He sat on the roof of an old building, so abandoned that even the wind felt like a stranger here. Below, the city moved lazily — cars, people, lights. Life. Noisy, hectic, meaningless. He had watched it for three hundred thousand years. And in all that time, it hadn't changed.
His name was... once. But now even he had forgotten it. He had changed it hundreds of times. Names, like eras, were dust in the wind of time.
He remembered what the first fire looked like. How the first houses were built from clay and bones. He saw the first planes rise into the sky and empires fall that were once promised eternity. Everything repeated. People were born, grew up, loved, died. And he... he remained.
Death had long ceased to be a goal. It became a dream — unreachable, like a mirage in the desert. He had tried everything: fire, cold, blades, poisons, abysses. He had drowned, burned, fallen from mountains — and each time, he awoke, whole. Even his heart refused to stop. He knew anatomy better than any doctor. He knew magic, science, every word in every language. He could have been a god. But he became emptiness.
And now, today, he was sitting again, as if waiting for something. He didn't even know what. A habit? Instinct? A remnant of desire?
And then — she.
Just walked by. In the crowd, on the other side of the street. Didn't even notice him. But he... he felt it.
No, not a lightning strike. Not a flash. Just a small shift inside, like the first breeze before a storm. Strange, incomprehensible... a feeling.
She was ordinary. At first glance. A scarf hung carelessly from her shoulders, her hair — honey-colored — spilled down her back, and she held a book in her hands. A book. That's what caught him. Who still reads paper books these days?
He jumped from the roof. Silently. Effortlessly. Like a shadow. Her steps were steady, calm. He didn't know why he was following her. He just was.
Suddenly, it mattered who she was. What her name was. What she loved. Why she smiled when flipping through the pages.
He didn't know what was happening to him. But for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years... he was curious.