Accidentally Immortal

I should probably explain the situation surrounding my semi-immortality. It’s the result of some very old magic that seemed like a good idea at the time. As so many things do.
It was back when I was actively doing the hero gig. The one that started it all, with the prophecy and everything. You’ve probably heard some version of that fiasco, so I won’t bother to rehash it here, but this part didn’t make it into the bards’ songs. Probably because Ashin and I are the only ones who know about it.
And it’s pretty embarrassing so hopefully no one reads this until after we’re dead.
Anyway, we were down in some old Garamoran ruin by the coast. The sort of place even the dwarves won’t go anymore because it’s likely to fall into the sea any minute.
So of course I walked in there happy as you please, high on recent victories, thinking I could just pluck an ancient mage’s grimoire off the shelf and waltz out with it. As though no one had thought of that before.
The first sign that things were not going to be that easy should have been the bizarre puzzle door blocking off the lower levels of the ruin.
A puzzle door might as well be an enormous sign reading “everything past here is trapped or cursed.” The reason I ignored such an obvious warning is partly because I was deeply stupid, and partly because Ashin was tremendously fascinated by the contraption and expressing it as only a wizard can: by giving me an impromptu lecture. To this day that’s a habit that renders me completely brain dead. So whatever words of caution he may or may not have voiced that day went in one ear and out the other. And when the door opened into the very laboratory we had crawled through this ruin to find, with the very grimoire we needed sitting pretty on a pedestal in the center of the room, I just strolled on up and took it.
And that’s the last thing I remember before waking up on the floor with a frantic Ashin leaning over me.
I think I slurred something eloquent like “Whu?”
“You daft, useless excuse for a hero,” Ashin replied, probably. “How could you do something so reckless and stupid?”
“Ow,” I said. My entire body was pins and needles. Halfway between pain and numb, but smack in the middle of uncomfortable. “What happened?”
“As soon as you touched that book you collapsed,” Ashin replied unhelpfully. That part I had figured out on my own. “If you’d listened to a word I was saying,” he began again, but then cut himself off. As my awareness of things other than the unpleasant tingling of my body began to return to me, I realized that Ashin’s eyes were damp and his voice was tight. “But that doesn’t matter now. I have to get you stabilized.”
“Stabilized?” More and more was returning to my awareness with each passing second as I returned to the land of the conscious. Ashin’s distress was the first, and both his hands pressed firmly to my chest over my heart. The strange tingling was not going away but it seemed lesser there, where Ashin was touching me. If I looked past Ashin I saw the crumbling stone ceiling of the ruin, the dust floating in the air illuminated by dim torchlight.
“Yes, now shut up and let me concentrate.”
Such inelegant language was out of character for him back then. He’d still been clinging to the expectations that history and prophecies heave onto people. I suppose I was too, and maybe that’s why I was as reckless as I was. But that’s not the point of this story.
Ashin tore his gaze away from my face and I followed his eyes to see that stupid grimoire lying open on the floor beside us. I couldn’t exactly read the pages from my vantage on the floor, but I know now I wouldn’t have been able to anyway because the whole thing’s written in ancient Garamoran. And I can’t read ancient Garamoran. That’s what Ashin was for, obviously, and he was doing a fantastic job of it if I do say so myself.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Shut up,” Ashin said again. His eyes flitted over the pages of the book, his mouth moving in silent syllables. His hands pressed down harder on my chest, enough to knock the wind out of me.
And that’s when I realized I wasn’t breathing. And so I began to panic. I tried to move my arms despite their tingling, but found I could not. I couldn’t move my legs either, or anything below my neck, for that matter. “Ashin, what’s going on?” I asked frantically, “I can’t move.”
“That’s because you’re dead,” Ashin snapped. “Now shut up and let me save your life!” But the shock of that first declaration was enough to silence any further outbursts from me.
I admit that due to my panicked state I don’t have a clear memory of the events that followed. I know there was a lot of muttering in tongues from Ashin. In fact it was mostly muttering in tongues, with the occasional cursing.
I’m sure there are people reading this who would love to know the details of exactly what happened and what spell he used and all the rot that wizards go mad about. I don’t know any of that. And even though Ashin attempted to explain it to me when we finally got free of that cursed place, I still don’t really understand what happened.
I mentioned already how his lectures go in one ear and out the other.
My understanding of what happened after I touched the book is as follows:

1. The moment I touched the cover I died. The damned thing had some curse on it that sucked the life right out of me almost instantly.
2. Ashin - glorious, wise, resourceful Ashin - got my heart running again with some quick thinking and a some technical mumbo-jumbo about healing spells. I’m assured it was very impressive.
3. Unfortunately, the book just kept on sucking the life out of me every time Ashin got a little bit of it back. If you’ve ever heard someone describe a book as soul-rending, that’s what this book was. But not metaphorically.
4. Desperate to save my pathetic mortal life, Ashin had the bright idea to look through the book himself for a cure to the soul sucking curse. Lucky for me, he found one!
5. Unlucky for me, he didn’t fully understand how it worked, and that’s why I woke up still paralyzed and half-dead. I’m pretty sure when bringing someone back to life you should probably do the consciousness thing last.

The important thing, though, is that I am not dead.
Technically speaking.
I might not have what you would consider an entire soul. And what’s left might be latched onto Ashin’s like some sort of mystical tumor.
But I am very much not dead, and that certainly beats the alternative.
How does this connect to my being nominally immortal, you ask? Well, one of the beneficial side effects of being a soul tumor is that I cannot be killed. At least not by physical means.
You see, my soul is a little fragile waif of a thing that would blow away in a light breeze, and Ashin’s is a strong rock that it’s been chained to. So long as those chains aren’t broken and the rock doesn’t disappear, I won’t be sucked back into the void.
So obviously I’ve got to stick by Ashin for the rest of our lives to make sure nothing happens to him. Because if it did I’d drop dead on the spot.
And I’d prefer at least a little bit of warning next time.