Julian learned he could not die long before he understood that he should be afraid of it.
At first, it was easy to ignore.
A fever that should have ended him instead broke overnight. A fall that should have shattered bone left him bruised, sore, and walking again within days. Time passed, and his body followed it—just slowly enough that no one questioned it until the question was already uncomfortable.
Doctors called him fortunate.
Friends called him resilient.
Julian said nothing.
He stopped celebrating birthdays in his mid-twenties. When people asked why, he laughed and said they were meaningless after a while. That was the first habit he formed to protect himself: treating the impossible as mundane.
It worked. For a time.
The moment that proved it was never meant to be dramatic.
There was no sacrifice, no choice weighted with meaning. Just speed, metal, and a mistake that arrived faster than thought. Pain erased everything else. His body failed in ways the mind refused to catalog. Sound collapsed. Light narrowed.
And then—
He was standing.
Whole. Breathing. Unbroken.
The world had not moved on. Voices continued mid-sentence. Wind brushed past him as if nothing had happened. Whatever should have followed death simply… hadn't.
Julian waited for the pain to return.
It didn't.
That was when fear finally reached him.
He tested it the way a frightened person tests reality: carefully, when no one was watching.
A blade across the palm. Blood, real and warm. Pain sharp enough to ground him. He waited. The wound closed—not instantly, not impossibly—but cleanly, naturally, as if his body were correcting a mistake.
He repeated the test days later. Different injury. Same result.
Time continued to pass. His reflection changed—but barely.
Immortality did not announce itself. It hid.
That disturbed him more than any miracle would have.
The second discovery came not from curiosity, but from regret.
He had made a mistake. A small one. The kind people replay endlessly in their heads, wishing for a different outcome. Julian focused on that wish—not as a fantasy, but as a need.
The world folded.
There was no sensation of movement, no resistance, no warning. One moment existed—then another replaced it, perfectly aligned, impossibly familiar.
He had stepped backward.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
Julian staggered, heart racing, lungs burning as if he had run for miles. The moment he had wanted gone was in front of him again, intact and unaware.
Nothing protested.
Nothing broke.
Reality accepted the change as though it had always been waiting.
That frightened him more than death ever could have.
He tested that too.
Every attempt confirmed the same truth:
Time did not resist him.
It branched.
No paradoxes. No corrections. Each change split reality cleanly, endlessly, like a tree that welcomed the cut. The past was not overwritten—it was abandoned.
Somewhere, every version of the world still existed.
Including the ones where he failed.
Including the ones where he died and stood back up.
Julian stopped testing after that.
Not because he was satisfied.
Because he understood the implication.
If time could fracture infinitely, then so could responsibility. Every choice created survivors—and victims—who would never know why their world had turned out the way it did.
He was not a god.
He was not chosen.
He was a variable the universe had failed to account for.
And variables, left unchecked, destroyed systems.
He made no vows that day.
He wrote no rules.
But one thought settled deep enough to stay:
If I move without care, the world will pay for it.
That was before history noticed him.
Before swords, before emperors, before borrowed names and stolen thrones.
Before Julian learned that watching was not the same as understanding.
Before time learned to remember him