The first name I ever had was Pallas, it is the name my parents gave me when I was born. I was born on the 13th day of September in the year 131 before Christ in a village in the Lykaion mountains. I am 2146 years old and still don't look older than 19.
I guess I should explain: I am as good as immortal, I think. I mean, I am fine now, and I am pretty old. The first part of this story shall be about how I got in touch with immortality. To understand this, you must know the importance of fantastic, divine intervention or just action in that time. It was a totally different time compared to the 21st century. Most people had less and they definitely had smaller expectations towards everything. Everything except for the gods, and we have plenty of those in Hellenism. They steer our world, our every move and breath a present from a higher power. In my early years, this was how important gods were to everyone. Since we lived very close to the suspected lair of the god Pan, as well as sheep being our base of life, the god of shepherds was our most important deity.
As you, dear reader, might know, in the hellenistic times of ancient Greece, the god of the wild (and the shepherds), Pan was thought dead. This was quite a throwback for the bigger temples in the area, since many people came there just to honor the god and bring offerings to an altar in the woods of the mountains of Lykaion. So, the logical consequence was finding the god and bringing him back, thus reinstating the "tourism".
Who better to find a lost, maybe dead god in the deep woods than young boys? According to our priests there, no one. A few months after the story of Pan's death spread throughout the greek empire, a group of 7 boys around the ages of 13-15 were sent into the woods to find Pan. They let us take some food, a knife and something small of our own. I was one of them.
At that age, we didn't immediately care as much about our task as we were supposed to, we just played around in the woods. What teenage boy listens to old men talking about some weird goat-dude in the woods if he can play spartans vs. persians? We were like kids on a field trip nowadays. Untamable.
Since they let us take some food, a knife and something small of our own, I had taken stuff I would need for my drawings. My interest in nature and animals has always been extremely strong, so I got away from the group as I saw an outstandingly pretty deer that I wanted to draw and followed it deeper into the thing about the woods in the Lykonian mountains back then was that you lost every little bit of orientation you might have thought you had in the beginning within an hour of roaming through the vast groves and the deep undergrowths that make up most of the woods. Additionally these forests are full of nymphs, dryads and other beings that love making fools of the humans daring to enter their territory I got lost, and at dusk, I didn't know where the other boys where so I walked on, trying to find a cave, a big tree or something else that would give me some shelter for the night.
Without noticing it, I had come closer and closer to the suspected lair of our patron deity. To put it a bit more blatantly, I came crashing right into his territory, clumsy and young as I was, not noticing the small signs of a divine presence. I only remember that at some point, I noticed that the animals were less scared of the human in their surroundings, they came closer than usual. After having fought my way through think undergrowth and thorny bushes for hours, I finally laid down beneath a big tree to sleep, seeming I could already see the moon through the leaves of the trees all around me. I fell asleep quite soon, exhausted by the hours of walking outside.
When awoke again, it was the late morning hours, probably almost noon. As I stretched and woke up every part of me after the chilly night out in the unknown depths of the woods, I noticed that I was strangely centered in a clearing. Hadn't I been walking mostly through undergrowths the night before? And I remembered having hidden behind a fairly concealing shrub to hide from predators. A few moments later I found out why I was so out in the open. I heard a few notes vibrating through the breeze that brought the smell of saltwater. It was a panpipe being played by someone who knew what he was doing. Okay, it wasn't just someone, it was Pan himself. The faun sat on a big boulder in the sun. As I sat up and stared at the god, the music stopped and he turned to me, smirking the devious smile fitting for a god like him.
"So, heard you are looking for me?"