Timeless

Chapter 1

5 May 2015

My name is Emily De Santos. I am 17 years old and I haven't aged a day since 1847. You would think this was amazing, eternally young and beautiful. It's not. If you had lived through 167 years of "You have more, so I am going to kill you and take what you have," you would understand what I meant. Imagine living through hundreds of wars over trivial things such as land and ruling. Constant death and destruction. It all gets a bit boring if you can't die with those around you. You can never become too attached to people. You can stay for a decade or two and then you must leave otherwise people would notice that you are not aging. And then you would be hunted down, possibly with pitch forks and torches. That happened to me once. I didn't realise that I wasn't aging and I stayed too long. I should have been 34. But I still looked 17. I didn't know what that meant. When I took the deal I didn't know I would stop aging. But there I was, staring at a perfect image of my 17 year old self in my ancient hand mirror. I often found myself wondering about who I could have turned out to be. Would I have had children? Would my friends marvel at my family when they saw how content we were? Would my husband's family like me? I could never be sure of the answers though because here I am frozen at 17. I wanted those things, all of them, I wanted children, I was already married. I wanted my friends to marvel at my contentedness. And I wanted my husband's family to like me. My husband was a year or two older than me but I didn't care. We were madly in love. But I switched the cards I was dealt. I never understood that I was signing away my soul when I drank that cup of vile tasting orange liquid. I remember a few days after drinking it feeling sick. So naturally I went to lie down. The next thing I knew, I was no longer lying in my bedroom. I was hot and uncomfortable. I tried to look at my surroundings but I couldn't see anything. It was completely dark and the heat was stifling. I tried to feel around myself to get a feel for where I was. I was in a velvet lined box, a coffin. I thought then that I should probably try to get out of the casket I had been put in. I wondered idly why my husband had allowed this. He was usually very protective over me. He had never let me out of his sight for more than 7 hours. It made both of us anxious. I wondered now where he was and what he was doing. Eventually I got tired of lying there in the heat. I wondered if they had already buried me and if I was able to get out. I attempted to lift the top. It budged, but not much. I then realised that I had only lifted my arm, I had not applied pressure, I had not exerted myself in any way. That was when I first noticed my new strength. Now you can imagine how I felt when the facts sunk in. I was supposed to be dead. I had unimaginable amounts of strength. I should have been suffocating in the tight box from lack of oxygen. Although, I couldn't for the life of me think of what I could have become to have such abilities.