit had to move on to Lok, and the quests of this generation were more exciting and significant than the routine little skirmishes against Chaos he had to perform for the past millennia, and he had that little advantage over Ahasuerus in that his bond with these Seekers was not a unique one such as marriage, but friendship, he still knew they would soon pass away, and he would grieve them. And, as with all his other friends, he dreaded forgetting them after their deaths.
This was a quest that approached the greatness of the endeavours Cherit was sure he had participated in with Lord Casterwill, but he had lost too many, too much, he had lived too long, for this to bear any significance for him. He still retained his optimistic joy upon meeting Lok, burying his dread of outliving and forgetting his new friend, but with each passing day this melancholy pessimism rebelled against the psychological cage Cherit had placed it in with greater fervour, seeking release before its time. Before the inevitable funerals.
So perhaps, this was how he appeased his dread. Or perhaps stoked its ferocity.
Cherit closed the book, replaced it on the shelf, and proceeded to the window, gripping the candle holder, the weak flame of the antiquated lighting device flickering as Cherit flapped his wings.
He set it down on the window-sill, and drew the curtain.
"I have lived too long," Cherit sighed, as he gazed out of the window into the lifeless black beyond, with only the cold moon's silver and the soulless yellow of the city's streetlights dappling the seamless, yet empty, garment of night.