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His name was Alexander the first time they met. Magnus was already old enough that his earliest memories were fading, and an obvious foreigner in this place. Alexander was barely twenty, already the shining, golden light of Macedon. Magnus had been kneeling, pledging his loyalty, and when Alexander told him to rise, he caught a glimpse of his eyes and Magnus knew he was lost. He watched Alexander conquer the known world; he followed Alexander from Macedon to Persia and India.
Magnus followed Alexander to the edges of the world and knew that the gods had cursed him. Whatever he’d done in those early years that he couldn’t remember had been enough to damn him. Magnus fell more in love with each day, and Alexander loved Hephaestion.
He grieved with Alexander when Hephaestion died because there was no place for Magnus in the hole Hephaestion left in Alexander’s heart. It was scar tissue, forever raw, and the closest Magnus would ever come to it was the day he died.
They were riding outside Babylon, just ahead of Alexander’s guard, and something moved in the edges of his vision, just out of sight. Magnus reacted on instinct, kicking his horse forward between Alexander and whatever that movement had been. There was a burning agony in his chest. He tried to draw in a breath, but his lungs didn’t seem to work quite right. A wooden shaft extended from the center of his chest, and he wasn’t sure how it had gotten there. Alexander was lunging for Magnus’s reins from Bucephalus’s back, but Magnus was already tumbling backwards. Men were shouting, horses thundering forward, men encircling their king, hands lifting Magnus.
He faded in and out of consciousness. No matter how many times he died and came back, he always fought that blackness. He fought with centuries of strength and always gave in after centuries of weariness. Men hovered over him, debating the best way to get the spear out. He heard brief, passing conversations.
My king, there’s nothing we can do—
You will save him—
My king, he’s dying—
Leave us —
The darkness was closer now, his fingers numb, even the pain in his chest had faded. He could only see Alexander when he leaned over him—those eyes, so striking even after so many years.
Don’t try to speak. Save your strength.
Magnus couldn’t hear him. He was cold. He could see where Alexander’s hand rested on his shoulder, but Magnus couldn’t feel him.
My honor, Magnus had begun, probably to say something suitably dramatic, but he felt the moment his heart pumped and there wasn’t enough blood in his veins. Sharp, pulsing pains, worse than when they’d cut the shaft to only a few handspans long. Dizzying swirls like Charybdis in his head, and everything ended.
He woke up alone, wrapped in funeral robes, and made his escape. Even Alexander wouldn’t have understood if Magnus had suddenly reappeared. To Macedon, to the Greeks, and to Megas Alexandros he was dead.
Later scholars wrote of the witch hunt Alexander set out on to discover who had taken Magnus’s body. Consensus seemed to be that it was Alexander’s general Ptolemy. The first time Magnus had seen that, seated beside one of the few Immortals who had known him when he was young, he’d laughed until tears had sprung to his eyes. The only person who may have benefitted less than Magnus from his death was Ptolemy. He had been the one to bring Magnus to Alexander’s attention, and as Magnus’s star rose, so had Ptolemy’s.
He’d gone on to found an Egyptian dynasty, so Magnus couldn’t feel too bad for history slandering him.
Magnus lived nearly a hundred more years without sight of Alexander again. As far as he knew, only Immortals were destined to keep meeting over the years, hunting one another in the name of the Game. Magnus traveled to the furthest edges of the world—places Alexander couldn’t have ever imagined—and grieved what became of Alexander’s empire after his death. But he kept returning to the centers of Alexander’s empire. Babylon, Alexandria, Susa.
And it was in Alexandria on the banks of the Nile where Magnus saw him again. He had dark hair now and dark skin. He looked nothing like the Alexander Magnus had seen in Babylon, but it was him. He didn’t know how he knew, but this was Alexander as surely as the sun had risen that morning.
He was standing knee-deep in the Nile, but as Magnus stepped to approach, someone called for him and he straightened, turning immediately toward the voice. His back was scarred with lash marks. Magnus had seen enough of them in his life to recognize them, and what they meant, on sight. Setau, come!
Alexander, a slave. It was so impossible that Magnus nearly forgot to follow him to his master’s house.
