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The Older Immortal

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John Sheridan: You're one of the First Ones?
Lorien: No, not one of the First Ones. I am The First One.

In a group of immortals, (or very Long-Lived people) there will be at least one who is considerably older than any of the others. If most of them are 200 years old, one will be 600, or 1000. If most are 600 or 1000 years old, one will be 2000 or 3000 years old. And so on, possibly to Time Abyss status. These are The Older Immortal.

This way you can have age contrasts and generational tropes between people when all of them are really old. After all, it's hard to pull off The Patriarch in a family of immortals unless you're a good deal older than the rest. It can also be used for comedy or misdirection if the oldest looks the youngest.

Not to be confused with Elderly Immortal, an immortal who appears physically old, who may or may not fit this trope.


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • An early opponent faced by the titular immortal Manji in Blade of the Immortal is Shizuma Eiku of the Itto-ryu, an Evil Counterpart to Manji afflicted by the same Curse of the Bloodworm that grants them both a near-flawless Healing Factor and unending life. Unlike Manji, however, who has only recently become an immortal and thus hasn't even outlived his natural human lifespan, Eiku is over 200 years old, having been granted the Bloodworms during the Muromachi period. Of course, both of them are outdone by Yaobikuni ("Nun of 800 Years"), the old woman who made both of them immortal in the first place.
  • Bleach:
    • Head Captain Yamamoto is over 2000 years old, given that in flashbacks to 1000 years ago he appeared to be in about his forties. With the exception of Captain Unohana (who was another original member of the Gotei 13 over 1000 years ago) and possibly Captains Kyouraku and Ukitake, the next-oldest shinigami only have a few centuries to their names. A flashback shows Kyoraku as a child. Kyoraku is at least 500 years old. Yamamoto is middle-aged in said flashback.
    • Yhwach, leader of the Vandenreich, is at least a millennium old, though he was sealed away for at least 900 years of those years. Most likely he's much older than that.
    • Members of the Royal Guard are very likely as old as Soul Society itself. One of them even invented terms like "Zanpakuto", "Shikai", and "Bankai", and is implied to be at least a million years old.
  • Possible downplayed examples in Claymore:
    • Isley and most shown male Awakened (prominently his immediate inferiors in power Rigardo, Dauf and Chronos), as well as Riful, are this to the other, mostly female Awakened of various ages until they too are killed. It is implied that they've been around for more than 1,000 years.note  Awakened beings who survive for any length of time in relation to the warriors, the most polite of whom sometimes refer to as their seniors (sempai?).
    • Raftella has been 10 for an unspecified amount of time, is implied to have seen numerous generations of field warriors and shows no signs of age.
  • D.Gray-Man: The Millennium Earl is at least 7,000 years old, and knew the Biblical Noah at the time of The Great Flood. Given that his real name has been revealed to be Adam, it's possible that he's even older than that. While the other Noah have the ability to possess Noah's descendants (i.e., everyone, since they did the Adam and Eve Plot thing after the flood) if they get killed, the Earl is only known to have vanished from the world once in 7,000 years before coming back.
  • From Frieren: Beyond Journey's End:
    • Serie is implicitly older than the already ancient Frieren. She was already an accomplished archmage whose knowledge of magic extends far back beyond the title character's epoch.
    • Kraft the monk is implied to be even older than Serie given that she looks still like a teenager at most while he looks like a full-grown man. He's so old that the legendary events he was once upon a time renowned for in the same vein as Frieren's party has been so lost to time that even the over 1000 year old Frieren has no inkling of what he's done.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist: In the manga, out of all the homunculi, Pride is the oldest and most powerful at over 300 years old. In the first anime, this role falls to Envy.
  • In Hellsing, Alucard is the original Dracula who's been around for centuries, and basically everyone else is a WWII vet or younger.
  • In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency, the Pillar Men are a race of vampiric Humanoid Abominations who can live for a very long time due to being really hard to kill and being able to hibernate for millennia by turning to stone. Of the four Pillar Men shown in the series, Santana and Whamuu are roughly ten thousand years old, Esidisi is an unknown amount older (old enough to be an adult when Santana and Whamuu were still babies) and Kars is roughly one hundred thousand years old. Notably, all four of them appear to be in their physical prime, which raises the question of how old the elderly Pillar Woman (old enough to have wrinkled skin and grey hair) shown in a flashback detailing Kars' origin was.
  • Mermaid Saga had a comparatively small number of immortals due to how poisonous a mermaid's flesh is and how rare people can survive eating it. As such for a time Yuuta at over 500 was the older immortal to Mana who was 15 when they met and she became immortal (by the time of the series end Mana is roughly 30). Both are easily eclipsed when they met the young boy Masato who turned out to be over 800 years old.
  • The Lifemaker in Negima! Magister Negi Magi is over two thousand years old as compared to Evangeline being around six hundred and Zect being 'a couple of centuries or so' old. Albireo's relation to this trope is a little tricky, as he's older than Evangeline, but it is unclear by how much. He claims to be "the oldest one present" when in the presence of both Evangeline and the Lifemaker, though he might have meant only his side of the conflict.
  • Nightwalker keeps the ages of all its vampires vague; protagonist Shido is an amnesiac who is implied to be a few hundred old. Shido's maker, Cain, claims to be much older, and by extension, much more powerful. And Cain really is in a whole other league.
  • In Tenchi Muyo!, the Trope Namer for Really 700 Years Old, it's routine for people to be hundreds of years old. A few characters are around 5,000 years old. Washu is 20,000 years old. And that's just in her current body. She's actually at least 14 billion years old. It's not an error that this exceeds the age of the universe itself.
  • UQ Holder!, being a story about immortals, has this come up. Of the ages we're aware of, we have one who is confirmed 85, another somewhere around 20ish, while Kuromaru is 14 and protagonist Touta is 4, though he has the body of a young teen. Evangeline is still there, though, with her age listed as 700, and the co-founder of UQ Holder is a man who is over 1400 years old. Karin is suggested to be over 2,000 years old. Later in the story, a group of immortal people show up who are all over 12,000 years old at the least.

