All the Time in the World

He sat slumped, bathed in the blood red light, staring out at the old sun which filled a good quarter of the sky now and cooked the landscape. Outside it would be approaching unbearable levels and what life still surviving in these end days had learned to seek whatever shade it could by burrowing under the sticky mud or hiding amongst the roots of the mangroves. Afternoons were the worst, when the red light would enter through the tall windows and he would watch it slowly creep across the floor as he had done innumerable times before. At least here in the tower it was cool, chilly even. The tower was, he reflected, one of his better accomplishments. A place as immutable as he, in which to wait. Or so he'd thought, but countless aeons had finally begun to erode the strata of the walls and slowly he had shut down sections and rooms and laboratories until only a handful of it's vast abilities and functions still remained functional.

He sipped his wine, thanking whatever gods might still remain that the kitchens still operated at something close to their original design. It wasn't as if there would ever be another grape and the waiting was hard and bitter and spiteful and seemingly without end. But there would be an end, wouldn't there,  he thought as he strolled to the windows and pressed his palms against the glass. Outside the crimson light from the swollen sun was waving and shimmering in the superheated air and distances were impossible to gauge. He thought he saw a crow struggling through the haze but wasn't sure. It would have been a while since he'd seen a bird. Centuries even. The earth was not kind to those things that still crawled or squirmed or flew in her domain. She favoured those that could live in the extremes and had no time for beauty or elegance. On the last time he had ventured out of the tower, out to the endless mangroves he had found huge fields of writhing squirming worms, knotted together in an orgy of stinking rotted corpulence. He had retreated in horror and ordered the tower to destroy the offending area to the bedrock. That had been a long time ago and he hadn't ventured out since. He just observed from his high window as the mountains rose and crumbled and the seas crept and waned. The weather, he reflected had been exceptionally unpleasant these last few aeons and was almost more than he could bear.

The long shadows on the floor seemed motionless. Caught and frozen in red amber. The days were longer now. Tidal forces and entropy robbing the earth of the energy required to move herself. He was not born expected to adapt to such cycles and felt a constant lag in his bones as though he should be elsewhere and else when. This was not one of the effects he had foreseen in those distant halcyon days of discovery and conquest. Death was the enemy and to conquer him was to be a god.

He had played god over the millennia. God, devil, wandering wizard, whatever he chose. The power was his and none had surpassed him. He had guarded his secrets jealously and no other had made the great discovery. Sometimes he wished they had. But not always. Eternity was not something that could be shared. Two immortals would eventually war and destroy one another was how he reasoned it. Still. He would have another to sit with, get drunk with, argue with and sit and stare at the sun with, as she grew slowly bigger and hotter and redder.

After the days of man had ended. Dwindling away in the aftermath of the latest in a series of  global wars. He had thought to recreate them and return them to the earth. Be a true god! he had thought. That had some appeal. Create them in mine own image. And so he had. Many times. And walked amongst them and thought himself happy, took wives. So many. Fathered sons and daughters. Whole lineages. But always, time stole them away. The great discovery was not passed down though his genes and he was too scared to grant it to another, so they went away with their kingdoms and and their cultures, again and again until he could no longer stand it and vowed never to create life again and he let the dust of centuries settle in the tower and never again commanded it to create life.

The discovery hadn't been hard. All he's had to do was misalign himself ever so slightly with what people usually understood as time and voilà! Ageless invulnerability. A mere trifle for one such as he, born to greatness, able to understand the universe at an instinctive level. Born it would seem with a certain short-sightedness to what immortality would really entail. He did not feel himself cursed as that would imply that others with greater powers had had influence over his life. Nor did he regret his choice to live literally forever, but he wished that he had built a fail safe into his schemes. To live until I wish to die would have been a better manifesto to his work he though bitterly as he sat there in the stillness of another syrupy slow afternoon swirling the wine around and around in his glass reflecting that it looked black as ink in the crimson light.

He wondered how long it would be now. By his calculations Mercury and Venus should be destroyed by now. Nothing more than a wisp of vapour on the surface of the sun. He wondered what it had been like on those planets and they first boiled, then cooked, then dissolved in the fiery oven of the only true mother to us all. He doubted even he would survive such torment, but a part of him worried that he would be sent silently shrieking through the universe, a sentient ember to wait still longer in the cold of space until some more exotic form of death finally claimed him. That wait, he reckoned would be one that would truly break him from whatever sanity he still possessed and was a hell beyond all reckoning.

He shivered in his high backed seat and gulped the last of the wine. The tower, used to his moods and needs created another bottle at his side. And he poured himself another generous helping. He settled back and stared out over the twisted mangroves. He had all the the time in the world.