The Price of Immortality: 20 Dark Fantasy Tales of Eternal Life

Book Description

What would you sacrifice to live forever? And what would living forever sacrifice in you? In this sweeping dark fantasy anthology, Adrian Cave — author of The Last Dragons and The Buckingham Palace Hauntings — explores immortality not as a triumph but as a reckoning. Twenty standalone stories. Twenty unforgettable protagonists. One relentless question: what is the true price of eternal life? An archivist discovers records of a daughter she no longer remembers — because something has been taking her memories, piece by piece, for nine hundred years. A physician's century of patient records reveals that the immortality treatment is slowly consuming the very thing that makes a person a person. A gravekeeper hears the dead whispering beneath the oldest stones and traces the sound to a civilization-scale theft conducted against those who died just short of forever. A knight cursed to return from death finds that each resurrection costs him something he cannot name until almost nothing remains. Across kingdoms and centuries, through caving systems and lighthouse towers, from the corridors of immortal empires to the threshold of the afterlife itself, Cave's characters grapple with what the endless extension of life actually demands: the erosion of the soul, the stagnation of institutions, the hoarding of time by the powerful at the expense of the many, and the slow forgetting of what made the living worth continuing. But these are not simply stories of cost. They are stories of choice. Of a prophet who spends four centuries learning the difference between prevention and witness. Of a thief who discovers that destroying a source of immortality is an act of liberation rather than loss. Of the most ancient being in the world, present since before humanity named the morning, who remains not from fear but from love — the specific, stubborn, clear-eyed love of what is there. Dark, precise, and deeply humane, The Price of Immortality is a landmark work of dark fantasy that asks its central question without flinching and answers it, story by story, with honesty and grace. Perfect for readers of Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Jeff VanderMeer.