Chapter Text
His name was Rhodas, and he was a child of light, though he did not yet know it himself. While other children were born with a cry that demanded attention, Rhodas entered the world in silence, his eyes wide open as if immediately trying to drink in the golden twilight of his mother’s hut.
He was born in a small village nestled at the very foot of sacred Mount Parnassus. Here, the cliffs seemed like the graying bones of the earth itself, and the sprawling olive groves like its quiet, silvery breath. The air was so thick with the scent of wild thyme, lavender, and rosemary that one could drink it like young wine, leaving the head spinning slightly. The nights were special: the sky over Parnassus leaned so low that it seemed to Rhodas—if he only climbed the old, time-twisted oak behind the house—he could gather handfuls of stars like ripe wheat.
Rhodas was an Omega, a rare, almost mythical gift for his poor family. His nature manifested not in weakness, but in the singular weight of his presence. When he entered a room, even the most heated argument died out like a candle in the wind. His skin bore the hue of ripe, sun-warmed olives, and his hair, a magnificent mane the color of chestnut gold, curled in tight rings that shimmered under Apollo’s rays. Rhodas’s features were too refined for a peasant: high cheekbones, a straight nose, and large brown eyes in which the entire golden depth of the Aegean Sea splashed at high noon.
While the other boys of his village competed in races with competitive shouts, kicking up dust and learning to hold heavy wooden spears until their palms were calloused, Rhodas preferred to vanish into the silence of the terraced gardens. His world was woven not of battles, but of subtle sensations that others simply did not notice.
"Rhodas! Are your head in the clouds again?" called his mother, Elpis, wiping her hands, red from labor, on an old linen apron. "The baskets won't weave themselves, son. Your father returned from the market irritated, and the honey must be gathered before the sun sets behind the peak."
Rhodas, who was squatting by an old beehive made of a hollow log, didn't even flinch. Bees crawled over his bare arms, but they did not sting. He pressed a finger to his lips and whispered:
"Shh, Mother. Just listen."
Elpis stopped, sighing heavily. She stepped closer, tucking a stray lock of gray hair under her headscarf.
"What am I supposed to hear? The bees? They hum as they always do, Rhodas. Work doesn't wait for music."
"No," he smiled with his enigmatic smile that barely touched the corners of his soft lips. "The olive leaves... they are whispering about rain. Do you smell that metallic tang in the air? It will come from the Gulf of Corinth, bringing the scent of salt and damp sheep's wool. The bees are nervous; they feel its heaviness in their wings. We need to cover the straw, Mother."
Elpis looked at the perfectly clear, piercingly blue sky, and then at her son. She knew this trait of his, which sometimes made her uneasy. People in the village whispered that the boy was "touched by the gods." Some considered it a blessing, others a dangerous eccentricity, but everyone without exception sought his company when their hearts were heavy. Rhodas knew how to listen to the world as if it were a living being with its own grievances and joys. He understood the mood of the sharp wind descending from the mountain peaks and knew when the earth was "tired" of the plow and needed rest.
Once, while Rhodas was gathering wild honey on a steep slope smelling of scorched stone, Lycaon, one of the local Alphas, approached him. He was a sturdy youth with broad shoulders and a heavy gaze, whose physical strength had long since outpaced his ability to think.
"Hey, Rhodas," he tossed mockingly, intentionally kicking the boy’s woven basket with his heavy sandal, causing several honeycombs to fall into the dust. "Why aren't you at the square? The old teacher says today we're learning shield tactics. You don't want to remain a weakling who only knows how to smell flowers and talk to bees, do you?"
Rhodas rose slowly, brushing the sweet, sticky juice from his hands. He raised his calm eyes to Lycaon. In that gaze, there was neither resentment nor fear, only a strange, almost divine patience usually found in elders.
"The world has enough warriors, Lycaon," he replied softly but firmly. His voice sounded like a warm wind through the pines. "But someone must remember how the cricket's song sounds before twilight. If everyone holds spears, who will teach the wind to dance in your hair? Who will remind you what exactly you are fighting for?"
Lycaon froze, his mouth open to snap back something biting, but the words caught in his throat. His Alpha instincts, which usually demanded the immediate submission of the weak, somehow grew quiet beside this Omega. Instead, an inexplicable, unsettling awe washed over him. He snorted gloomily to hide his embarrassment and walked away, feeling somehow much smaller than he actually was.
Rhodas's life was simple and yet incredibly rich in internal events. He wove baskets with such skill that the willow vines in his hands seemed like living tissue; they were strong, yet light as a feather. While working, he often sang; songs arose in his head on their own, without any effort. He matched the melody to the rhythm of the distant surf or the barely audible pulse of the earth.
However, despite all the surrounding beauty, a quiet, aching emptiness lived inside Rhodas. When he stepped onto the threshold in the evenings and looked at the stars, it seemed to him that he was waiting for someone who would come from that very deep darkness between the constellations. Someone whose strength would not demand submission, but whose silence would be deeper than any words.