It took some work, but Magnus managed to ingratiate himself into the household—a few bribes for the favor of a runaway camel and a few more bribes to ensure silence—and Magnus happened to be in the right place at the right time to save the man’s heir. He was invited to stay with them and, with their thanks, granted the use of Setau. He was still young, but he was trained to serve a man of noble birth, which a man such as Magnus must have been.
Magnus did nothing to disabuse him of that notion. Besides, he had no real memory of his life for the first hundred or so years. He may have been.
Setau may not have been Alexander the Great, but he still chafed as a slave. He bowed and did what he was ordered, but sometimes there was a look in his eyes that Magnus had seen in Alexander on those few occasions he’d been forced to concede. He was careful, though, and if Magnus hadn’t been watching, he would never have seen it.
They kissed for the first time in Alexandria. Alexander—Setau, whatever—cornering Magnus in a darkened hallway, whispering words to him that could have gotten them both killed. Magnus could no more have stopped Setau than he could have stopped Alexander.
They fell into bed that night, hands fumbling with clothes, mouths catching broken moans. And if Magnus hadn’t been sure this man was Alexander before, he knew then. Alexander had been a shining light and even here with the raised, scarred skin of a slave beneath his fingers, Setau was that same shining light, brilliant even in the darkness.
But Magnus had been so high on the sensation, so thrilled to be with Alexander again, that he made a mistake. They weren’t careful enough, and he woke one morning to shouting in the courtyard. The guards seized him and dragged him before the judges to face Ma’at’s judgement.
It turned out sleeping with somebody else’s slave was against the law.
Magnus watched them throw Alexander into the Nile. It was too fast-flowing this time of year for him to do anything but watch in horror as Setau, his Alexander, drowned. And then Magnus was flung from the barge. This time death was an agonizing mercy, a darkness that scoured him clean until he woke up on the bank of the river.
Magnus headed north after that.
Nearly thirty years later, he reached a small village on Rome’s northernmost border. A young, dark-haired man, maybe early twenties, was sitting on a stone fence with unfinished arrows beside him. As Magnus watched, the man retrieved three small, grey, trimmed feathers from a covered basket. He held two of them in his mouth and set about applying the fletchings to the arrows. His hands were steady and sure, and he never looked up until he’d wound the final thread around fletchings to secure them.
It was Alexander’s voice that spoke to him. A different language, but it was Alexander. He knew it as surely as he’d known Setau. The gods had cursed him. They would keep sending him Alexander, and they would keep taking Alexander from him.
Somehow he’d managed to stammer out a request for directions to lodging, and the young man pointed behind him. My name’s Aelius. My mother runs the inn in town. Magnus could have wept.
He should have gone. He should have run as far and as fast as he could, but he stayed. He learned fletching from Alexander. He taught Alexander’s family trades he had picked up in his travels, and he stayed.
He stayed and one day Aelius cornered him and whispered the words in his ear that had gotten them both killed in Egypt. Come with me. And when had Magnus been able to resist Alexander anything? He went.
Magnus found happiness in this small, unnamed village in Rome. He was as happy as he had been riding with Alexander. Happier, even, because he fell into bed each night at Alexander’s side. After a few years, long enough that the fact he hadn’t aged a moment since the first time Aelius laid eyes on him, Magnus took him aside and explained.
Immortal.
Only a beheading can kill me.
There are more of us.
Drawn to one another to fight until the Gathering, when the last of us will take the Prize.
Will never age.
He didn’t explain about Alexander. How could he? Explain to a boy in a nameless village that he’d once been Alexander the Great and he’d conquered more of the world than Aelius had ever imagined? Some things Magnus would bear on his own, even if each day Aelius seemed more like Alexander, bright and vibrant and the light of the sun. He had Alexander’s way with horses, even if it was just the nag they’d been given in thanks for Aelius’s father’s military service and not the wild, untamed Bucephalus.
And he had accepted it and only asked Magnus what he what needed to do. They stayed in the village until Aelius’s parents had died, passing the care of the inn to a younger cousin.
They wandered from city to city until people began to think Aelius was Magnus’s older brother, and then father, and finally, when Aelius was too old to travel, they found another small and nameless village. To the villagers, they were an old man and his grandson. They kept to themselves, and nobody bothered them. Some of the women brought food if neither had ventured out in too many days.