    Comic Books 
  • Caballistics, Inc.: Solomon Ravne is several hundred years old, having extended his life through Blood Baths and other dark magic. However, his "father", Ethan Kostabi, is revealed at the end of the series to be a Fallen Angel created at the dawn of time who has been walking the Earth for at least two thousand years.
  • The DCU:
    • In Demon Knights, the immortals Xanadu and Jason Blood are wandering after the fall of Camelot and wind up in a bar where Sir Ystin, the Shining Knight, is hold up. Ystin is thousands of years old and thinks these two pups are upstarts and starts insulting them in a language long since dead. Ystin in turn is the beloved of the Amazon warrior, Exoristos who is even older than Ystin and sometimes patronizes the Shining Knight. Then there's Vandal Savage, who's the oldest living human — so old that his dad isn't even considered human on the evolutionary scale — and is initially just happy to travel with these "kids" as it might be something fun to do.
    • The Guardians of the Universe from Green Lantern are members of what may have been the first sentient organic species in the universe. Individual Guardians, along with their kin the Zamarons and the Controllers, are billions of years old.
    • Wonder Woman: While all the Amazons of Paradise Island are immortal Hippolyta is by far the eldest of those remaining in the Pre-and Post-Crisis continuities in Wonder Woman (1942) and Wonder Woman (1987) as she is the same Hippolyta who fought Hercules prior to the fall of Troy.
  • Marvel Universe:
    • Galactus is the sole survivor of the previous universe that existed before the Big Bang. Word of God is that Mr. Immortal (who is absolutely immune to death) of the Great Lakes Avengers will live to see the end of the universe, implying that he'll take Galactus's place in the next one.
    • Also, the Elders of the Universe, each of whom is the last living member of one of the first races to evolve.
    • Also, Loki's Asgardian acquaintances and occasional Caper Crew include a guy named Sigurd, who happens to be one of the oldest alive (around the age of Odin). This fact is generally not obvious because he doesn't look like it, but he himself has noted he's been at the hero thing far longer than Thor and is a far older god than Loki.
  • The Sandman (1989):
    • In "Brief Lives", Bernie Capax is killed in a freak accident while walking down the street in the current day while reminiscing about meeting the Marquis de Sade, talking with Freud, and the smell of Mammoths. When he meets Death he is upset because he is still not yet "done" with life, but he tries to console himself with how long he managed to last. She is unimpressed, telling him — "You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less." Bernie's feat is shown to be genuinely unimpressive compared to some others, as it is revealed that there are around 500 beings still alive that remember the human civilizations from before the Dinosaurs, and 70 or so still around that were born before the Earth formed from gas and dust!
    • Obviously, there are also the Endless, Lucifer and the other angels, who all hail from the beginning of time, or even before it.
      Death: When the first living thing existed, I was there, waiting.
    • The Sandman: Overture reveals even older beings: Time and Night, the parents of the Endless.

    Fan Works 
  • Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): It's explicitly confirmed that Ghidorah is billions of years old, essentially making Ghidorah (and by extension its shed skins such as the San who forms part of Monster X) the Older Immortal to Godzilla and the other Earth-native Titans (who are presumed to be only hundreds of millions of years old).
  • Child of the Storm has a lot of incredibly ancient immortals, with the likes of the Endless, who've all existed since the beginning of the universe — and in the case of Death, possibly before it. Separately, Thanos is indicated to be one of the oldest beings in the universe (to the point where Word of God has it that no one really knows what Thanos used to be, let alone what he is now), and Doctor Strange is about 500,000 years old thanks to exposure to the Time Stone, making him about twice as old as modern humanity — though truthfully, not even he is exactly sure how old he is, on the grounds that he stopped bothering to count after he hit 100,000.
  • I, Eternity, a fanfiction set in The Elder Scrolls universe, follows a mind-bogglingly ancient vampire who was alive (and sometimes an active participant) in long past events from the series history, although he isn't quite as old as canon characters like Vivec.
  • The Infinite Loops: While everyone is stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, Anchors are the only ones who are Awake for every loop. Other loopers vary on whether or not they are Awake. Therefore, Anchors are much older than everyone else in their loop, and Anchors from the first universes that started looping are even older than that. In The MLP Loops, Celestia and Luna were thousand year-old immortals before all this started. They realize that because they loop rather rarely, many of their subjects are now much, much older than them.
  • Sailor Moon: Legends of Lightstorm: Given that all the main characters are biologically immortal, Lightstorm is technically this in relation to the Sailor Scouts, although the Scouts are all 14 when they meet him.
  • Pony POV Series:
    • The Concepts are all immortal deities who mostly predate the current version of the universe, though some are born later. However, the three we see most of the time are all relatively young. While their order of age is not stated, Celestia and Luna are quite young among their family, having been children when the Big Bang happened, while several of their elder siblings were fully grown when it happened. Meanwhile, Discord is actually the youngest Draconequus (second youngest in universes where Rancor was born), with the two oldest being his sister Strife, the Anthropomorphic Personification of Natural Selection, and his deceased brother D__t, who embodied Clap Your Hands If You Believe until his demise.
    • The Elders are this by far. The five known ones are so old, as they predate time itself. It's implied that there exists a being above even them that created them, but she's not involved in the story.
  • Both Ozpin and Salem in Remnant Inferis: DOOM are much older than the Doom Slayer, who himself is already well around 10,000 years old if not older. This is due to the revelation that demonkind was born from the fragmented souls of the original Remnant's humanity after the God of Darkness wiped them out. Meaning that their existence predates demonkind, who in turn, long predate the Doom Slayer.
  • In Undocumented Features, the Wedge-Rat generation of Detians are around 440 by UF's "present day". Edison Bell, a contemporary of the inventors of Detianism, is over 14 million.