He felt like a small acolyte in a vast, vibrant temple of nature. Rhodas knew every rough stone on Parnassus, every hidden spring of icy water, but he also knew that his fate would not be limited to gathering olives and weaving vines. He waited for "his" Alpha not just as an Omega seeking protection, but as a soul seeking one who could endure its light.
In the meantime, he simply lived. He gathered translucent honey, listened to the old trees complain about a dry autumn, and smiled at his own thoughts, remaining simultaneously the happiest and loneliest being in all of Hellas.
Hob Gadling tore himself from the grip of sleep as violently as if he’d been shoved out of a plane into a viscous void. He bolted up in bed, gasping for air that felt too thick, stagnant, and yet catastrophically empty. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird blindly beating against the walls of a cage, searching for an exit that didn't exist.
For a few seconds, the world around him split in two, like a badly overlaid film reel. Beneath the fingers convulsively clutching the fabric, he felt not the cheap cotton duvet of his London flat, but the scorched, generous earth of Hellas, still yielding the day's warmth to the night sky like a living thing. In his nostrils lingered a distinct, almost unbearably real scent: the salty surf of the Ionian Sea mixed with the tart aroma of fresh mint and wild thyme growing between white stones.
But the reality of the 1990s was ruthless and tasteless. It struck his face with a cold draft from a poorly closed window, bringing with it the smell of old dust, wet asphalt, and the eternal, sticky London rain.
"Damn it..." Hob rasped. His voice trembled treacherously, foreign and too deep for the echo still ringing in his ears.
He climbed out of bed heavily, feeling his stiff muscles protest every movement. He walked to the bathroom mirror without turning on the light; the dim, deathly glint of streetlamps was enough. From the murky glass, the man he had known for six centuries looked back: sturdy, with a rough three-day stubble, eyes that had seen too many deaths, births, and technological revolutions. In this period of his life, he played the role of the Alpha—strong, tireless, the survivor who makes money, fights in pubs, and builds empires on the bones of the past.
But now, looking into his own pupils, he saw someone else. He saw Rhodas.
There, in the depths of memory, he wasn't this London wolf. He was an Omega. Soft-skinned, delicate, almost transparent in his emotionality, sensitive to the slightest shift in the wind’s mood or the intonation of a stranger's voice. And this feeling—a deep, almost primal need for protection, for belonging, for someone stronger than this entire world—was blooming in his chest now like a painful, poisonous flower.
"It’s just despair, Hob," he whispered to his reflection, touching his fingers to the cold glass. "Ordinary, banal despair of a jilted lover. Though you aren't even a lover. You’re just... a blank space."
He looked down at the cold floor, feeling every crack in the old tile. Every movement sent a chill up his spine.
"He didn't come," he stated aloud, and the words fell to the floor like heavy stones. "Your big, gloomy Alpha simply crossed you off his schedule. Maybe he got bored? Five hundred years of watching you buy new hats and complain about taxes? And you, like a faithful dog, waited in that pub until closing time. The 'White Horse' spat you out onto the street along with the cigarette butts and the smell of stale booze, and now your mind is making up crazy tales about antiquity to fill this black hole inside."
Hob remembered the face of the bartender, a young lad who looked at him with a mixture of pity and annoyance when Hob ordered a double whiskey for the fifth time, his eyes never leaving the door.
"Waiting for someone, sir?" the boy had asked.
"A friend," Hob replied then, feeling the word taste bitter on his tongue. "We meet here every hundred years."
The bartender only gave a crooked smile: "Well, hope he's not stuck in traffic."
But the dreams wouldn't let go. They weren't like the hazy visions that melted with the first cup of coffee. They were too... detailed. Too corporeal.
Hob closed his eyes and felt again the taste of a ripe fig, that sweet, slightly tart juice on his tongue that Rhodas had tasted by a crystal stream. He remembered the tickle of the coarse but incredibly light linen chiton on his hips. He remembered exactly how to address the elders at the market, using a dialect you wouldn't find in any modern Oxford textbook, a complex blend of archaic Attic and the local Parnassian patois.
"I never studied Ancient Greek at this level," he muttered, gripping the edges of the sink so hard his knuckles turned white. "In 1389, I could barely read Latin, and English sounded like dogs barking. Where are these words coming from? These rituals?"
He remembered how to correctly wash his hands before entering a temple—three times, with a specific tilt of the wrists. He remembered the specific knot on his sandals that kept them from slipping on steep, stony paths. This wasn't imagination; these were files retrieved from a hard drive he hadn't known existed for six hundred years.
Hob walked to the window and jerked the curtain aside. London outside the window looked like a cheap set for a bad play about the end of the world. Grey, unwelcoming, squeezed in the grip of concrete, dirty snow, and flickering neon.
He felt abandoned not just by a friend. It was worse. It felt as if a part of his spine had been taken away. His Stranger's absence at their 1989 meeting acted like a physical wound that wouldn't heal. His inner beast, that hidden, vulnerable part of his soul he so carefully hid behind the mask of a soldier and merchant, was now whimpering, demanding the presence of its mate, its Alpha.
"He doesn't need you," an inner voice whispered. "You were just an experiment. A curious little pet that learned how not to die."
