ZYON ANTONIO VALIENTE

FACE CLAIM: ANTON LEE | HWANG HYUNJIN HE/ HIM. NSFW. 3N

There was a time when I believed immortality was a gift.

I was too young then to understand what eternity truly meant. To a child, forever sounds beautiful. It sounds like endless summers, endless possibilities, endless chances to become whoever you dream of being. I remember standing beneath a sky filled with stars and wondering what it would be like to witness centuries unfold before my eyes. I thought it would feel extraordinary. I thought I would become someone extraordinary.

Instead, I became a spectator.

That is what immortality really is. Not living forever, but watching everything else die.

The first person I lost was my mother. For years, I convinced myself her death would somehow be easier because I knew it was coming. Human beings age. Human beings die. It is the oldest truth in existence. Every wrinkle on her face should have prepared me. Every strand of silver hair should have softened the blow. Yet when I stood beside her bed and watched her struggle to draw each breath, I felt as helpless as a frightened child. She kept apologizing for leaving me. Even now, centuries later, I can still hear her voice asking me to forgive her for something that was never her fault.

What haunts me most is not the memory of her death. It is the memory of her looking at me and realizing I had not changed. Her hands were fragile. Her body was failing. Entire decades had passed across her face. Meanwhile I looked exactly as I did when I was twenty. There was fear in her eyes during those final days—not because she was dying, but because she understood that I wasn’t. She knew I would remain behind long after everyone else was gone.

I buried her beneath an old oak tree overlooking the hills she loved. For years I visited her grave every morning. Then years became decades. Decades became centuries. The cemetery expanded. New graves appeared. Old names faded from stone. The oak tree grew taller than the church beside it. Eventually even the church disappeared. Time erased everything except me.

That was when I began understanding the true nature of my curse.

Death is not the tragedy people imagine it to be. Death is merciful. Death allows a story to end. It gathers a life into something complete and whole before carrying it gently into memory. The tragedy belongs to those left behind. The tragedy is remaining. The tragedy is waking up every morning after everyone you love is gone and realizing the world expects you to continue as though nothing happened.

The centuries that followed blurred together in ways I can barely describe. Empires rose and collapsed. Entire cities transformed beyond recognition. Languages I once spoke fluently vanished from existence. I watched horses disappear from roads and airplanes appear in skies. I watched wars begin because of men who believed they were important and end with thousands of names carved into stone. I witnessed enough history to fill libraries.

None of it mattered.

History becomes strangely insignificant when every memory is overshadowed by loss.

People assume immortality grants wisdom. The truth is that grief eventually occupies so much space inside you that there is little room left for anything else. Every century added another collection of ghosts. Friends whose laughter I can still hear. Lovers whose faces remain vivid in my mind despite the passage of hundreds of years. Children who once wrapped their tiny fingers around mine and trusted me completely. I remember teaching them how to read. I remember watching them fall in love. I remember attending their funerals.

I attended all of their funerals.

At first I tried keeping photographs. I filled entire rooms with them. Shelves lined with smiling faces. Frames stacked on top of one another until there was barely any empty space left. I told myself I was preserving memories. In reality, I was building a museum dedicated to everyone I had lost. One evening I stood in the center of that room and realized I could not remember the names of some of the people staring back at me. I remembered loving them. I remembered mourning them. Yet their names had vanished somewhere inside the endless years.

I have never forgiven myself for that.

Imagine loving someone enough to believe you could never forget them, only to discover that eternity slowly steals even your grief. The pain remains, but the details begin to fade. A voice becomes difficult to recall. A smile grows uncertain around the edges. Memories that once felt untouchable become fragile. Eventually you are left desperately holding fragments, terrified that one day even those will disappear.

That fear changed me.

People often describe me as distant. Reserved. Difficult to know. They assume it is part of my personality. They think I enjoy solitude. The truth is far uglier than that. I stopped allowing people close because every relationship felt like borrowing happiness from the future. Every friendship came attached to an inevitable goodbye. Every moment of love carried the certainty of loss. No matter how deeply someone cared for me, no matter how many promises they made, I knew exactly how the story would end.

I would be standing beside their grave.

I always was.

Over time, I became skilled at leaving before attachment could take root. I moved frequently. Changed names. Disappeared whenever questions became too difficult to answer. I convinced myself it was the sensible thing to do. If nobody knew me long enough to love me, nobody could break my heart. Yet loneliness has a way of becoming its own form of punishment. Years spent avoiding grief eventually turned into centuries spent avoiding life itself.

Sometimes I sit alone at night and watch lights flicker in apartment windows across the city. Behind each window is a temporary life. Someone is arguing with their spouse. Someone is helping their child with homework. Someone is making coffee for a person they will spend the rest of their life with. They do not realize how precious their mortality is. They complain about growing older. They fear wrinkles and gray hair. They spend entire lifetimes running from the very thing I would give anything to have.

An ending.

That is all I have ever wanted.

Not wealth. Not power. Not eternity.

An ending.

A final page.

A moment when I could close my eyes knowing I had reached the end of my story instead of wandering endlessly through chapters that should have concluded centuries ago.

