They were three brothers.
That was probably why they succeeded where so many of their kind didn’t. Three’s a good number for sorcery. Witches know it, which is why they’re generally more successful than sorcerers.
They summoned the spirit successfully, in a circle of molten silver. They bound the spirit successfully, in chains of finest silk. They tortured the spirit successfully, with fresh milk and warm blood. And on the third hour of the third night it gave in, and it told them the secrets of immortality.
“Be forgotten,” it told them. “Never ever have a single creature, however small, recognize you for what you are. Erase yourself from the page of history, and live in the gutters – forever fleeting, forever invisible, forever.”
The brothers were elated at this and banished the spirit to the netherworld, then they actually realized what this would entail.
“Fuck,” said the youngest brother, who was the quickest thinker.
“Fuck,” said the middle brother, who generally went with whatever was going on.
“Fuck,” said the oldest brother, who hadn’t figured it out yet but was starting to feel stupid.
***
It’s a very useless thing, to become an immortal god-king of magical lore that nobody knows about. But some people won’t settle for mere mortality, and so the three brothers bent and twisted and gnawed at the limits of their goal: to live forever and look good doing it.
“What do people recognize?” pondered the oldest brother.
“It’s you,” said the middle brother.
“’You’ is far too big a concept for day to day business,” snapped the youngest brother. “It’s your NAME they recognize. Let’s just excise that. I’ll get the orichalcum tongs.”
Now, most people would balk a bit at having the first gift anyone ever gave them extracted from their core conceptual being with a pair of spell-scalded metal claws, but that’s why most people aren’t sorcerers. The profession attracts a certain kind of person, and soon each of the three people of that type present held a softly whispering sphere in palm: their own names.
“Now throw them away,” bade the youngest brother. “Throw them away where nobody will ever see them again, ever, no matter how long it takes. Also, we’re never seeing each other again or this won’t work. Goodbye.”
“Bye,” said the middle brother.
“See ya,” said the oldest brother. “Woops. Forget I said that.”
***
The oldest brother felt sort of stupid, and he despised that. He brooded over his misstatements and belated realizations all the way home, chewed on them as heavily as he chewed his dinner, brooded on them like a motherly chicken.
“I’ll bury it deep,” he decided. “Where it’ll never come back out.”
So he hiked up the side of Mount Firegut – driving six guides to their deaths in the process – and chucked his name down into its caldera, and went home and raised up a mighty empire with conquering, killing, all that sort of thing.
Mount Firegut groused and fussed and belched and erupted and subsided and burbled and eventually turned quiescent for good five hundred years later, which was a great boon for the wealthiest merchants of the oldest brother’s empire, who established diamond mines all over it. Jewels flowed like water, and a particularly large and glowing one was brought to the emperor personally.
The oldest brother laid eyes on it and immediately recognized it. And at that moment, so did his entire court.
“Aw FU-” he managed, and then he turned into a dusty skeleton and everyone was quite embarrassed.
***
The middle brother went home by the long route, and he walked by the sea and listened to it rumble and roar. He climbed the tall hill by his home and watched it go on and on forever.
“Well,” he said. “There’s a match made in heaven, if I’m a judge.”
So he sailed out to the middle of the ocean – losing half his crew to salt madness and dehydration – and threw his name overboard, and went home and established a towering sanctum of madness and magic with insanity and darkness the likes of which man had never dreamt and all that sort of nonsense.
The ocean moved.
Continents crawled, plates shifted, seafloors raised and lowered, and the ocean moved.
So did everything in it.
Five thousand years later, a crab ate a funny thing and was eaten by a small squid which was eaten by a small fish which was eaten by a bigger fish which was eaten by a shark which was eaten by a murderous whale which died on a beach gasping for relief from the searing heat at its insides, which was stolen by a gull which was eaten by an eagle which dropped it near a fishing village, which brought it to their dark and sorcerous overlord as tribute.
“Oh!” said the middle brother.
And that was about all he had time for.
***
The youngest brother went home looking up at the stars. How he hated those twinkling bastards. They were made from the same matter he was, but they smiled down fondly as he aged to nothing.
“I’ll outlive you all,” he swore. “Just you see.”
So he decided to show them.
He buried his name in a chest in a box in a safe in a vault in a bricked-up basement and he began to send things into the sky.
Birds were an early experiment. But at a certain height they came back down dead.
Balloons seemed plausible. But they popped.
Some kind of flapping machine nearly did the trick, but they could never flap high enough.
Then he tried fireworks.
And bigger fireworks.
And engines attached to the fireworks.
By the time he launched his first rocket the youngest brother was a billionaire many times over and he’d had to replace his name vault many MANY times more than that. It was loaded aboard, triple-bound in enchanted whispers and hand-packed by blinded wage-slaves.
“To forever!” he toasted the rising little mechanical star.
And he made a holiday of it.
“To forever!” he toasted the six thousandth year of his reign as Global President.
“To forever!” he ordered the Newmanity under-slaves as they carved the monument marking ten million years of their god.
“To forever!” he called out across the boiling seas and the fires of apocalypse missiles as four hundred million years of history went up in atomic smoke.
“To forever,” he whispered to the cautious invertebrates that were his only friends a billion years hence, wandering under the baking heat of the engorged sun.
“Forever,” he chanted as the world was gently enveloped in the warm hand of its star.
Forever, he remembered as matter slid away and the solar system washed into nothing.
Forever, in the dark space as the last few coherent atoms raced ever greater infinitely apart.
Forever.
***
A long life is a fine thing. But immortality brings with it concepts that don’t quite fit naturally into the human skull. Try to keep them at arm’s length, and use gloves.