One day the women came to the hut at the edge of the village and found a freshly dug grave, and Magnus gone. For centuries, Magnus found the grave carefully tended when he returned in the dark of the night.
Magnus lived through the birth of the Christian’s Jesus, but the world was too big. There were too many people and too many cities, and he couldn’t travel enough of the world to find his Alexander.
A hundred years after Jesus’s death, Magnus found Alexander again in Jerusalem. Magnus rode with Hadrian’s army in the final crush of Jerusalem, because one of his skills, although not one he’d taught Aelius and his family, was killing. He’d honed it long before Macedon, and it hadn’t rusted yet.
But as the gates of Jerusalem finally fell, Magnus felt the call of another Immortal, faint at first, then stronger, growing closer. Hadrian’s army spread out through the city, hacking at the few remaining soldiers. Magnus peeled off, following his sense of the Immortal. Their fight was swift and brutal and Magnus clutched at the gaping, healing wound in his chest while the Quickening struck.
He mounted back up on his horse, hands still shaking from the Quickening, but followed the sounds of the fighting. By the time he’d regained his strength, he’d found a wing of Hadrian’s army, and nobody had even realized he’d been gone. They had just crushed a few dozen soldiers at a crossroads and were pushing forward when Magnus saw Alexander again. He was trapped in a corner, surrounded by Hadrian’s soldiers.
There was a woman and two small children behind him.
He held a sword as naturally as Alexander had held it, an extension of himself. He fought like Alexander, lashing out with skill a man of his age shouldn't have had. One of the children, a small girl, called him father. But there were too many people in front of Magnus—men and horses and bodies—for him to reach Alexander.
Alexander was cut down, then his wife, then his children, and Magnus could only watch. He never even learned his name.
Magnus fled. He would be counted one of the dead in Jerusalem, and maybe Hadrian would spare him a passing thought. Most likely to decide who would fill his saddle now that he was gone. He ran for two hundred years while the world changed around him. He threw himself into the Game, waiting to find someone, anyone who was stronger than him.
There was no one. He fought and he killed and he tried to bury Alexander’s face as deep into his memory as he could. He tried to shove it behind the disappearing memories of his earliest years, but Alexander wouldn’t leave. He traveled north into Britannia and faced the Immortals there. He found his way to Constantinople and watched it become the greatest city the world had ever known. Even Babylon, even Alexandria, faded in comparison.
But there was no Alexander.
He’d searched. He’d tried to tell himself he was only playing the Game, preparing for the Gathering. But he’d been searching. He’d been looking for eyes, a voice, a lock of hair that called to him. Anything to bring Alexander back to him.
But there was only silence.
For the first three hundred or so years of his life, Magnus had taken his solitude as a given. It had never bothered him before, but now, after Alexander—after losing Alexander four times—he felt… alone. So he hunted Immortals. He’d gone as far north as he could go, to the edges of Britannia. He turned east, heading for the lands that must have been where he was born.
There were wars there, too. He plied his trade in those wars, pledging himself to promising rulers. Only once did he help a man overthrow his cousin to take control, in what would become China. He fought at Fú Jiān’s side and there, finally there, did he find his Alexander again.
His name was Chen, and he was thirty. He’d weathered the unrest in the capitol and pledged himself to Fú Jiān while Magnus stood at his king’s side, and for just a moment Magnus thought Alexander recognized him. But no. He stared at Magnus for a moment, then retreated after his dismissal.
Magnus tracked him down later that day. Chen looked at him again, raising a hand and nearly touching Magnus’s cheekbones, just like Aelius had done when they lay together at night. Something hard and agonizing clenched in his stomach, and he wanted to be sick.
I thought I knew your face.
You may.
Come with me.
They didn’t fall into bed in this life. There was no time, not with Fú Jiān’s power so tenuous still. But they did, eventually, one night after a battle. Magnus had lost sight of him and when Alexander came up behind him, his arm bloodied, but otherwise healthy, Magnus had taken his good arm in his hand and kissed him.
They’d fallen into bed after that. And Magnus was happy again for a few brief decades. After Fú Jiān’s death, Magnus and Chen left the city. They were free of war and death and battles, but Chen aged. And Magnus didn’t.