    Film — Animation 
  • Coco: An Aztec couple is seen mingling at de la Cruz's party.
  • Rise of the Guardians: The Guardians are all immortal, but some are older than the others. Sandy predates all the others; as the personification of good dreams, he may have been around for as long as people have been existing.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Blade Trilogy:
    • Eli Damaskinos from Blade II. Unlike every other vampire in the series (who look physically middle-aged or younger), Damaskinos actually looks like he's hundreds of years old.
    • Blade: Trinity also has Dracula, the very first vampire. Unlike Damaskinos, though, Drake looks very young and fit. Having Voluntary Shapeshifting helps.
  • Highlander:
    • Ramirez is a man so old he claims that he's forgotten which culture he came from (he's originally Egyptian, posing as a Spaniard and his accent is not even explained in the movie, but in the real world, it comes from Not Even Bothering with the Accent.)
    • From the same movie is the Kurgan, an immortal villain about a century older than Ramirez. He was roughly three thousand years old at the time of his death.
  • In The Old Guard, Andy is older by far than any of the other immortals. Nile is newly immortal, Booker became immortal in the 1800s, and Joe and Nicky became immortal during the crusades, but Andy is so old that she doesn't remember her exact age (Word of God is that she's nearly 7000 years old).
    Nile: You're the oldest. [Andy nods] Well, how old are you?
    Andy: Older.
    Nile: How old?
    Andy: [Beat] Too old.
  • The vampire Akasha in Queen of the Damned. See the Literature section for more information.
  • Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat: While many of the vampires in the Monster Town are over a hundred years old, count Mardulak, the founder, is over four hundred years old based on the historical age of Vlad the impaler. and, given that in this setting the older a vampire is, the stronger and faster he is, he proves it by beating a slightly younger vampire in a Quick Draw duel.
  • Underworld (2003): In Evolution, seventy-ish Derek Jacobi plays the original immortal — neither lycan nor vampire but the progenitor of both. There was no Immortality Procreation Clause, so he fathered three sons who inherited his immortality; one was bitten by a bat and mutated into a vampire, another was bitten by a wolf and mutated into a lycan, and the third remained human and spawned his own line of descendants.

