Did you hear, the first rumours went, what happened to Holy Rome?
Most of the Old World nations had at first responded dismissively, with a disinterested snort. Who hadn’t? This was all old news. The boy emperor who could not grow, who was not eternally youthful but stagnant? The parade of ailments that had beset him ever since the Thirty Years War…
Of course, it was their lot to live long lives—childhood could, maddeningly, stretch out over the centuries. But, as all the others grew into an awkward adolescence—Old World and New—as surely as stalks of wild grass, Holy Rome had remained a small, pale figure throughout the ages. The face of a child with the eyes of an old, haunted man, lacking even the grim, spiteful vitality that sustained the elder nations who counted their lives in millennia.
And then, he had finally tired of life, as so many of their kind had—but without ever surmounting the summit of adulthood. For even those nations that had burned bright and short went out in a blaze of glory, slain on the battlefield, their cities razed and salted— they could say they had realised what they were meant to be, before their gods or the Almighty had deemed their story finished.
Holy Rome's end varied based on who you heard it from. It was peaceful; once he had put his affairs in order, he simply lay down on his bed and gave up his life. There was a sort of dignified, solemn martyrdom about it. No, others said, it had been a violent, terrible struggle with a final illness before he passed. Whichever it was, it was the end of the boy who had lived for so long without living. Ultimately, this was of little concern to most. It was the destiny of some of their kind to die now and then, of course.
But now— Gilbert had done something terrible.
Gilbert had done nothing.
He laughs. Breathe the life back into a dead nation? What a flattering thought!
But no, such grand powers and secrets were beyond his means. No one after all, had truly managed to discover how to scrub a nation so cleanly of memory that they became a blank slate.
Because the boy emperor did not die. He clung to life—and Gilbert took pity, when the boy asked for something to ease crossing from this world to the next. An overdose of laudanum, something that would be as peaceful as going to sleep.
Gilbert had stayed with boy, as the candles burned down to their ends and went out. Maybe out of pity, out of a vague sense of obligation.
But then, Gilbert had awoken in the middle of the night—to the sound of breathing. The steady rise and fall of the boy’s chest, his sleeping clothes outlined in the silvery moonlight spilling through the window. Regular and reassuring, instead of the rasping and erratic gasps of the terminally ill.
The boy slept for many days.
Days turned into months. The seasons came and went. Winter and autumn into spring, and then spring and summer back to autumn again. Preserved in the immortality of slumber; no food, no water, but his body did not waste away. A living death, one might say— although his hands remained warm to the touch, instead of growing colder and colder the way they should when death neared.
And then one day, as the snows melted away to the first buds of spring in a new year, he had opened his eyes.
They were the same shade of blue, but now they were as bright and keen as the stars, his face pink-cheeked instead of pale and sallow—and there was a question spilling from his lips, as ready as snowmelt, as he stared and stared at Gilbert.