Magnus watched Chen grow old, biding his time until he asked why why had Magnus not aged a day since they met in hall of Fú Jiān’s palace?
This time when Magnus told him—the Game, the Gathering, Immortals—Chen left. For a week, a month, Magnus reeled. He stayed in their home. This wasn’t right. His Alexander.
Two months later, Magnus woke up to fingers in his hair and a warm body at his side. And arm snaked over his waist and lips pressed to the back of his neck.
I’m sorry. I love you. I will come with you.
But it didn’t matter. Six months later Alexander came home with a cough. Six months and one week later, Magnus clutched Alexander to his chest as he drew his last, rattling breath.
The gods had cursed him. They’d granted him everything he wanted, the one man he could never live without, and then they kept ripping him away. Every time Magnus had given up hope that he would find Alexander again, they gave him back.
Seventy-five years later, Magnus found him again. A young woman had come running to his door, begging for a doctor’s help. It was Alexander, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, dying. And all Magnus could do was ease his passing.
The next three times he found Alexander, he came too late. Once, his broken body on a battlefield. Again, taken by some strange illness. Then, a slave on the wrong end of his master’s whip.
A hundred years passed, and Magnus began to dread finding Alexander again. He headed north, avoiding large cities. There were more people in cities, more chances to find Alexander on his deathbed. He missed the destruction of Aphrodisias. The city had been beautiful once. One more grand thing scrubbed from the earth.
Magnus was tired. He was tired of running from Alexander; he was tired of running to Alexander. The gods would never let him free. He was doomed to find him again and again and again and then lose him every time.
He railed against the gods, demanding answers, demanding to know what he had done. But the gods were silent. They were silent has they had never been in the truly old world. Maybe the years had killed them. Maybe other gods had come and gone and left them dead in their palaces, but he was still cursed.
He threw himself into the wars in Britannia. The Britons were going to lose. Nobody could withstand the might of the Saxons. He’d seen their like before in Macedon, in Greece. But Magnus was tired of siding with the winners. He wanted, for once, to meet something that could stop him.
But nothing could. He was cut down on the battlefield and rose to rejoin the Britons later. His pride wouldn’t let him kneel to any Immortals who found him, and he beat them all. He beat them all and his power grew. He’d lost count of the number of heads he’d taken. How many Quickenings until one more burned him clean and there was nothing left of Magnus?
Alexander found him this time. Magnus had taken a Quickening and he was on his knees, trying to regain his strength to stand. He heard hoofbeats, then the sound of feet hitting the ground near him.
Alexander had spoken a language Magnus was only barely familiar with. He’d heard the early roots of it spoken, enough to recognize some words. Lleu. Light.
Magnus looked up at that into bright blue eyes and black hair braided back. Whorls of woad decorated his cheeks and up across his forehead. It was unmistakably Alexander.
His name was Lugh. He helped Magnus to his feet, then up on his horse, and swung into position behind him. His people welcomed Magnus, despite his obvious foreign status. He wasn’t the tall, blond Saxons, and that seemed to be all that mattered to them.
They lived the life Alexander lived with Hephaestion. They rode and fought during the day, and each night they lay together. The winters were miserable—cold and wet and the cattle slept inside with them, but Magnus could have shared their home with boars and he would have been happy.
Lugh had been young when he found Magnus. Sixteen, by the way his people counted things. In later years, sixteen was far too young, but here, at sixteen most men had wives. They had more years than Magnus deserved. The war brought light and life to Alexander’s eyes, the way he’d looked back in Macedon. Magnus let Alexander sweep him into his world, a light gathering Magnus’s flickering flame and fanning it into brilliance.
He’d loved him then, more than he was willing to let himself admit. He whispered the words to Alexander each night before they slept, cradling him in his arms, because if he let go the gods would take him again. The gods of the Celts were as brutal as the Macedonian’s had ever been. Brutal and capricious, and Magnus waited for the lightning to strike. For the Tuatha De Dannan to rise and drag Alexander to the underground.
