Chapter 3: The Unchanging Shore

Chapter 3: The Unchanging Shore

Month of Pyanepsion, 1200 B.C.E.

Eight hundred and forty-five years.

The number was an abstraction, a piece of data logged in the golden pages of his grimoire. It was the time elapsed since his rebirth, a span so vast it had swallowed up entire dynasties and civilizations. For Lykaon, it had passed with the serene, unhurried pace of geological time. He did not feel older. Age, like hunger and injury, was a concept that no longer applied to him. He simply… was.

His home was no longer on Thera. He had watched the island's slow transformation with the detached interest of a geologist. He felt the pressure building deep beneath the caldera, a titanic geological strain that his magical senses could perceive as a low, groaning hum. He knew, with the certainty of both his 21st-century knowledge and his own supernatural senses, that the mountain was preparing to devour itself.

The great Minoan eruption, a cataclysm that would obliterate Akrotiri and reshape the Aegean, was not an event he chose to experience firsthand. There was no fear; he was certain he would survive it, perhaps buried under a mountain of pumice to be inconvenienced for a few centuries. But Lykaon abhorred inconvenience.

So, on a calm, sunny afternoon decades before the cataclysm, while the Therans went about their prosperous lives, utterly oblivious to the doom sleeping beneath their feet, Lykaon had simply relocated. He stood in the central courtyard of his villa, placed his hands on the warm marble, and drew upon his power. He did not teleport himself. He teleported his home.

The entire sanctuary—every perfectly carved stone, every drop of water in his enchanted pools, every fresco-adorned wall, and every single golden page of his library—was lifted from its foundations and displaced through space and time. It was an act of magic so profound, so impossibly vast, that it would have been considered a myth by any witch who ever lived. For Lykaon, it was a strenuous but manageable act of housekeeping.

He had replanted his gilded cage on a secluded peninsula along the rugged Ionian coastline, a wild, mountainous region that would one day be known as Epirus. It was a place of breathtaking beauty, with sheer white cliffs plunging into a sea of incandescent blue. More importantly, it was strategically irrelevant, far from the rising powers on the mainland and the bustling trade routes of the age.

Here, his wards had been perfected over the centuries. They were no longer just a veil of suggestion. They were an absolute reality to the outside world. To any lost sailor or wandering shepherd, the peninsula appeared as an impassable mass of razor-sharp rock and thorn-choked gullies, perpetually shrouded in a disorienting mist. It was a place that actively repelled approach, promising only injury and confusion. His isolation was now absolute.

Within this impenetrable fortress of solitude, his life's work continued. The library had grown into a treasure trove of knowledge that dwarfed any collection in the world. The golden pages now numbered in the thousands. He had moved far beyond the mere practice of magic and into its deepest theoretical underpinnings. He had mapped the planet's circulatory system of ley lines, understanding how to tap into them from afar to observe and, if he ever chose, to influence. He had catalogued the mystical properties of every plant, mineral, and animal, from the common yarrow to the mythical, and as he had discovered, very real, basilisks that hid in the southern deserts.

He had even begun to gently probe the fabric of time itself. True time travel was a fool's errand, a paradox-laden path to self-erasure that he had no intention of treading. But scrying the past was a simple matter. He could conjure an image in his pool and command it to regress, watching historical events as a man might rewind a recording. He had watched the first stones of Stonehenge being raised, witnessed the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, and observed the quiet, mundane lives of his own mortal ancestors from his first life, an experience that evoked a faint, academic curiosity and nothing more. The future was more opaque, a swirling sea of possibilities, but he could glimpse the probable currents, the paths of least resistance down which history was most likely to flow. It confirmed what he already knew: the world was, for the most part, on track.

His luxuries had become more refined, his conjured comforts more exquisite. He was a connoisseur of an existence no other being could comprehend. An immortal scholar in a fortress of perfect solitude, with all of history and magic as his personal collection.

From this unchanging shore, Lykaon watched the world burn. The Late Bronze Age, a period of unprecedented connectivity and prosperity, was unravelling with shocking speed. He tracked its dissolution in his scrying pool, the surface of the black water rippling with images of fire and slaughter. It was the greatest show on Earth.

He gave the invaders a name the Egyptians would later echo: the Sea Peoples. A loose confederation of desperate, hungry warriors displaced from their homelands in the west, they fell upon the rich, complacent empires of the eastern Mediterranean like a pack of wolves. He watched their fleets of longships, filled with men in feathered helmets and horned helms, their round shields bristling with spears, as they crashed against the coasts of Anatolia and the Levant.

He was watching on the day they came for Ugarit. He had often observed the beautiful port city, a cosmopolitan hub of trade where a dozen languages were spoken in the markets. Through his pool, he saw the frantic activity as the first reports of the approaching fleet arrived. He saw the scribes in the palace hastily etching messages onto clay tablets, desperate pleas for aid sent to their Hittite overlords, who were themselves facing their own invasions.

"My father, behold, the enemy's ships came (here); my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country."

He read the words of the last king of Ugarit as the scribe scratched them into the wet clay. He felt a clinical sense of pathos, the same distant empathy a historian might feel when reading a tragic primary source. He possessed the power to intervene. A single thought could have conjured a hurricane, smashing their fleet to splinters against the shore. A whispered word could have boiled the very sea around them. He had the power to save them all.

He did nothing.

He kept his gaze fixed on the scrying pool as the warriors swarmed from their ships, as the flames began to lick at the great stone warehouses, as the screams of the dying echoed across the water. He watched until the city was a smoking ruin, its people slaughtered or enslaved, its great library of tablets buried in the rubble to be found by archaeologists three thousand years in the future.

