The Night Market sprawled before him as it always had, lanterns burning with phantasmal power, casting dancing shadows along the stalls and tents within. His worn boots clomped along the cobblestone paths as he looked for something new. He had walked this road before, hundreds if not thousands of times, each visit chasing the faint hope that someone, anyone, could end him.
The first stall promised *Mercy's Kiss*, a poison offered to ease the ill and elderly into the hereafter. The seller's eyes seemed cunning, but were still shocked when the man took the concoction for himself. He drank the draught, felt the cold spread through his chest… and then rapidly thaw out, the cold grasp of death fading before it reached his heart. She stared at him, startled. “I’ve never had it fail before.”
At the next tent, an enchantress offered to coax his soul away with her charm-magic, to use her power to convince the death-proof body to just let go. Her song and suggestion was sweet, alluring, the violet smoke of her magic working itself deep within the man's being. Her words convinced the heart to slow, the brain to sleep, the lungs to just relax. He slowly fell limp, each breath taking longer than the last, until his body shot forward as if jolted back to life, choking and gagging as he spat her magic out of his lungs. She gasped and stood back, no one before had been able to resist her spellcraft.
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He tried them all, curses meant to wither the hearty, enchanted blades pierced through his organs, immolation by the most supreme of sorcerers. Every attempt failed, and with every attempt his hope faded.
After a full day, he sat on the edge of the Market’s outer roads, where the lights were thin and the stalls but shadows in the distance. He stared upward at a sky heavy with constellations he had known by other names, in other tongues, when humanity still remembered him.
A patron he did not know approached, an elderly quiet man with wrinkly paper-thin skin and a voice soft like vintage velvet. “You’ve been here before,” the man said. “Always asking the same question, and you always leave disappointed. I've seen this for years, and years... I was but a child when you visited my grandfather's shop.”
The man did not look up. “Yes, that was me. And it’s not disappointment,” he murmured. “It’s… confirmation.”
“Of what?” the cautious, caring man asked.
“That no matter what bargains I strike, no matter what power I kneel before, I will see the end of all things. The oceans will boil away, the stars will flicker out, and I will remain.” His voice trembled, and there was no pride in it, only a terrible certainty. “These Market devils will cease to exist. The gods will fade into myth. I will walk on, alone, through the cold silence that follows.”
The caring man’s voice was barely a whisper. “Who are you?”
The immortal finally looked at him, eyes like cold like rusted iron, unfocused as he each second was eternity for him now.
“I am Cain,” he said, “and my sentence has no end. For bringing Death into this world, I am cursed with Life.”
He stood, and walked into the dark beyond the Market, seeking a solace that he will never find.