But they didn’t. They left Alexander to the Celts, where he grew brighter and brighter until it should have hurt to look at him. It was Magnus they took away, a dagger to the heart. Humans, mortals, who had found out who he was. Who was he? What was he? How did he become Immortal? How could they become Immortals? Remarkably persistent, these mortals. It took him a year to escape. A year during which the Saxons had swept through the land. He only escaped because the Saxons attacked the village where he was being held.
He’d returned to their village, but it had been razed. It was empty. Not even animals ventured here. There were no graves, no cairns. Nothing. Nothing to tell him if Alexander had been taken or killed. He swept through Saxon encampments like death itself, but nobody remembered a specific nameless village out of the many they’d destroyed. And why should they? This was war.
Magnus lost track of the years as he searched. There was nothing for him in this world if the gods kept taking Alexander from him. He’d had his heart broken too many times. And it seemed whether he went looking for Alexander or not, the gods would push them back together, only to rip Alexander away when Magnus began to feel safe.
It left him ragged. Fewer of the Immortals he’d known and befriended over the years still lived. The young ones were too young. They were still too weak, and it was still too easy for them to be killed. Magnus couldn’t let himself grow attached to anyone else. Not if he knew they would die so soon.
He found a few newborn Immortals in his travels, men and women who’d just woken up from their first deaths and were frightened and in need of a teacher. He protected them until he could bring them to another Immortal who could train them, but Magnus never let himself grow attached to these children. They were infants in a war that had been going on for thousands of years before even Magnus had died. And he had never met anyone older than himself that still lived. There had to have been older Immortals, and there were whispers of the oldest yet, but Magnus had never met him. He was beginning to think he was a myth.
Finally, despairing of ever finding Alexander before the gods willed it, Magnus pledged himself to kings again. Men died in battle, and Magnus could always slip away before he found himself growing too attached to anybody. It was an easy life, if not a pain free one.
But then, after what historians would call the Battle of Hereford, Magnus sat, nursing a deep wound in his leg, waiting for it to heal. A red-haired man knelt at his side, hands reaching for the wound.
Magnus tried to wave him away, insisting that most of the blood wasn’t his, but then the man looked up. Alexander. His Alexander, in a different body again, but always his Alexander.
But this wasn’t his Alexander. This Alexander was Meredydd, and within the hour, Magnus met his wife. Meredydd became a fast friend, but never anything else. He only had eyes for his wife, and for nearly a decade, Magnus became an honorary member of his family. Meredydd’s children called him uncle. Meredydd called him brother.
Magnus couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t imagine what he’d done to anger the gods to bring this kind of torture to his life. Having Alexander like this, but never truly having him, was worse than not having him at all. He relished each smile Alexander gave him, but day by day his soul withered when Alexander—Meredydd—took his wife in his arms.
Magnus left.
He couldn’t say goodbye. He’d tried to leave a dozen times before, but the words always stuck in his throat before he could say them, and he stayed. He rose one morning, left everything but a few changes of clothes and his sword, and rode out.
The only good thing about being an Immortal was that he could take three decades to sulk and still have plenty of time left in his life. He sulked and moved south and east into what would become France. Magnus watched Charlemagne rise to power with the first interest he’d held in a ruler since Hadrian. With the world growing larger every day, and the gods growing crueler each time he found Alexander, Magnus supposed he had nothing to lose.
He threw his lot in with Charlemagne and rode with him as he conquered. He was no Alexander to take it all, but he took enough, and Magnus loved him a little for that. It was a life of fire and death and war, and that was all Magnus needed. His life was simple. He woke in the morning in the army camp and ate whatever slop they were feeding that day. He drilled or fought during the day. He slept in a tent at night. It was familiar and easy and never once did a man kneel at his side and send Magnus’s life twisting away like a toy boat caught in the current.
Then Charlemagne died, and Magnus was left again with the choice of staying or running. He did what he did best, after all, and ran. He ran all the way to the border of Germany and France and stopped in a city one night to rest.
And that was where he found Alexander again. He had a girl child on one hip and carried a basket of arrows in his other hand.
Go find your mother, darling, I’ve got some work to do.
Okay, daddy.