    Literature 
  • In Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Henry Sturges mentions that most vampires don't live much past 300 years before becoming bored with life (or unlife). Being one of the original Roanoke colonists, this is roughly how old Henry is at the time. The sequel, The Last American Vampire, provides further details. At the time of his death in 1898, Adam Plantagenet, the founder of the vampires' Union, was over 590 years old despite still looking like a teenager. By 2014, Henry is likely one of the oldest vampires left, being just over 450 years old.
  • Baccano! has the original immortals who became immortal in 1711, and then a newer batch in 1930. Most of the 1930 ones are in an organization together, but one of the senior members of said organization is from the 1711 group. Later in the novels, one character is introduced who's been immortal even longer than the 1711 group; how much older she is still hasn't been revealed.
  • "Border Guards" by Greg Egan is set 7500-odd years after humans achieved immortality through Brain Uploading. Jamil and his fellow quantum soccer players are in the neighbourhood of 1000 years old, except for Margit, who's a Time Abyss and one of the one-in-a-million humans who remembers what it was like when people died. Indeed, the reason she's this trope is that she has a pathological fear of dying — most of her contemporaries committed suicide at some point (causing her to become very jaded) and the remaining individuals of her cohort have withdrawn to interact only with one another. She is unique in that she still has a life, albeit a voluntarily friendless one.
  • The titular protagonist fulfills this role in Captain French, or the Quest for Paradise for the rest of humanity, who have all become The Ageless. It's not uncommon for a person to live for centuries, although 2000 is about the average max, since few tend to survive that long due to accidents, violence, wars, disease, cataclysms, etc. Living on a spaceship, French is safer than most planetary denizens, although even he always runs the risk of being vaporized during a jump. Graham French was born in the 21st century, making him over 20,000 years old by the time the novel takes place. However, subjectively, he is only about 2000, since he spends much of that time traveling at near-light speeds. Still, people always experience a feeling of Time Abyss when meeting him and hearing him casually mentioning meeting their distant ancestors.
  • The Cosmere: There are many immortals of various stripes running around. The Elantrians could easily reach a few hundred years, the Lord Ruler was a thousand and numerous kandra were nearly as old, and the Heralds are over four and a half thousand years old. Then there's Hoid. He is approximately the same age as the original Shardholders, meaning he is older than most of the planets where the stories take place.
    Shallan: You're... old, aren't you? Not a Herald, but as old as they are?
    Hoid: Child, when they were but babes, I had already lived dozens of lifetimes. 'Old' is a word you use for worn shoes. I'm something else entirely.
  • In The Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock, the remaining members of humanity are at least millions of years old, but they are an engineered race born extremely far into the future (millions or billions of years). The youngest of these humans is Jherek Carnelian, whose father is Lord Jagged. Unlike the other humans, Lord Jagged was born in the 19th century and while Jagged is a time traveller (it's mundane technology to humanity at this point), he's actually lived his way to the end of time rather than time travelling to that era.
  • In The Dark Elf Trilogy, Matron Baenre is said to be at least 2000 years old even though drow are said to have a maximum lifespan of 800-1000 years — what ultimately killed her wasn't old age, but an axe to the face.
  • Discworld:
    • Golems aren't made any more, but they're self-repairing, so they last a long time if nobody smashes them with a hammer. Most of the golems in Ankh-Morpork are centuries old. Anghammarad in Going Postal is nineteen thousand years old. Then in Making Money Adora Belle Dearheart discovers four thousand golems built by one of the earliest civilisations on the Disc. They're reckoned as between twenty and sixty thousand years old.
    • The Magpyrs are a family of vampires that have trained away their traditional weaknesses, while developing new powers that allow them to mentally enslave humans in order to serve as cattle for a steady supply of blood. When the humans break free and come together to annihilate them, the Old Count and uncle to the Magpyr patriarch is summoned, looking like a very traditional and campy vampire in the style of Bela Lugosi. Despite his silly demeanor, the Old Count is implied to be far more powerful than the rest of his family, and he easily cows them into submission, imparting on them that being silly and full of weaknesses means that the humans won't see you as that big a threat, and let you live (or unlive) to drink blood another day instead of turning you into dust and spreading the ashes off the edge of the Rim.
  • Doctor Sleep: Grandpa Flick to the rest of the True Knot. While the rest of the Knot mentions stuff like graduating class of '36 or the Old West, he casually mentions that he remembers when Europeans worshipped trees.
  • There are a few in Dragaera. Among the Easterners (i.e. humans), there is the Warlock, who's well past 250. Dragaerans can last around 3,000 years, but the youthful-looking Sorceress in Green has been in the history books for at least 20,000. Then there's the Inexplicably Awesome Sethra Lavode, who looks Dragaeran but predates the 200,000-year-old empire...
  • The Dresden Files: Vampires tend to be old, but few are seen older than twice what a wizard usually lives. Injun Joe, a mortal wizard on the Senior Council, for reference is about 300. The Red Court, for one, has its origins (and the source of the very oldest) in the Mayan Empire. Some of the more ethereal entities are even more ancient. The Fairy Queens feel like Time Abyss. Mab and Titania are said to have not exchanged words since Hastings, presumably the noted Battle of Hastings of 1066. And their mothers, Mother Summer and Mother Winter, are even older. And then there is Archangel Uriel and his Maker who have existed since before the Universe began.
  • Fevre Dream: Damon Julian, the Big Bad, is the oldest living vampire. He's so old that he has no real name, because he was born before names were invented.
  • Georgina Kincaid: In Succubus Blues, Georgina (the titular succubus) mentions that talking about age among Lesser Immortals is really quite gauche, but she's probably the oldest in her group of friends. Of course, the Higher Immortals are far, far older than that, since they never used to be human. Clues in her life story suggest that Georgina is probably less than two thousand, maybe 1700 or so, from the cusp between Christianity and Grecian paganism.
  • Guild Hunter has a particularly extreme example — while most Archangels are implied to be somewhere in the 1000-10,000 years margin, which is considered ancient even by immortal standards, Caliane is believed to be approximately 200,000 years old. Whether this is true or not is up for debate in-universe, but it is agreed by Caliane herself that she is much, much older than the others.
  • In the Inheritance Cycle, elves are immortal, but Rhunön has been around since before the Dragon Riders existed and is at least 2500 years old.
  • Journey to Chaos: There are a number of immortals living on Tariatla, but Old Man Aaloon is older than all of them (save maybe a handful of elves). He's even older than the Physical Gods that run the planet (by a good thousand years).
  • Mediochre Q Seth Series: Mediochre is the oldest human being in existence, at about 400 (although Melinda Quinn is only slightly behind him at 370 or so). It looks a lot like there are no surviving entities older than him (human, undead or otherwise), although that might be thrown into doubt by the second book, where a couple of prisoners in the Stygian Secure Unit are implied to rival Mediochre for the status of oldest man in existence "depending on what you count as a man". The oldest of them is implied to be the Pied Piper. As in "of Hamlin".
  • Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn: The Sithi and Norns are, like Tolkien's elves, immortals, with even the youngest shown on-page (Sithi siblings Jiriki and Aditu) being centuries old. The Sithi are led by their eldest member, Amerasu, whom they call "First Grandmother" because of her age (millennia, at least). The Norns, by contrast, are led by Utuk'ku the Norn Queen, the oldest sapient being on the planet, who is more than twice Amerasu's age.
  • In the Merry Gentry series, the Fey don't pay much attention to their ages, but Merry continues to discover that her lovers are older and older (than she thought). One of them confirmed he is over 2000 years old, and implied that he might be much, much older than that.
  • Night Watch (Series): The Others' aging process slows down to an immeasurable crawl after Initiation (except for children who continue to age until maturity). The most powerful Others can expect to live for millennia, and even the weakest Others can expect at least a few centuries. The head of the Moscow Night Watch is named Gesar. If we are to assume that he is the same Gesar as described in the Epic of King Gesar, then he would be at least 800 years old. The novels imply that he's even older than that, having fought the Dark Others in the time before the Grand Treaty. He is familiar with a much older Other named Rustam, who had since retreated into the Twilight. Rustam knew Merlin, one of the most powerful Others in history. Gesar's Arch-Enemy Zabulon is also pretty old, although his age is never stated or even hinted (he's implied to be either English or Irish although later revealed to be Judean). While his chosen name comes from The Bible, Word of God is that the novel's Zabulon is not that guy. The novel Sixth Watch has three extremely old Others: two of them are vampires (a Cro-Magnon and a Neanderthal) and one is a shapeshifter (a weresmilodon, as in "sabertooth"). This is explained as vampires being the first kind of Others to appear in the world (absorbing magic through the most rudimentary method possible — blood), followed by shapeshifters (evolving to absorbing magic through meat) and witches (nature-based magic). Mages appeared much later.
  • October Daye: The Luidaeg — and pretty much any other Firstborn (as in, the first generation of fey to be born of Oberon, Titania, and Maeve). Toby comments in one book about the inadvisability of taunting someone who has firsthand experience of continental drift.
  • Perry Rhodan does this with Atlan da Gonozal. By the time the 20th-century human protagonists get their first taste of immortality phlebotinum, he's already been stuck on Earth without a way home for ten thousand years. (There are much older characters in the series, of course... but they remain outsiders where Atlan quickly becomes and then stays one of the most important members of the core immortal True Companions.)
  • The Raven Tower: Gods of the setting are immortal unless they're killed. The Strength and Patience of the Hill, one such god and also the book's narrator, became sentient and self-aware around 500 million years ago (by Earth standards) and having spent the entirety of his existence as an immobile boulder he has slowly watched the spinnng of the galactic core and life evolve on the planet. He's old enough to have witnessed a previous generation of gods, The Ancient Ones, having driven themselves to extinction. The Myriad, another old god, landed on the planet as a meteor during the Ice Age and mentions having been sentient while she was still a celestial object, making her age impossible to guess.
  • From The Saga of Darren Shan, we have vampires who've mostly been around for a century or two, except for Paris Skyle, a vampire prince about 800 years old at the time of his death, which is said to be very old for a vampire. At the end of the series, Seba Nile becomes the oldest living vampire, being over 700 years old.
  • The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel: Aside from all the Elders, Archons, and First Generation who are all several thousand years old the oldest human immortals are Gilgamesh and Tsagaglalal, who were among the first humans created by Prometheus.
  • The Shadowhunter Chronicles: Magnus Bane is four centuries old, but he is still a child compared to Ragnor Fell, who was already an established warlock when Magnus was a boy. The Shadowhunter Codex mentions a handful of living warlocks hailing from the era before the Covenant between Jonathan Shadowhunter and Raziel, over a millennium ago. A short story in The Bane Chronicles focuses on a two millennia-old warlock named Aldous Nix who has been driven insane by his longevity and tries to open a portal to Pandemonium.
  • Those Who Hunt the Night: Brother Anthony the minorite, an ancient Franciscan friar. Living in secret for over 400 years when most other vampires believed the eldest living vampire to only be around 200.
  • In Robert A. Heinlein's works, starting with Time Enough for Love, Lazarus Long is the oldest human being by at least a thousand years. Even in a galaxy of extremely long-lived humans thanks to a combination of the Howard Foundation's applied eugenics program and medical rejuvenation therapy, he's an anomaly, not to mention an artifact, being the only living witness to Old Earth before space travel and the diaspora that seeded humankind among the stars. Part of the reason he's an anomaly? The Howard Trust was set up to include those that could prove their (immediate) ancestors had lifespans of 100+. He couldn't, but still didn't need rejuvenation until 150+...
  • Tolkien's Legendarium:
    • This often happens due to several long-lived and immortal races, because the respective older ones either survive their peers or simply happen to live among a different group whose members are younger and less powerful.
    • The epitome of this is Tom Bombadil, who is called "The Eldest" by all the races and is described as being ancient by both Gandalf and Treebeard, two of the oldest characters in the series. He even calls himself the First and the Fatherless. This implies he is the oldest living thing (possibly the very first living thing) in Middle-earth.
    • Among the elves, Elrond is over 6000 years old, and Galadriel is even older, having been born before the sun came into existence. They're both children to Cirdan, who was possibly one of the first elves who awoke in Middle-Earth. When he sailed into the West at the close of the third age, Cirdan was nearly 11,000 years, at least.
  • Normal vampires live a few hundred years in Trinity Blood. Abel and the other Crusnik (his brother Cain and sister Seth) live millennia and are apparently immortal barring violent death.
  • The Twilight Saga:
    • Carlisle Cullen, the head of his coven/family, is 200 years older than the next oldest of his coven (Jasper Hale). Carlisle was turned in 1663 while Jasper was turned in 1863. Everyone else in the family were turned in the early 1900s, joined by Bella Swan later who gets turned in 2006.
    • While most vampires are "mere" centuries old, a couple have lived for thousands of years, like the Volturi, the Romanians, and the Egyptians.
  • In The Vampire Chronicles, the eponymous Queen of the Damned is from Ancient Mesopotamia, and was married to the king of the land that would later become Egypt. After becoming a vampire and saving her husband from an assassination by making him one, they became the basis for the myth of Isis and Osiris. She also created other vampires at the time who have survived into the present day, including Maharet and Mekare (twins), as well as Khayman (slightly older than the sisters).

