100 Years Old and What Have You Done Lately?

Frankenstein is dying.

Finally.

His experiments have served him well.

He's lived to be 100 years old.

Today.

A full century.

But still, he's failed.

Still he ages. Still he dies a little bit each and every day.

Each minute.

Each... second.

He's tried everything.

A century of searching for the secret.

Cheating death.

No. Beating Death.

Beating her at her own game.

He hasn't tried switching bodies in a while.

Somehow, he knows even that won't help.

Just another rotting corpse, falling apart moment by moment.

Each incarnation, each implantation. Each iteration. Incorporation.

Rotting away to nothing. Emptiness. Entropy. Deadly decay.

And only one person would be qualified to perform such a procedure.

He, himself. Victor Frankenstein.

And of course the copy he'd made of himself.

Made for just such a purpose.

Whatever the creature was, he'd trained it to become a world-class surgeon.

Just like himself. It had understood intuitively. It had been like teaching himself.

Almost like recovering a lost skill, like riding a bicycle again after twenty years.

Like learning to walk after a stroke.

As if it already knew how, and only had to be reminded.

But the creature - the Promethean - was lost to him now.

It had gone off into the Far North, in search of Hyperborea.

It had sought the refuge of the Hollow Lands, the hidden world inside our own.

Even if he could find the creature, it would never work with him again.

It would never work for him.

It would curse him for disturbing its solitude, its solace, its slumber-time in the underworld.

So now he had a new protege, and she was a very promising student.

But she just wasn't he - Victor - himself, like the other one had been.

She was so like him.

And so... unlike him, too.

More like a daughter than a twin, more like a sister than a double.

Someday, soon, she'd help him start anew. Afresh. Again.

Revived.

Arisen.

Until that day, he had his new creatures. His fabulous beasts. His reborn wonders.

Someday soon they'd all see what a genius he was. What a prodigy he'd always been.

He was a hundred years old today.

Maybe he was a slow bloomer.

But he would have his day.

And soon. Oh, Elizabeth, so very, very soon.