Magnus wanted to turn and keep running until he collapsed. But he couldn’t. He’d run from Alexander once and he couldn’t do it again. He accepted the room Alexander—Sasha—offered him, and then found a place for himself inside the city. He helped Alexander fletch his arrows, watched him dote on his daughter. And just as he began to feel that itch to run, to protect himself from this pain, Alexander caught him by the arm.
Come with me.
They could get killed for this, both of them. But to have Alexander back beneath him… Magnus would take any pain, any fate, to feel him again. Sasha’s daughter called him uncle, but Alexander called him my love. Alexander couldn’t possibly understand why some nights Magnus’s jolted awake from a nightmare and clutched Alexander to him, but he always kissed him and sank back to the bed, pulling Magnus on top of him, urging him on without words. Magnus could never refuse what he was offered, and he held Alexander close while he shuddered. He gripped Magnus’s arm or hand or hip and bit his lip to keep silent. Those quiet gasps and whimpers were more than enough for Magnus, and he never lasted much longer than Alexander.
It happened too many times. Alexander spent too many nights away from his wife, and she found them one night. She’d come to ask Magnus if he’d seen Alexander, instead she found her husband on his back.
I love you, Magnus, I love you. God help me, I love you.
Her gasp sealed their fate. Alexander, a blanket around his waist, tried to talk to her. She would hear none of it, and she ran. Magnus went to him, took him in his arms. But he couldn’t tell him it would be okay.
The horror that spread slowly across Alexander’s face burned itself into Magnus’s mind. He’d hardly been willing to let go of Magnus while they dressed. There was no time to run now. They could only sit and wait for the guards Sasha’s wife had called. He could already hear the shouting.
Alexander’s neck broke when the hangman kicked the stool from beneath his feet. That was Magnus’s only comfort. He’d died swiftly, unlike Magnus, who felt the rope burn across his throat. He felt his lungs seize when no oxygen reached them. He got to experience every moment of his own death, but even that wasn’t enough to erase Alexander’s face from his mind.
He woke in the back of a wagon next to Alexander’s cold body. They were being taken out of the city for shallow graves, most likely. Neither of them had earned a burial on church grounds.
Magnus broke the driver’s neck and left him lying beside the road. He buried Alexander far away from the city beneath a tree and swore to himself he would never again be the cause of Alexander’s death. If he spent the rest of his life hiding, he would protect Alexander.
It worked for nearly a hundred years, until a young man was presented at the court in Songdo. Magnus was too enmeshed in the politics to run. He’d worked for decades to undermine Yuan power and bring Taejo to power. He was too close to succeeding and breaking the hold the Mongols held on this land. If they failed now, the country and Taejo would be destroyed, and Magnus couldn’t allow that to happen.
It didn’t seem to matter. This Alexander wormed his way into Magnus’s life and with one come with me, Magnus surrendered again. Together they held the ragged fringes of Taejo’s kingdom together until he was strong enough to gather each of the disparate threads into his hands, and suddenly there was no more use for them.
Taejo granted Magnus a title and a great deal of land and money, which Magnus had no choice but to accept. Alexander came with him, much to the relief of his family. He was a younger son, and his eldest brother had already married well, a daughter of the king’s cousin. As long as this son was taken care of, his family didn’t care where he ended up.
Magnus got nearly thirty years with this Alexander. They were happy days, ones where they rose from their shared bed only to eat and bathe and then went straight back to bed. Their servants, chosen carefully for their discretion, let them do as they wished. They loved Alexander’s brightness, and Magnus thought they would have died for Alexander before they even considered dying for him.
However—so many things in Magnus’s life had a however—one day Alexander came back from the city shivering. It was nearly fall, but not so cold that Alexander should have been shivering. He kissed Magnus on the cheek and curled up in their bed.
Magnus managed to get him to eat a few bites of a broth over the next few days, but eventually Alexander shook his head, pushing the bowl away with a weak gesture.
My love—
I’m okay. Lay with me.
There was a pit in his stomach. He cupped Alexander’s cheeks and kissed him. He was so weak. He could barely move into Magnus’s arms. Magnus pulled him tight, tucking Alexander’s head beneath his chin, the gentle gust of Alexander’s breath against his neck.
They stayed that way nearly an hour, until Alexander’s warm breath no longer brushed Magnus’s throat. Magnus must have made some sound, because moments later the door burst open.