But the pain was too deep for simple resentment. It felt like the severing of a bond that had existed long before they ever met in a tavern. It was this pain, it seemed, that had torn the veil of oblivion, punching a hole in the wall separating Hob Gadling from Rhodas.
Hob returned to the bed and slowly lay down, pulling his knees to his chest as if trying to protect his solar plexus from the cold of loneliness. He didn't want to sleep in the conventional sense. He feared ordinary dreams about unpaid bills or wars. He wanted to dive back into that golden abyss.
He wanted to be that youth again, the one who didn't know the smell of gunpowder, hadn't seen the plague wipe out entire cities, hadn't known the lethargic loneliness of immortality among mortals. He wanted to see it all: from the first song that echoed in the olive groves to the moment his gaze first met the galaxy-eyes of a being who was not human, but who was his entire world.
The first year after the failed meeting became a time of slow, sticky decay for Hob. The world around him lost its sharpness, turning into a set of dull obligations. He nearly abandoned his real estate investments; letters from lawyers and bank statements lay unopened on the kitchen table for weeks, gathering a layer of London soot. Affairs moved by inertia, but Hob himself was no longer in them. He shut himself in his flat, which now felt not like an immortal’s cozy nest, but like a waiting room at a godforsaken station.
Dreams came every night, inevitable as the tide. In them, he became Rhodas again, a youth with skin so thin it seemed to lack a protective layer. He felt the coarse wool of sheep beneath his palms on the mountain slopes and heard their melancholy bleating echoing off the cliffs.
"So where are you now, you magnificent idiot?" Hob would mutter, lying on an unmade bed and tracing yellowish cracks on the ceiling that resembled the outlines of constellations in the dark. "Sleeping in your palace, or just watching from a corner as I slowly go mad? You know I waited. Sat there for hours like a fool, my throat parched."
In the second year, realization struck: cheap whiskey doesn't erase memories; it only makes them dirty and distorted. Hob would wake with a splitting headache, yet the shimmer of Aegean water remained before his eyes. He changed his tactics then. He joined the British Library, becoming a permanent shadow there in a worn tweed jacket. For hours, he sat over manuscripts smelling of dry death, trying to find even a crumb of information about Rhodas or the being who so closely resembled his Stranger.
One Tuesday, as rain lashed mercilessly against the tall windows of the reading room, a young postgraduate with disheveled hair sat down at his table.
"You’ve been staring at that map of Attica for three hours as if you’re hoping it will speak," the youth said softly, adjusting glasses that kept sliding down his nose. "I’m Julian. I research the fringe cults of Oneiros. And you?"
Hob slowly raised his tired eyes. Deep shadows lay around his pupils.
"I’m looking for proof that I’m not insane, lad. Have you ever heard in your books of a mortal who remembered someone else’s life through dreams? Not just saw them, but lived them?"
Julian laughed nervously, glancing at the stern librarian.
"The ancient Greeks had a word for that: 'enthousiasmos'. It literally means 'to have a god within.' But honestly, in the myths, it usually ended tragically. You either become a prophet, or your mind burns up like a moth in a lamp. Be careful with that, sir."
By 1998, Hob began to feel a strange, almost frightening transformation. The Omega within him, that vulnerable, world-open Rhodas, ceased to be just a memory. He sprouted through Hob Gadling’s rough skin. Hob became quieter; his movements took on a softness uncharacteristic of him before. He began to paint. He bought expensive canvases and cheap gouache, filling his flat with strange images: temple columns bathed in cold moonlight, and a tall silhouette in a black cloak that seemed like a rift in the very fabric of reality.
One of the following years became a year of pilgrimage. Hob sold one of his plots in East London and went to Greece. He stood upon the ruins of Delphi, ignoring the crowds of tourists with cameras. Beneath the modern, sun-baked asphalt, he felt the vibration of the very earth that once held his youthful feet.
In a small port village, he sat for hours in a tavern smelling of fried sardines and old wood. An old fisherman named Yorgos, whose face resembled the cracked bark of an olive tree, slid him a pack of unfiltered cigarettes one evening.
"Are you waiting for someone, Englishman? You’ve been staring at the horizon for three days as if the King's fleet is about to appear."
"Waiting for my friend to stop sulking at me," Hob smiled crookedly, breaking a piece of bread. "A proud sort with principles. He thinks friendship with me is beneath his dignity."
"Then listen to an old man," Yorgos said, placing a heavy palm on Hob’s shoulder, who smiled inwardly. "Don't wait for him. Live as if he is already dead and has become a star in the sky. If he returns, it will be a gift from the gods. But if you only wait, you will miss your own life. You don't want to become a ghost while you're still alive, do you?"
The passing time brought Hob an unexpected, almost healing calm. He returned to London a different man. When he learned that the "White Horse", the pub where centuries of his memories with the Stranger were tied, was to be demolished, he did not despair. Instead, he bought an old premises nearby and fitted out a new pub. He spent most of his time in a corner by the fireplace, surrounded by dictionaries. He translated ancient poetry, trying to convey the very same bittersweetness that Rhodas had felt.