A reference for my phoenix character, Athkore.

Some call him a magician, a dimension-walker, a ghost, but his rightful name across his two and a half millenniums of life has been Athkore.

A phoenix by blood, he is the immortal, gifted with new life at the chime of his darkest hour, born again into this world to witness it through fresh eyes for the next century to pass. He has existed in cosmos similar to the one both you and I know, running parallel and out of reach, where we are not ourselves as we know ourselves to be here and now, but we exist all the same.

Early on in Athkore's life, the concept of multiple realities eluded him, aware only of the fact that each time he passed on and achieved rebirth, he was born into a new existence in a realm much like the last he remembered, filled with the same faces, sounds, sights—and yet, no one knew him, and the people he was sure he knew were imposters wearing the same face. It took centuries of understanding and death to realize that these realities were similar but not exact mirrors to one another and behind at least one door, he could find a land where he did not put butter on his toast that morning, when he was sure he most certainly did!

His discovery and ability to manipulate and guide himself amongst the many existences he and others had created through means of choice led Athkore on to become a scholar of parallel universes, dedicating his long-lived being to studying the full extent of realities beyond his own. His work was dismissed by some as lunacy, accepted by others as genius, and gave Athkore a firm place to stand in this lifetime as a professor of renown in his field. He had many lives following this one to hone his research and become the leading authority in areas currently untouched by his sharp mind.

However, living as an immortal was a horrid thing. While realms existed in which he could see those people he once knew in memory, they were never quite the same as in the reality in which he met and grew to love them, warped by the complexity of choice. As such, Athkore found himself outliving all his dear ones, and quickly replaced their existence with more and more work, pushing out others to avoid the pain of constant loss. Whoever kidded themselves that living forever was a gift had never met one with an eternity to live and lose.

Athkore is a third of the way through his newest life, still striving toward his goal of understanding the world and its many iterations and forever fearful of losing more than a two-thousand year old man could already have lost.

https://www.f-list.net/c/athkore/