Apologies for not posting until today (day 9), but we had guests over yesterday and then I just forgot… I didn’t manage the daily target, but seeing as I am ahead… Today I hope to make up the deficit regardless.

In my long life I have only revealed my secret to a handful of people, and generally this stage of the proceedings comes with a great deal of disbelief followed by a progression of fear, then anger and then finally a mixture of wonder and sadness, but I had never been in this position before, of having to clarify what someone had actually witnessed. If it sounds a little far fetched that I had never had to take someone aside and explain after they saw something I would rather they had not, then I would have to agree with you, but a mixture of extreme caution, an amount of cunning and a lot of luck had brought me this far nonetheless. If you are wondering why I trusted Andrea with my secret so easily, so soon after meeting her, well at the time I did not believe that I had any other choice. Based on what she had seen I did not believe I was going to be able to explain things away, and anyway she was family. Fran had known my truth, why not share it with her sister?
“I had a normal childhood and early life, normal at least for an affluent child of Roman citizens. I learned to read and write, to perform what we now call mathematics, I learned about the law, the political structures of the Republic and the Empire, our history and beyond all of that I learned to be a soldier. At the age of seventeen I became what we would now see as a junior officer in the Roman army, and I started to live the life of a career soldier. I was a reasonable leader and tactician and I became better, learning in the service of great men. Eventually, by the time I was nearly forty years old and with many campaigns behind me I had risen to the level of being a general, a leader of several legions of Roman soldiers. I was a powerful man and while that definitely had its positives, it also brought with it the politics and the enemies that all people who wield power must deal with. It was on the eve of my fortieth birthday that the assassin broke into my family villa and slew my two sisters, their husbands and all of their children and attempted to kill me. He was a skilled warrior and he caught me unprepared, unprotected and armed only with a wooden club that I had taken from a Germanic tribesman, that was mounted on the wall over my bed. I hurt him, it is fair to say, before he plunged the gladius he brought with him into my stomach. I do not know which of us was the more surprised when I simply grabbed his hand, the one on the hilt, and pulled him closer, pushing the sword deeper into my gut and out through my back, so that I could head butt him. His eyes filled with tears, his nose streamed with blood, and as he reflexively stumbled backwards, releasing the sword that was now lodged firmly in my body, I caved in his skull with the club and then fell to my knees. I was sure that my life was at an end, and that the end would come in the form of hours of pain and suffering as with most grave gut wounds before the invention of surgery and antibiotics. I supposed that if I could bring myself to pull out the blade my wound would bleed freely and at least I would be released from that mortal coil as painlessly as possible. I gritted my teeth, grasped the blade just in front of the hilt with both hands and pulled. If you have not been stabbed it is hard to describe the feeling, the strange mixture of sliding and dragging as the blade is pulled back out through the wound, but hard as it may be to describe it is neither pleasant nor easy to forget, and even now my memory of that moment sends a chill through me. I dropped the gladius on the floor and sank down next to it, welcoming death as an inescapable final journey. You may imagine that I was very surprised to be awoken by one of my retainers at around dawn. He had risen early, as was his habit, and begun to make preparations for breakfast, putting the kitchen slaves to work and rousing the cook from his slumber. He was walking across the portico when he discovered the body of my elder sister Aurelia. Her body was posed in a rather sordid manner, a spear protruding from her chest, facing the main doors of the villa. Presumably the assassin, whose identity I never learned, had been given specific instructions on how to engineer as much shock as possible with his handiwork. After laying her body down and covering her with his own toga my, I suppose the current term would be butler, ran to my chamber to check on me and found me asleep next to the body of our assailant, a strange man that he had never seen before. As I said, I was surprised to be alive, even more surprised to find that there was no evidence of my being hurt, my wound having completely healed, and on reflection I was lucky that he was shaken enough to believe that I had caught myself with the kosh, after dealing with the assassin, knocking myself out.”
Andrea laughed quietly at this and I was relieved that despite the seriousness of what I was telling her she was able to see the funny side of anything at all.
“Anyway, from that day I have not aged one single day nor have I been laid low even for a moment by any illness, and despite suffering many potentially fatal hurts over the years I have always recovered and healed in the way that you saw the night before last. Clearly I have had to learn how to hide my condition from others, if only to be able to do anything remotely normal with this immense tract of time I have available to me.”
“You know Caine, that’s an amazing story, but I can see why you wouldn’t want everyone to know, as they would be on you all the time to reveal how you became like this. I mean it’s the ultimate dream of humanity, right? Death is the great leveller, it comes to us all. Just imagine what people would pay for your blood.”
I threw her a look;
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to be bleeding you while you sleep or anything, I was just thinking out loud. I mean there is a part of me that has to believe you because I’ve seen you not die when you should have done, but I’ll be honest I am still reeling.”