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Babylon 5, all the First Ones are functionally immortal, and thus immeasurably old. But Lorien, the guy they all kowtow to, is nothing less than THE First One, the first lifeform to achieve sapience in the Milky Way galaxy. The other First Ones are billions of years older than any of the current "younger" races, to the point of being borderline godlike. But to Lorien, they're still children, and when he speaks, they listen.
  • In Being Human (UK), few vampires seem to last more than 200 years — Mitchell was just over 100, and he was older than most of the others he met. The Old Ones, however, mostly seem to be around 400-500. Then there's Edgar Wyndham, who casually mentions being "more than a thousand", and Mr. Snow, who condescendingly sneers that "These eyes have seen Pharaohs, and the son of a carpenter."
  • In Being Human (US), Aiden is close to 260 years old, which makes him a respected elder among the Boston Vampires. The 'Dutch' vampires are close to a thousand years old and are treated with utmost respect and fear by younger vampires like Aiden and Bishop. However, Mother is older than all of them and is hinted to be thousands of years old.
  • Buffyverse:
    • The Master, the Prince of Lies, and Kakistos are all noted as so ancient that they've outgrown human features. The first two Look Like Orlok, while the last has cloven hooves instead of hands. No other vampires seen have shown any sign of happening yet, with the oldest known normal-looking vampire being Darla, at around 400. (Word of God previously stated The Master was about 600 years old, but as he had already stopped looking human when he sired Darla it has presumably been discarded.) The Master has inhuman features partly because Evil Makes You Ugly; he was "impressively" evil even before he became a vampire.
    • Dracula, since he's not indicated to be anyone other than Vlad the Impaler, has over a century on Darla. He doesn't look animalistic but is unnaturally pale — as is Darla in Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Though Dracula is a very atypical vampire who, thanks to mastery of unspecified "gypsy magic", doesn't follow the usual Buffyverse rules. (We later see Darla without her pallor, but only a) as a resurrected human, b) as a remade, newly young vampire, and c) in flashbacks, the latest of which is set in 1900 when she was under 300. All of this is consistent with the idea that she began going white in her 300s, and that this is for at least some vampires the beginning of the dehumanising process.) Of the three truly ancient vampires, the Master and the Prince of Lies are both very pale. (Kakistos, on the other hand, is positively florid, but it's possible that different bloodlines or different individuals de-evolve differently, hence his cloven hooves.)
    • At one point, the Mayor, who looks middle-aged but is roughly a century old, orders Angel to "respect your elders". Angel mocks him; Angel was turned into a vampire at age 26, but is roughly 240 years old.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The franchise features a lot of very old Immortals with the Time Lords and the Eternals and the Guardians and what not... but there's also the Beast, who (by his own claims, at least) predates time itself.
    • The Face of Boe is another contender for the title of oldest being in the universe, with his given age being billions of years old. He might also be Captain Jack Harkness, and given that he's been known to time travel, by the time he's the Face of Boe he could be older than the universe itself.
    • Ashildr/Me ends up as this, surviving to the absolute end of time after all the other immortals are gone, watching the stars burn out in a reality bubble. Particularly impressive for someone who isn't invulnerable. Specifically, it has been established in the show that the universe will burn out, collapse and undergo a Big Crunch (and subsequently another Big Bang), sometime after the year 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) CE. Even the Face of Boe has nothing on Me's lifespan. Then she acquired a TARDIS for herself and Clara, so if/when seen again could be several times as old as the universe.
    • During her thirteenth incarnation, the Doctor herself is revealed to be the Timeless Child, a being that can infinitely regenerate and is the source of the Time Lords' Resurrective Immortality. She is also revealed to have lived an uncountable number of lives that predate the First Doctor, which have been wiped from both her memory and general knowledge. With that in mind, she is vastly older than Time Lord civilization itself, and in terms of age, is easily in Time Abyss territory.
  • Earth: Final Conflict: The Taelons are an alien race where individuals can live to be many thousands of years old. In Season 5, we are introduced to Ra'jel, who claims to be the first Taelon.
  • In Forever (2014), Henry Morgan is 234 years old at the start of the series. The mysterious caller, claims to be over 2000 years old. Unlike Henry, he is cynical and contemptuous of human life. According to the caller, he himself used to be "a good and decent man" like Henry, but time has taken a heavy toll. Henry met his first death trying to save the life of an African man on a slave ship; Adam tells Henry he met his first death trying to stop the assassination of Julius Caesar. Now, Adam says murdering is "like breathing" to him.
  • In Forever Knight, most vampires we meet are a couple hundred years old at most, but LaCroix was a Roman general who got turned by his preteen daughter during the volcanic eruption at Pompeii. Her own sire was an even older vampire known as "The Ancient One", who is hinted to have been around since prehistoric times.
  • Methos from Highlander. His first memory is about 5000 years ago, and he could be far older than that. According to the man himself, it all starts to blur prior to the first Quickening (that he can remember, that is), and he has no memory at all of his first death or the "mortal" life prior to it. Several characters point out that his history is so vast and ancient that even fellow Immortals (who mostly think of him as a myth) can't begin to assume anything about what he's like or how he thinks.
  • In Moonlight, Mick is relatively young for a vampire (he was turned shortly after World War II) and looks to be in his mid-30s. His friend Josef is well over 400 but looks to be in his 20s (the original unaired pilot had him more as an Elderly Immortal played by Rade Å erbedžija). As a rule, vampires stop aging the moment they are turned (one of the episode villains is a 200-year-old teenager who wipes the floor with Mick). However, the older a vampire is, from the moment he or she is turned, the more his or her body smells of decay (to another vampire). Coraline is nearly as old as Josef. Lance is stated by Mick to smell very old and be capable of feats that shock Mick (e.g., harmlessly jumping from a great height, not turning to ash when exposed to fire). However, he may also be about Josef's vampiric age. Lance and Coraline are supposed to be vampire siblings. The oldest stated vampire on the show is Lora, whose age is somewhere around 700. After her activities force Mick to kill her, both Mick and Josef lament the loss of so much experience (Josef also had an on-and-off thing with her for the last century).
  • Supernatural:
    • Archangels are understood to be the oldest and most powerful angels. Thus, Castiel (who is a seraphim) is considerably younger than his archangel brothers, Michael, Lucifer, Rafael, and Gabriel.
    • Princes of Hell are older than Knights of Hell, who are in turn older than regular demons. They are all predated by Lilith, the first demon ever created.
  • True Blood has at least three examples so far. In the second season, Godric is over 2,000 years old, and has tired of vampiric intrigue. In season three, Russell is nearly 3,000 years old and still bent on domination. In season six, Warlow is older than both of them combined, making him the oldest living being seen on the show thus far. Then there's Maryann Forrester (her current name), who is over 8000 years old.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Among the setting's various Time Abysses, a few stand out for being even older than their peers. Zaphkiel is the only surviving member of the original Celestial Hebdomad, and came to rule the highest level of Mount Celestia shortly after creation, when the first mortal souls arrived there. Queen Morwel of the Court of Stars has taken many consorts over the centuries, but none in Arborea can remember a time before her. Asmodeus, Baalzebul and Mephistopheles are mentioned as the original Fallen Angels who came to rule the Nine Hells of Baator in the Baatezu's creation myth (and some older, obscure lore has Asmodeus being merely the guise of a much older primordial force of evil). And among the demon lords, Pale Night, Dagon, Obox-Ob and Pazuzu are all Obyriths who ruled the Abyss before sentient life arose on the Material Plane, and are feared and respected even by the Tanar'ri who dominate the plane now — Dagon in particular is sought out as a (dangerous) source of obscure and forgotten lore.
    • Forgotten Realms: Ao is the oldest known being on the Material Plane (he might be outmatched by Primordials or Obyriths, we don't really know). Following him, were Shar (goddess of night, darkness and nihilism) and Selûne (goddess of light, the moon, and lycanthropes) born from the creation leftovers in the Astral Sea. Following them, were their daughters, Chauntea, goddess of life, and Mystryl, (the first) goddess of magic. Other gods sprung up sporadically after that.
  • Exalted: Most of the Exalted get extreme longevity as part of their package, but Chejop Kejak of the Sidereal Exalted is perhaps the oldest Exalted still alive. He was born shortly after the Primordial War and was one of the architects of the Usurpation that cast down the Solar Exalted when they started giving in to megalomania. Problem is, unlike other Exalted, the Sidereals have a very set lifespan of 5,000 years post-Exaltation... and he's at 4,999. Give or take.
    • Third Edition introduces someone even older than Kejak: Rakan Thulio, a renegade Sidereal who has avoided his expiration date by tearing his thread from the Loom of Fate after realizing his lover dumping him was the result of celestial malfeasance. He does not age as a result, and he has spent that time unsealing and shepherding the Getimian Exalted, made up of people who were likewise screwed by fate.
  • Pathfinder:
    • Pharasma is the eldest god alive, predating the current incarnation of the universe. When the first gods came into being and explored the universe, Pharasma was already waiting for them. Concordance of Rivals reveals that she is in fact the Sole Survivor of the previous iteration of the multiverse, and created The Wall Around the World to protect the young existence from Those Who Remain.
    • Magrim is the elder of the three firstborn dwarven gods, and views most other deities as young and brash to some degree. Pharasma is the only deity he treats as an honored elder.
    • Charon, the Horseman of Death, is the oldest by far of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse that rule Abaddon. Predating human life, he is the only Horseman to have never died and been replaced.
    • Asmodeus' version of his origin casts himself as one of the first two beings that emerged together into the new universe, and the only one still alive after he slew the other. Other accounts describe him as simply an empyreal lord who fell to evil, though an ancient and powerful one.
  • In Traveller, age-retarding drugs have been around for millennia, and some alien species are extremely long-lived, but Yaskodray is the only surviving Ancient and is hundreds of thousands of years older than any other living thing.
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade and associated media, there are some very old vampires around; Napoleonic vampires are seen as relative upstarts by some in the modern age. However, they live in fear of truly ancient vampires and the mythic Antediluvians, the vampires from before Noah's flood, thousands of years ago. And then there's the first vampire, Caine (yeah, that one), who managed to outlive the generation of vampires he directly created who, in turn, created the Antediluvians.
  • Warhammer:
    • Elves are long-lived but not explicitly ageless, and usually fade away and die of something akin to old age after a few millennia have passed. Then there's Morathi and her son Malekith, both of whom are over five thousand years old and the oldest elves in the setting by far. Morathi uses Blood Magic to stay ever-young, while Malekith simply seems to be too hateful to ever truly die.
    • The tree spirits of Athel Loren are immortal, and can live forever if not destroyed. Even amongst them Durthu is considered ancient, being between 10 to 15,000 years old and older than the entire elven race.
    • Kalgalanos and Krakanrok are the Monster Progenitors of their respective species — the Dragons and the Dragon Ogres — who inhabited the Warhammer world before the arrival of the Old Ones. Both are believed to still be alive but sleeping (Krakanrok was confirmed as such in Archaeon's backstory), meaning their ages are, at the very lowest estimate, over 15,000.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • You will run across thousand-year-old Eldar relatively frequently. Then you have people like Eldrad Ulthran and Asdrubael Vect, who are old enough to have been around before the Fall.
    • Space Marines are often hundreds of years old, but the Dreadnoughts can be even older. Bjorn the Fell-Handed was around when his Primarch left for the Warp.
    • The basis of the Space Marines are the Primarchs who are over 10,000 years old, but these Primarchs were made tens of thousands of years into our future. Their creator, the God-Emperor of Mankind, is an immortal from the distant past of the BC period, making him and other Perpetuals of his time, this trope to everything human in the Warhammer 40k setting.
    • With all the gods and immortals running around (okay, not exactly running), you still can't beat the C'tan, who drove to extinction the first beings to exist.
    • Among the Chaos Gods, Khorne is thought to have developed sentience a good couple of centuries before the others, even though "Grandfather" Nurgle is usually considered the "older" deity. Slaanesh inverts this trope by being many millennia younger than the others, having been created by the Fall of the Eldar some ten thousand years before the setting's present day, but due to the nature of time in the Warp, once Slaanesh came into existence Slaanesh had always existed.

