Immortality

Immortality is a supernatural state that offers survival beyond ordinary mortal limits, but the novel presents it as no simple blessing. It can let a fighter recover and continue through a prolonged confrontation; it can also turn love into an anticipation of loss. For Dorian, the decisive change comes when time reversal makes relinquishing immortality possible: he chooses a finite life rather than face a future in which he outlives Esme.

Identity and Meaning

Immortality is described through its double value. It has allowed Dorian to live long enough to meet his soulmate, a gift he would not dismiss. Yet that same longevity carries a particular cost: Esme will not live indefinitely, and he expects that he may one day be left alone. The state therefore does not erase vulnerability so much as relocate it. Dorian may be beyond death, but the person he loves is not.

That tension shapes his thoughts about a shared future. Even in the imagined best case, in which the coming war never happens and everything is put right, Esme would eventually die while Dorian remained. He considers the life she deserves in concrete, ordinary terms: work she chooses, perhaps in psychology, the field she studied; marriage, growing old, and children if she wants them. He does not want her to surrender those possibilities for his sake. His willingness to give her that future makes immortality feel less like private power than an unequal condition imposed on their relationship.

The wish to make Esme’s life her own also sharpens the state’s contradiction. Dorian wants to share a life with her, yet recognizes that his continued existence could make that shared life finite for her and interminable for him. Immortality is thus both the reason he could meet his soulmate and the reason he fears what their future together must eventually contain.

Survival in Conflict

The state has practical force in battle. In one prolonged fight, the immortal combatant cannot die and, although he grows weary, his energy returns quickly. His opponent, Dorian, is sustained instead by sunlight, a resource that could last for days or be given back to the earth. The contrast distinguishes enduring immortality from a powerful but conditional reserve: the duel can continue because the combatants draw on different kinds of staying power.

Immortality does not make the fight effortless or remove the need to act. The narrator describes both fighters taking hits and recognizes that the confrontation could continue for days; he searches for something that might help. Dorian is notably more focused and lethal than in their previous encounter, when he nearly died. He moves faster and anticipates attacks, whether through observation or by seeing the future. The immortal fighter’s capacity to endure therefore does not settle the conflict. It changes its likely duration, while skill, foresight, and the opponent’s sunlight remain consequential.

This scene gives the state a value beyond abstract invulnerability. It can keep someone present in a struggle that would otherwise end in death, but prolonged survival is not the same as advantage without limit. Weariness still occurs, and the other combatant’s energy has its own source and timescale. Immortality sustains the possibility of continuing; it does not by itself determine the outcome.

Time Reversal and Its Price

A later proposal makes immortality part of a larger decision about time. Phillip explains that Asher appears inconsistently in future visions, but that a conversation with him about his people and magic has suggested a difficult possibility: with Asher’s magic and the blood of Dorian and Draco, time might be turned back to before the war and the events that set it in motion. Phillip distinguishes the two men from the others involved: the gods are inside them, he says, rather than merely lending them powers.

The proposal has serious costs. Draco would become mortal, and the people brought back might not remember the intervening months; some might remember, while others might not. For Draco, the loss of immortality is inseparable from the possibility that Rose could forget their marriage and the life they shared. He agrees to proceed despite that uncertainty, grounding his decision in the belief that love can survive the loss of memory. The choice demonstrates that immortality is not the only value at stake in the reversal: a second chance may restore lives, but it cannot guarantee that those lives will retain their shared past.

Dorian’s Choice and the New Life

After the reversal, Dorian also gives up immortality. He accepts the new path of mortality because he does not want to outlive Esme after having experienced losses he never wants to face again. His first concern is whether she will remember their relationship or see only the man he had been before: the doctor who treated her badly. The decision does not settle what Esme remembers, but it removes the former certainty that Dorian must survive her.

The new circumstances place Dorian in Seahill one year before he left the city in chaos. People without gifts remember nothing, while gifted people have mixed outcomes; there is no duplicate Dorian in this timeline because he and his earlier body have merged. Phillip urges him to continue with the life he had and offers him a place in efforts to make the Hero Society better. The invitation remains open rather than becoming an immediate resolution.

The ending recasts immortality as a condition that can be surrendered, not an unquestioned prize. Dorian’s earlier longing for a future with Esme had exposed its emotional price; after time has been turned back, he chooses not to keep the power that would separate their lifespans. Mortality brings uncertainty about memory and a future still to be built, but it also makes a shared finite life possible. The change is therefore not simply a loss of supernatural protection: it is Dorian’s acceptance that loving Esme means preferring a life bounded by hers to an endless existence without her.