"Grief is a season, not a climate." That was what a spiritual master had told me once, during a lifetime when I had sought out every sage, every mystic, every hollow-eyed holy man in a desperate attempt to find some way to numb the endless cycle of loss.
I had found him in a cave in the Himalayas, in 1850, a small, bald, wrinkled old man whose eyes held a thousand years of wisdom despite his mortal span of 80 years. He sat cross-legged on a threadbare cushion, a single butter lamp flickering beside him, casting long shadows that danced across the stone walls like living things.
He knew what I was the moment I crossed the threshold of his cave. I didn't have to explain—didn't have to speak of immortality or curses or the lover I had lost more times than I could count. He simply looked at me with those knowing eyes, and I felt the weight of my centuries settle between us like an old friend taking a seat.
In my long existence, I had encountered others who sensed something unusual about me. There was the child in a medieval village who stared at me too long, her eyes tracking something just beyond my physical form, before her mother pulled her away with a whispered warning about witches. There was the dying man on a battlefield who clutched my hand and whispered, "You are not like us," in his final breath. There was the old woman in a mountain village who crossed herself whenever I passed, muttering prayers against evil spirits. They felt something—a wrongness, an otherness—but they could never name it. They reacted with fear, with awe, with superstitious dread.
And there were others, rarer, who felt something gentler. The midwife in the old world, who delivered a baby while I held the mother's hand, who looked at me afterward with tears in her eyes and said, "You have the touch of someone who has done these many times." The grieving father who, in his moment of deepest despair, looked at me and said, "You understand loss. Real loss. Not the kind you hear whispers about." They sensed the weight I carried, even if they couldn't name it. They felt the centuries pressing against the thin membrane of the present.
But none of them knew. Not like this.
This man, this small, wrinkled sage in his cave at the roof of the world, looked at me and saw everything. Not in pieces, not in glimpses, but whole. Complete. He saw the girl on the mountain, the immortal woman, the lover who had watched her king die a hundred deaths. He saw the weight I carried, and he did not flinch.
"You carry a mountain," he said by way of greeting. His voice was like wind through dry leaves, papery and thin, yet it filled the small space completely.
I hesitated before taking a seat. What left me speechless was not the greeting itself, but the language in which it was spoken.
It was not the local dialect, not Hindi or Tibetan or any of the regional tongues I had encountered on my journey through the mountains. It was Sanskrit—but not the classical Sanskrit of scholars and temples. This was older, purer, a form I had not heard spoken aloud for a long time. It was the language of the Vedas as they were first conceived, before they were written down, when they were still living breath on the lips of rishis in the northern forests.
I understood him perfectly.
He saw my surprise and smiled—a slow, gentle unfolding of his weathered face. "You know this tongue," he observed. "From very long ago."
"Yes," I said, the words falling from my lips in the same ancient Sanskrit. "I learned it from a man I met four hundred years before I came to you. In a kingdom they called Siam."
The sage's eyes gleamed with interest. "Tell me of him."
And so I did.