    Video Games 
  • In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, the Silver Lady is considered incomprehensibly ancient even by the oldest of elves and dwarves. The very much alive Nasrudin was considered incomprehensibly ancient at the time when a certain annoying little Silver child kept bothering him.
  • As the first Sustained, Empress Lenore of Battleborn lore is this. For comparison, according to one of Attikus' lore challenges which is a brief recounting of key events in the history of the Jennerit Empire/Imperium, the exact year she became Sustained, 1 C.R, was also the year that Rendain was born. It was only by 50 C.R. that Rendain himself was Sustained. He served as her right-hand for nearly 20,000 years before betraying her.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • Hermaeus Mora, the Daedric Prince of Knowledge, claims to be this. He states that he is one of the oldest Princes, a class of Time Abyss being who have existed before time was even conceived of as a concept, and is/arose from detritus concepts ejected from reality during creation. Hermaeus Mora is what could not be. Unlike the other Daedric Princes who take humanoid forms when dealing with mortals, Mora prefers a truly Eldritch Abomination form of a mass of eyes, tentacles, and claws.
    • Morrowind: The Tribunal, a trio of Deity Of Elven Origin Physical Gods, as well as their mortal enemy, Dagoth Ur, who achieved godhood in the same way, are all over 4000 years old. When speaking with Vivec, one of the Tribunal deities, he reveals that Sotha Sil (another Tribunal deity) and Dagoth Ur are both a generation older than he (and the third Tribune, Almalexia.)
  • Fire Emblem: Some Dragons from Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn can live to 1000 years, while all other laguz' lifespans are far shorter. Lehran tops that at 2000 years, and still looks like a bona fide Pretty Boy.
  • In Helltaker, a demon's age and power can be measured by their horns. Demon horns are naturally black, but turn white with age. Only two demons have white horns in Hell, Lucifer and Beelzebub, marking them as very old and very powerful compared to the other demons. Subverted in the Examtaker DLC by Loremaster. While it looks like she has white horns, she actually paints her horns white to make herself look older and more powerful than she actually is.
  • Legacy of Kain: Vorador is the oldest human-derived vampire in Nosgoth when Kain first meets him, and unlike the wandering warrior fledgling, Vorador prefers the life of indulgence within his remote stately manor, over matters of revenge.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Gears of Destiny reveals that the Materials are older than the already several centuries year old Reinforce and Wolkenritter, with the Book of Darkness having been created to seal them. This lets them know things that even Reinforce doesn't know, such as the fact that the Book of Darkness also contained a secret weapon called the Unbreakable Darkness... which turns out to be an even older and more powerful Humanoid Abomination than the Materials.
  • In the Suikoden series, the mysterious Leknaat's role in the story would imply that she's this. But she's not. Word of God is that vampire queen Sierra Mikain is well over twice as old, and and is the oldest known person in the world.
  • Sword of the Stars 2: One of the Suul'ka is known as the Eldest, he is 320,000 years old and determined to be the last living thing in the universe.
  • Touhou Project's non-human characters are all Older Than They Look, but their ages range from "at least sixty" in the ice fairy Cirno's case, to "five hundred years old" for the vampiric Scarlet sisters, to "at least 2300, probably more" in the case of Kanako Yasaka and Suwako Moriya, goddesses who competed for control of ancient Japan. We're not sure how old Yukari Yakumo is other than she played a hand in the creation of Gensokyo (and it's probably not a good idea to ask), and Yuuka Kazami is so old that the local judge of the dead once told her that the sin she'd risk going to Hell for was that she has "lived a little too long." And then there's Eirin Yagokoro, who is older than some of the deities featured in Japan's creation myth, which puts her age somewhere in the millions of years. It's not for nothing that she boasts to one of the aforementioned vampires that "Your history of scarlet... divided by my history, the result is zero."
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, this title belongs to either Beckett or Strauss. Neither state their ages outright, but refer to the 150+ old Prince LaCroix (who was an officer under Napoleon) as "young one". According to the tabletop game, Jack is just shy of 400 years old. Unlike the other two, he doesn't really act his age. If the real identity of the Taxi Driver from the endgame is what the Malkavian note  Player Character thinks he is, then he's older than any other living vampire (let alone those gathered in L.A.) by several thousand years.