My lord—
He’s dead—
My lord, move away, please—
It could be catching—
Magnus fled from the city before Alexander’s burial. He’d seen it happen too many times to live it again. He threw himself back into any war he could find, hoping to find an Immortal who could end this. He found one, a woman in France. She drove him to his knees and when he finally dropped his sword, waiting for her to finish this, please, she knelt beside him and took him in her arms.
Come with me, child.
Over the course of a few weeks, Rebecca worked the story out of Magnus. She fed him and held him while he wept. She was kind and gentle and Magnus hadn’t known either in the twenty years since he’d held Alexander as he died.
We are not cursed. Your gods haven’t cursed you any more than my God would.
He was still with Rebecca when they both awoke in the middle of the coldest night of the year. Something had changed. It was as though a giant bronze bell clanged or metal gates had been forced open. Maybe both. Magnus staggered toward where Rebecca slept, and she met him in the center of the room.
Blue light like a Quickening raced up their arms, sparkling and sparking. And then it was gone as quickly as it started. Magnus felt like he’d taken a Quickening. A brutal one.
Rebecca?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
Magnus left to find out, although how he was going to find out what had caused this when he wasn’t even sure what had happened, he didn’t quite know. But he rode out of Normandy the next day.
Every Immortal he found had experienced the same thing. Dizziness, then a Quickening. It hadn’t been a Quickening, but that was the closest they could come to describing it. And over the course of a decade, Magnus began to discover what that blue spark had been.
The magic Magnus had grown up with had been from the gods. It had been the process of ritual and prayer and myth. The Tuatha De Dannan he had feared in Ireland had been magic from the gods. Magic had been a part of his life since his birth and he had never questioned its existence. It changed as the gods changed, but it was no less real.
This magic was different. This sparked from an Immortal’s fingertips until their swords were only used in the final, killing blow. The intricate dance of swords fell to a ritual to begin the fight, and Magnus learned to use this magic. Each Quickening he took strengthened his magic just as it had strengthened him before. Now he felt the spark feeding the well of magic within him.
The Game changed. There had been headhunters before, there always would be headhunters, but they were more brutal. For nearly a century Immortals forgot the rules. Magnus brought them to heel, hunting the headhunters. He let his name spread far and wide and Immortals retreated back to rules. There were no more attacks on deserted roads before they announced the Challenge.
It was far better to have a fair fight than risk the Bane. Magnus accepted the name, and before long Magnus Bane was what mothers threatened their children with if they disobeyed. The Downworlders, creatures Magnus had never thought truly existed, began to see in Immortals a kind of protection. It was tenuous protection, but it was better than facing the Shadowhunters alone.
And Alexander was still gone.
The Immortals had become warlocks. He wasn’t sure when the change happened, but it became rare that things came to duels between them. He still took heads if pushed, but they lived in wary circles around one another. The most powerful claimed their cities and the rest of them made what living they could.
Magnus searched all over the world in the guise of accepting clients, and never once did he see Alexander. There was nothing, no whisper of a man as golden as Alexander had been, no matter what coloring his body wore. Some days that was more torturous than watching his death. At least he’d had Alexander. He had touched him. It had been nine hundred years, and Alexander was gone.
Magnus dealt with the Shadowhunters, much to his growing distaste. They grated on his nerves, almost like the buzz of other Immortals, but wrong somehow. They shouldn’t exist. They were the symptom of a plague. A plague that wasn’t doing its job particularly well.
He settled in Brooklyn. The city had grown too unruly for its own good and it needed the strength a High Warlock could provide. Alexander would have laughed at him. He’d always been second or third place, just far enough removed from power that he could pretend he had none, and now he was stepping in to stop a city spiraling out of control.
Magnus provided control. He dealt with the Clave and their nonsense and he reined the Downworlders and Immortals in.
His life was simple for twenty years. Payment made, services rendered. A firm hand on the Downworlders. The Shadowhunters stayed out of his way for the most part and he stayed out of theirs. He settled in and waited for the Gathering. He waited for another Immortal strong enough to take his powers. None came. He was stronger than anyone who came to challenge him. He weathered Valentine.
