Black raspberry 12, Carob 11 & Hazelnut 30
Flavor: Black Raspberry [#12 You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs] + Carob [#11 creativity] + Hazelnut [#30 buried treasure]
Rating: PG13
Title: Anselme's Will - A Boy of Unremarkable Lineage Considers Immortality & the Wisdom of Pirates
Author: Queen451
Summary: The process would be repeated, until each separate partition grew, and, if the pirates were successful, fortunes would wait them at the end, fortunes, the likes of which no other man could even achieve.
X+X+X+X+X
Immortal.
To live forever, eternal, everlasting, enduring, unending, perpetual.
The lure of demons and mythical ghosts, the forbidden wish.
Vampires, some would say, but they paid their price in blood, a price he thought too high to pay. Much too messy.
Were-beasts, but their abilities were only enhanced. The trade off was an animal form, and hunters raised their guns to anything which moved on four legs.
There were Magicians, Sorcerers, Witches and Warlocks. But there were rules that bound their kind, and such power was useless if one could not command it to one's desires.
To become immortal would mean to remove one's self from the present, and exist to one's will and only to one's will.
Then there were the ingredients for a spell or a potion, the key needed to achieve such a goal.
It wouldn't be as simple as chanting a few words and offering a 'fitting' sacrifice. Such a wish would need a mighty will for it to be fulfilled, and, as his mother was fond of quoting, one couldn't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
But exactly what kind of egg, indeed.
Would it be the life-blood of thousands, the unused years of the dead and lifetimes untouched? Time's fickle allowances, captured into one and made to be unbreakable-- that was what he needed.
Such a troublesome way, though. An entire village, say, his very home, wouldn't be enough. Little less than a dozen centuries, pitted with illnesses and unbecoming habits. No, the lives of others would never do.
He would have to think of a new way. To live forever, a life lived as his own, continuously, of his own will.
Troublesome, but worth it, he decided.
He'd learned from experience that, when in doubt, hit the books. Granted, he might've taken such advice too literally on several occasions, but it was best not to dwell on the past when the future beckoned.
A week and a half of searching in the family library garnered a small mountain of handpicked 'references'. Some on the subject of vanquishing demons, others on anatomy and biology, and the rest were books on pirate adventures.
He'd thought that, perhaps, the pirates' idea regarding their booty was quite an inspired one. But he'd have to check his background material, first.
The Church had much to discuss about their ministry's travels, though most agreed that to destroy a demon, one had to tear its heart from its body, or else dismember it completely.
Science echoed this statement: a part cannot exist away from the whole, unless it can evolve into yet another whole. That it would still remain a part is debatable, and the life span would also pose a problem, depending on its original specie of origin.
But the pirates had better tastes. To keep one's treasures safe and unharmed, one must seek several hiding places, divide the treasure and bury it completely, to guard against wandering eyes.
The process would be repeated, until each separate partition grew, and, if the pirates were successful, fortunes would wait them at the end, fortunes, the likes of which no other man could even achieve.
Ah, the wisdom of the old is truly a treasure in itself.
He'd had to retract an earlier statement, but other than that, everything was settled. Now, he considers, rules were made to be broken after all.
By lovers throughout time, revolutionists who would change the face of the world as they knew it, even wordsmiths who would inspire generations after them and spawn legions of creators, all powerful in their own rights.
And, as of three seconds from now, by him. Anselme Delusi, the latest spawn of an unremarkable breed, was immortal.
Yes, he thought as the world spun and his vision darkened, the pirates were right, all along...
On the eighteenth day of March, in the year of the Lord nineteen-hundred and one, Clarissa Delusi found her fifteen year old son, Anselme Delusi, dead on the library floor, a revolver in his hand and a bullet through his head.
Wretched and miserable, she ended her life six months later. As her son, the last Delusi to be born fit and alive, was now dead, the line petered out and disappeared just as the twentieth century arrived at the horizon.