Yet morning always arrives.

The sun rises exactly as it did yesterday and the day before that and the century before that. The world continues moving forward with unbearable indifference. New people are born. New memories are created. New lives begin. And somewhere among them, I continue existing—unchanged, unwanted by death, carrying generations of memories inside a heart that should have broken long ago.

Perhaps that is why I no longer ask whether I am cursed.

Nobody survives this much loss without becoming convinced of it.

The real curse was never immortality itself.

The real curse was being forced to remain long after every person who taught me how to live had already forgotten my name.

After five hundred years—assuming that’s even the correct number—I finally decided to start living again.

I spent most of those centuries waiting for my life to begin.

At first, I was waiting for the curse to break. Then I was waiting for a miracle. After that, I was waiting for death. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that happiness was something reserved for the future, something I would allow myself to experience once my existence finally made sense. The problem with eternity is that the future never arrives. There is always another year, another decade, another century stretching endlessly beyond the horizon. If you spend your entire life waiting for the perfect moment to start living, you eventually realize you’ve wasted lifetimes standing still.

These days, I work as an Emergency Room resident.

It’s ironic, in a way.

A man who cannot die spending his nights trying to prevent death from claiming other people.

The shifts are brutal. Twenty-four hours become thirty. Thirty become forty. Coffee replaces sleep, and adrenaline replaces common sense. By the end of most shifts, my scrubs smell like antiseptic and exhaustion, my eyes burn from fluorescent lights, and I can barely remember whether I’ve eaten anything in the past twelve hours. Yet somehow, despite the chaos, I love it.

The emergency room reminds me that life is fragile.

Every patient who comes through those doors carries a story interrupted without warning. A father who thought he would be home for dinner. A student who believed tomorrow would be ordinary. A mother who kissed her children goodbye that morning without realizing how quickly life could change. Human beings live under the illusion that time belongs to them. Then one unexpected moment arrives and shatters that illusion completely.

Perhaps that’s why I chose this profession.

After centuries of watching people disappear, I developed a strange appreciation for how precious a single day can be.

Of course, nobody at the hospital knows the truth about me. To them, I’m simply Zyon—the resident who somehow functions on minimal sleep, drinks entirely too much coffee, and always volunteers for difficult cases. The consultants assume I’m ambitious. My co-residents think I’m insane. The nurses have stopped questioning why I never seem particularly exhausted no matter how long the shift lasts.

I’ve learned that people rarely look too closely at things they can explain away.

When my shift finally ends, I trade fluorescent hallways for dimly lit stages.

A few nights a week, whenever my schedule allows it, I perform at small gigs around the city. Nothing extravagant. Just crowded bars, rooftop venues, cafés filled with university students, and the occasional event where nobody pays attention to the performer until they recognize a song they like. I never planned on becoming a musician. The first instrument I learned no longer exists in the modern world, and the first songs I memorized have been forgotten for centuries. Music simply followed me through every lifetime until I eventually stopped resisting it.

There is something comforting about performing for strangers.

For a few hours, nobody asks who I am. Nobody expects explanations. Nobody knows how many centuries sit behind my smile. They only know the music. They only know the voice. The moment begins, exists, and ends exactly as it should.

Unlike me.

My friends often describe me as carefree. They think I spend my free time chasing whatever catches my attention because I enjoy being reckless. The reality is far simpler. After five hundred years, I have learned that nearly everything people worry about eventually becomes irrelevant. Embarrassment fades. Failure becomes a story. Heartbreak heals, even when it leaves scars. The only things that truly matter are the people who make life feel lighter and the moments that remind you you’re alive while they’re happening.

That’s why I say yes more often now.

Yes to late-night drives with no destination.

Yes to invitations that arrive at the last minute.

Yes to spontaneous trips and terrible ideas and experiences that make absolutely no sense on paper.

I’ve spent enough centuries understanding how temporary everything is. The least I can do is enjoy it while it’s here.

The truth is that I stopped searching for meaning a long time ago.

Meaning is overrated.

A patient surviving a surgery nobody expected them to survive.

A crowded room singing the lyrics to a song I wrote during a sleepless night.

Watching the sunrise after a shift that should have broken me.

Laughing so hard I forget how old I am.

Those moments are enough.

Maybe that sounds insignificant after five hundred years of existence. Maybe it should. Yet the older I become, the more convinced I am that life was never meant to be understood. It was meant to be experienced. The tragedy isn’t that everything ends. The tragedy is spending so much time fearing endings that you forget to enjoy what exists before them.

So now I live the only way I know how.

I save lives when I can.

I sing whenever I get the chance.

I collect stories I’ll never tell.

I fall in love with cities I have no intention of staying in.

And every morning, when another sunrise arrives to remind me that eternity is still waiting outside my window, I choose to greet it with a smile instead of resentment.

After all, five hundred years taught me many things.

The most important lesson was that forever becomes a lot less frightening once you stop treating it like a curse and start treating it like another chance to live.

• BASIC DNF CRITERIA
• MINOR OOC & IC
• NON RP ACCOUNTS