Rue

wip wip wip i just wanted something up super quick before i started tagging

---

Before the city, before the conquests and colonists, before we flew and sailed and raced in all our impatient modern ways, an ocean away, a man who called himself Belial discovered the secret of immortality.

But this is not his story.

It is the story of the thing he left behind, the girl he left behind, the clay sculpted into the shape of a girl with just enough life in her to serve him. An aid to his studies, a keeper for the household, a companion to a man lost in his desperate and neverending escape from death, she was given the name Rue, and she spent a millennium as a slave in all but name, watching Las Vegas grow into itself through window panes. Made to be quiet and patient, scholarly and gentle, she never considered that she might have a place in the world outside. She never thought to want for one—and so how could she have ever prepared herself for being thrown into it, all at once, and all alone?

Now, Rue transmutes weapons and armor for a local gang of werewolves. She makes dust into medicine for urchins who pay in favors. She pores over her master's work and pursues the questions left unanswered because she does not know who she is but an extension of him, and now she is alone.

This is not the story of how an immortal met his end, but perhaps it is the story of the aftermath.

---

---