    Webcomics 
  • In A-gnosis' comics on Greek mythology, Gaia and Nyx are the first of the Physical Gods to emerge from the Primordial Chaos, with the rest of the cast several generations removed from them. Nyx chooses a minor role as the stern but loving mother in The Underworld, but even Hades knows to Never Mess with Granny.
    "I'm not a Titan, child. I'm far, far older than that."
  • The oldest drow in Drowtales is likely around 900 to 1000 years old, since the drow first began being born after the exodus underground, but their parents the Dark Elves like Diva'ratrika and Ash'waren who were born on the surface are by definition much older.
  • In El Goonish Shive, though Immortals are technically all older than recorded history, they usually reset their identities about every 200 years to avoid going insane with boredom. Pandora Raven, however, prior to her most recent reset, held on to an identity for what can be inferred as being over 599 years which made her in some sense the oldest known Immortal.
  • In Gunnerkrigg Court, a dispute between Ankou and Jones regarding Mort's death is settled by seniority thanks to a third party, a representative of the Realm of the Dead. Ankou, being a psychopomp specializing in humans, is roughly as old as humanity itself. Unfortunately for him, Jones is older than all life on Earth.
  • Most of the characters in Hetalia: Axis Powers are old, but most are maybe a thousand or two. China is over four thousand and was the contemporary of several other nations who have since died.
  • In Lore Olympus, the three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, appear to be this. Lachesis addresses 2000-ish year-old Hades as "Young Blood". Nyx waxes nostalgic about how cute Hades looked when he was little.

