It wasn’t that I didn’t want to live forever. I had seen the life leave enough men’s eyes to be certain I would do anything to escape that final moment, the things they seemed to see in it, to understand.

Yet, sitting around that table with the king and all of those graced by his blessing, staring into the goblet that was meant to cure me of death’s shadow forever, I hesitated. Why? Staring into the milk-thick crimson of immortality, why did my throat seem to sew itself shut? Why did the goblet seem suddenly too heavy to lift from the table, while the comrades all around me raised theirs and drank their fill?

I’m not a wiser man than any of them were. I won’t flatter myself by saying that I knew somehow. But before the last of them had drunk the last drop, the first was clutching at his throat, trying to stop a very different sort of crimson from spilling back out of his gaping mouth. The table was flooding with it, the fine carvings filling and flowing, and the king was watching, calm and proud as if presiding over any ordinary feast.

I’m not wise. Any of those other men would have understood, if they hadn’t been clawing at their own throats and bellies, when the first drops of that vomited red tide reached the king. When he held his goblet just below the rim of the table to collect what flowed to it, the lives of those most loyal to him, a vintage as rich and powerful as only sacrifice could be.

Perhaps only sacrifice can grant an escape from death, only to those with enough lives to stuff its jaws in their place. He’s going to kill me before I can tell anyone else. I know he is. It’s there in the way he looks at me, the red on his lips and in his eyes. And I may not be wise, but if I know one thing even a king doesn’t, it’s that I would rather die than be whatever sort of immortal creature he’s become.