Then Jocelyn Fairchild begged he take her daughter’s memories, and Magnus knew this careful house of cards he’d built for himself would come tumbling down sooner or later. He prepared himself to weather Valentine again, and to protect the Downworlders as best he could. He knew, deep in the pit of his stomach, that if Valentine turned his wrath on him, there was nothing he could do to stop him. He could hold him off, hopefully long enough to get his people into hiding, but he couldn’t truly stop him. Not now. If he’d stepped in years ago, maybe. Maybe not even then. By the time they knew he was a danger, it was far too late. And as much as Magnus wished an Immortal would come for him, the thought that all his power could be lost to Valentine made him sick.
Everything spun out of control too quickly and even Magnus wasn’t prepared. He found himself standing in his lair, facing a fallen Shadowhunter, with his wards gone. He only knew the Immortals weren’t all dead because he could still feel their magic beneath his skin. If he failed in this, it wouldn’t matter that they were still alive. They would be hunted and killed.
As the man in front of him threatened to collect his eyes—and that was a new one, he had to admit—an arrow whistled past him and into the Shadowhunter’s leg. Never one to look a gift weapon in the mouth, Magnus finished the fight, then looked at the red fletchings on the arrow. He’d seen that arrow at Pandemonium the other night, but the archer had never emerged. Magnus had had other things on his mind. The Fairchild girl, for one.
The buzz beneath his skin was different, not quite Shadowhunter. He shifted, trying to assess the danger before he turned. He was tired. It had been a long time since he’d expended this much magic this quickly.
Well done.
More like medium-rare.
Finally deciding that whatever danger he faced, it wasn’t likely to come soon, Magnus turned. He felt sick. Hope and despair clashed in his chest. The gods couldn’t give him Alexander now. Not in the middle of this war.
The sound of a bow clattering to the floor made Magnus jump.
“Magnus.” His Alexander ran the four paces to him, wrapping his arms around him, and gripping Magnus so tightly it hurt. “Magnus.”
“Alexander?” He was slow to return the hug, but Alexander didn’t seem to notice.
“I’ve been looking for you for so long. Magnus.” His voice cracked when he spoke. “I didn’t know—I didn’t know it was you. I would have found you years ago, if I had. I just… I just knew there was someone. I knew I had to find him. I didn’t know your name.”
“Alexander. Alexander, let me see you.”
He didn’t let go. If anything his hands gripped the back of Magnus’s shirt tighter, but he pulled back. There were unshed tears in his eyes, and Magnus forgot how to breathe. “It’s been a thousand years.” That hadn’t been what he’d meant to say. “I thought I’d lost you.”
Alexander shook his head. “No. No, never. I’ll always—“ his breath hitched. “I never knew you, did I? I can’t remember everything. Your face. But I never knew you when we met.”
Magnus shushed him and kissed Alexander’s jaw. “We have time, my love.”
Alexander kissed him, desperate and rough. Magnus could only surrender, grabbing a fistful of Alexander’s shirt at his hip. This wasn’t the time, but Magnus couldn’t pull away. Gradually Alexander’s desperation faded and the kiss gentled, but Alexander still held onto Magnus as if he was afraid Magnus would slip away.
This was the first time he’d felt anything but irritation and amusement in a thousand years, and Magnus suddenly couldn’t remember why he’d stopped searching for this. Any pain, any loss, was worth Alexander in his arms.
“Hey, Alec, where are you—whoa.”
Magnus could feel Alexander flinch in his arms. Alexander’s back was still to the door and Magnus reached up to cup his face and hold him in place for a few more moments. As soon as he stepped away, Magnus would have to accept that there was still a war going on, and the gods were going to rip Alexander away from him as soon as they could.
“Whoa what?” A young woman’s voice. “Is he okay? Is that… Magnus Bane?”
And then Alexander was pulling away, slowly, his eyes still locked on Magnus’s face. “You’ll have to tell me how you got your last name.”
Magnus snorted, then let Alexander turn to face the other two Shadowhunters. Something niggled at the back of his mind. There was a familiarity to the buzz Alexander left under his skin. A little off for a Shadowhunter. A little more like—A little more like the buzz of an Immortal. Like one of the young ones before their first death.