His rule of non-interference was absolute. It was not born of cruelty or apathy, but of a cold, galactic-scale pragmatism. This history, in all its horror and bloodshed, was the specific history that led to the world he knew. It was the soil that would eventually produce the Mikaelsons, the Salvatores, the entire supernatural drama he had paid the price of his soul to witness. To save Ugarit, to save the Hittites from collapse or the Mycenaeans from their own destruction, would be to throw a stone into the pond of time. The ripples would spread, changing everything, potentially even erasing the future he was waiting for. His own existence as a spectator depended on the integrity of the show. He would not stop the fire; he would only catalogue the ashes.

The collapse of the Mycenaean world was less a spectacle and more a slow, agonizing decay that he observed over decades. The great palaces he had watched being built were burned and abandoned, one by one. Pylos, Mycenae, Thebes—all fell. The complex, literate, palace-based civilization crumbled. The world outside his wards was descending into a dark age of poverty, illiteracy, and fear.

Amidst this chaos, his personal needs remained. The loneliness still crept in. But now, he no longer needed to cast a subtle lure. The world provided a steady stream of candidates. The roads were filled with refugees, the desperate and the dispossessed.

One evening, he projected a small, targeted illusion beyond his wards: a single, gnarled apple tree, heavy with perfect fruit, standing in a small clearing. It was a beacon of impossible hope in a starving land.

She came the next morning, as he knew she would. A young girl, no older than seventeen, with tangled brown hair and the haunted, terrified eyes of a survivor. She was skeletal, her dress little more than rags, a raw wound on her arm clotted with dirt. He watched as she fell upon the apples, weeping with relief as she ate.

When she had eaten her fill, he allowed the mists to part, revealing a simple path leading up his cliff. He appeared at the top, not as a god, but as a simple, kind-faced man.

"You are safe here," he said, his voice gentle.

Her name was Elara. Her village had been raided a week prior. She was the only one she knew of who had escaped. He brought her into his villa, and to her, it was the afterlife. She stared at the moving constellations on his ceiling, the impossible cleanliness, the endless food and warm water, with a sense of mute, overwhelming awe.

He cleaned her wound with a touch, the skin knitting together without a scar. He clothed her in soft wool and fed her a warm stew that tasted of home and safety. He did not touch her for a week, letting her terror subside, letting her believe she had found a true sanctuary with a benevolent spirit.

His seduction, when it came, was effortless. She saw him as her rescuer, her god. She gave herself to him with a desperate, fervent gratitude that was a potent spice to his jaded palate. He enjoyed her youth, the contrast between her harrowing stories of the outside world and the perfect peace within his home. She was a living relic of the history he was observing, a primary source he could touch and taste.

For three months, he kept her. He taught her to read a few simple symbols, shared sanitized stories of the stars, and took his pleasure from her willing, grateful body. But like all the others before her, the novelty eventually faded. Her stories became repetitive. Her gratitude, once so intoxicating, began to feel cloying. Her utter dependence on him became a chore.

The parting was, in his view, an act of immense charity. He did not cast her back out into the maelstrom. He spent a day scrying, searching for a place of relative stability. He found it in a remote mountain valley, a small village that had been spared the worst of the chaos due to its isolation.

As Elara slept her deep, dreamless sleep, he once again performed his gentle act of mental surgery. He erased himself, his villa, her trauma. He didn't give her a dream of a god, but something far more practical. He wove a new set of memories into her mind: she was an orphan from a distant town, sent to live with a cousin in this village. He crafted a whole childhood for her, simple and unremarkable.

He teleported her sleeping form to the edge of the village, placing a small pouch of real silver coins in her hand. He then reached out with his mind to the family he had chosen for her—a kind, childless couple—and planted a powerful, loving suggestion: the recognition and immediate acceptance of their long-lost niece.

He watched from afar as she woke, confused for only a moment before her new memories settled. He watched as she was welcomed into the village, her future now secure. He had used her, yes. But he had taken her from certain death and given her a new life. By his own amoral, self-serving calculus, it was a more than equitable exchange.

He sat by his scrying pool, watching the silver coins he had given Elara being used to buy a milking goat. A good investment. She would be fine.

He turned his attention back to his long-term project: tracking the bloodline. In the chaos of the collapse, it had become difficult. Families were scattered, names changed, records non-existent. But his magic was not reliant on records. He tracked the unique resonance of the blood, the faint echo of a destiny that was still centuries away from fruition.

He found them. The descendants of the line that would one day produce Tatia, and therefore Amara. They had been merchants in a prosperous coastal town that was now a ruin. He found them now living as farmers in a forgotten corner of Arcadia, their lineage and history lost to them. They were just people, tough and resilient, trying to survive in a broken world. Their trajectory was correct. They were falling into the obscurity required by history. He was satisfied.

His gaze drifted back to the wider world. Egypt was fighting for its life against the invaders, its great empire bleeding wealth and power. The Hittites were gone, their name a whisper on the wind. Greece was dark. Literacy, art, architecture—all collapsing. The intricate web of Bronze Age civilization was gone, and something new, cruder, and more iron-willed would eventually rise from its ashes.

Lykaon stood up and walked to his library. The chaos outside felt distant, almost unreal. The screams of the dying were silenced by his wards of peace. The fires of history were just flickering images on water.

He picked up a fresh sheet of gold, the metal cool and heavy in his hand. He dipped a stylus into a pot of enchanted ink and began to write, his hand steady, his prose precise. He chronicled his observations on the systemic nature of societal collapse, the failure of interdependent networks, the role of climate change versus human conflict. He wrote as a scholar, for an audience of one.

The world could burn. History could bleed. He was the unchanging shore, the eternal observer. His paradise was safe, his life of the mind and of the flesh undisturbed. He had endless time, endless luxury, and a grand, violent story to watch. He had everything he had ever wanted.