I wrote this mainly in a couple of nights of depressed inspiration! I had the idea for a long time, though. It's a short side-story to my novel, "Dreamer's Rhlem", but one does not have to have read that to understand this story, I think. I'm still polishing "Dreamer's Rhlem", anyway. I posted the first chapter to it here a while back.
Anyway... this short side-story has one of the main characters, a man who is over three-hundred years old, talking to an immortal character specific to this short story (ie. Ashe' does not appear in the main novel).
Read, review, enjoy?
http://rhlem.net/burdens.html