M Was Twenty-Three June 1381

What would you do with forever?

Marcel de Bois, known as M, returns from the Battle of Crécy wounded but victorious, eager to claim his beloved Regine and begin their life together. Riding home with her through a moonlit forest, they encounter something impossible-a bright light that shouldn't exist, a moment that defies explanation, an event that will trap them in a secret more dangerous than any medieval battlefield.

They awake transformed. M's wound is healed. They have been given greatly extended lives. Both are impossibly strong, and resistant to most diseases. They will soon realize that they must watch and endure everyone they love eventually die, while they remain young, almost frozen in time.

M and Regine must adapt to live in a medieval world where aging isn't a freedom-it's heresy waiting to be named. In an age where Church doctrine explains everything from crop failure to stillbirths, when the devil's mark can be anything unusual, when village gossip becomes evidence at trial. Their unchanging faces would be proof of witchcraft, demonic pact, or something worse that the medieval mind has no word for. The Church burns what it can't explain.

They have to hide their secret from everyone they can. For their own children, they proclaim ignorance, unwilling to tell them the whole truth. But they know time is still ticking. They are not immortal, but their lifespans will be measured in centuries, and not decades. They crave for the chance to live a life as close as possible to normal. M finds and acquires an isolated piece of land in the rugged mountains of Wales, where they create their own life, build a home, and raise their two sons.

This is where most immortality stories lie to you. They promise power, wisdom, endless second chances-the fantasy that time is the only resource that matters. But M Was Twenty, August 1346 forces the question nobody wants to answer: What if the gift of almost forever is actually an unbearable burden?