Starting another multichapter is about the last thing I should be doing, but when has that ever stopped me?

Romane Awareness Day 3 - You stop aging at a certain age, until you meet your soulmate and grow old together. TonyPepperRhodey

Word Count: 990

Prehistory

Tony has always liked to look forward, to imagine what tomorrow will bring. It's a nice way to stay optimistic in the whirlwind that is his life.

(Only no. Whirlwinds come fast and are over soon, it's just the consequences that last. His life, however, does nothing but continue on.)

He thinks it stems from the tales of his parents. His father had lived for years and years before he managed to meet his mother. While the man himself had become extremely bitter, Tony himself always liked to think that this gives him the chance to make sure his soulmate will have an easier life than he had.

His life certainly could have been worse, but travelling with the tribe to follow their prey and gather what they could is exhausting. It's not unusual for someone to die before they even get a chance to meet their soulmate.

Tony is not one of them. He's smart and resourceful, and the magical blessings for hunts have always been successful for him. Even if he sometimes comes worryingly close to death, he always survives.

"The spirits must like you," his mother often tells him when he comes to exchange some meat for some nuts, leaves, fruit, and berries. He also likes to watch her work on the hides they use for clothing while he fixes his spear. One can never learn enough, as far as he is concerned.

He shrugs noncommitandly. She is more well versed with the spirits than he is; she must know what she is talking about.

His mother dies way too soon, quickly followed by his father, and an ever increasing number of his mother's other children.

Some of them left and never returned. Maybe they found another tribe or maybe they died, Tony wouldn't know it either way.

Either way, Tony gets closer and closer to becoming an Elder, which isn't something he wants. He isn't the type to sits down and make responsible decisions, he wants to go out and do something.

Tony himself had spent nights with a few women himself over the time he has lived and once he's fairly sure he has outlived most of the earlier ones, he leaves the tribe to go and see if he can find his soulmate. Travelling alone is both easier and harder, since on the one hand, he doesn't have to take as many things with him, but on the other hand he has no one to watch his back.

He does not find his soulmate, but what he does find after he has travelled a considerable distance is people who have buried something in the ground and gotten food out of it some time later. They are also keeping some animals nearby to be used for food at a later day, watched only by a man or two instead of hunted by twenty.

It works amazingly well, this 'farming' thing they're doing, so Tony makes sure to learn as much about it as he can before he moves on, just in case it ever becomes useful.

He discovers more and more people doing that as he moves on and begins to wonder why his tribe had not. Has enough time passed that they are doing it now? Is the land they had travelled not as good for that?

Another thing he finds people using is something called copper instead of stone on their weapons and gold and silver for their jewelry. He gives them some of the meat from his last hunt as well as some of the skins he had made into clothing and some of the grains he had gotten from a similar trade with the some of the farmers in exchange for a bow, an arrow, and a quiver. He's never been one of the archers of the tribe but he figures it's never too late to learn. Otherwise he'd be stuck hunting and gathering forever and he can only barely recognize some of the plants now and he figures that it will only get worse as time goes on.

Tony has not exactly counted the time he has lived, but he knows that it has been many many moons by now. The full moon must have passed the sky multiple thousands of times since his birth, even if it can't have been more than six thousand. He figures that he deserves his soulmate showing up in the next few dozen seasons, even if he is pretty sure it will not actually happen. Most tales he heard — not only from his tribe but also from his travels — have the oldest people meeting their soulmates at around a thousand seasons — if one is going with the four he grew up experiencing. He's over that age already, or at least pretty close to it.

To ease the pain of travelling, he gets himself a companion. A dog, already much tamer than the ones he had grown up with and seen around his tribe and that despite the fact the little one had just been born. Those ones had still been more wolfish than the hound a nomadic shepherd sells him now. The dog comes up to his waist and he is a good partner for hunting, even if he had been protecting all his life so far.

Tony had been reluctant to get a dog — because he did not want to go through the pain of losing more than he would have to which he thinks is quite understandable, personally — but tales everywhere agreed that dogs would live with you until you found your soulmate, if the two of you are bonded close enough.

Tony figures it's worth trying once. Either it works or he will be rid of the constant question of 'what if' that has been plaguing him for a while.

(It works, to the relief of everyone involved. Tony had grown quite attached to little Jarvis.)