    Web Originals 

    Western Animation 
  • In Gargoyles, Hudson is obviously older than the rest of the gargoyles, and gargoyles have a really long lifespan. It is explained that gargoyles age at half the rate of a human, because they are made of stone during the day. In addition, the main group was Rip Van Winkle'd for 1000 years. Thus, when Hudson, who looks 60+, boasts that he is over 1100 years old in the episode where he is kidnapped by Xanatos, he is actually taking off a few years (decades) from his age.
  • Hazbin Hotel: The Overlords that rule Hell's Pride Ring are several decades old at a minimum, and a few centuries old at most. Zestial is the oldest of the current Overlords; he speaks in perfectly fluent Flowery Elizabethan English and is explicitly described by Alastor, who's from the 1930s, as "ancient".
  • Tie-in comics for Miraculous Ladybug have revealed that the kwamis are essentially immortal, as they are abstract beings who come into existence whenever a new concept enters the universe. Tikki (Marinette's kwami), representing creation, came into existence at the beginning of the universe, making her the oldest of the kwamis.
  • Glossaryck in Star vs. the Forces of Evil was apparently created by the universe itself in ancient times, simply because there was nothing else in existence yet to create him. In second place would be Omnitraxus Prime, who Glossaryck describes as being so ancient he barely remembers having created him.
  • The Gems in Steven Universe are able to live for tens of thousands of years without aging at all. Pearl, Ruby, Sapphire, Lapis, Bismuth and formerly Rose Quartz are well over 6000 years old. Jasper is about 5500 years old. Amethyst is about 5000. Peridot is younger than Amethyst, but still likely to be centuries old. The Diamonds are the leaders of the whole race, who are said to have been made for the Diamonds, meaning at least one of them is older than even the oldest established Gem. Of the Diamonds, it seems likely that White Diamond is the eldest due both to her mural depicting her with the most colony planets and the deference she is given by the other Diamonds. Likewise, the youngest was probably Pink Diamond, who only had one: Earth.
  • Transformers:
    • We don't even know if there's any upper limit for spark lifespan, but Cybertronians can last millions of years if they take care of themselves. Especially old ones tend to be Old Soldier types. We've got Kup from Generation 1, Ratchet (and other Great War veterans) in Animated, and Jetfire from the film series. Jetfire was only showing his age due to lack of energon, but he was still established as much older than the average Cybertronian.
    • All of the above are practically children compared to Vector Prime, who was literally among the first robots to walk the face of Cybertron, and when asked his age, gives a figure of nine billion.
  • In Young Justice (2010), the Light has three immortal characters: Ra's al Ghul, who is 600-700; Vandal Savage, who is 50,000; and Klarion, who is "ageless" according to Word of God.

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