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"I was old when the molecules of your world joined and called themselves land and sea and fish and man.
That's why they come back to Z'ha'dum every time they're driven off. Because I'm here. They think they are showing respect. They don't understand. They did use to. But that was a long time ago. A million years."
Lorien, Babylon 5
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There are the old, and then there are the truly old. People usually die within a century or so. Cities and nations may last a few millennia, and we think them old, but the truly old are so much older.

They were already old when all the nations we know were born, even those now vanished into history. They can speak of Ancient Athens and Babylon as casually as we might speak of yesterday, for to them those ancient cities are but recent memories. They were there when brick was first laid on brick, over five thousand years ago. They may have watched the trilobites come, and go, with eyes older than the stars. They may even be older than time itself.

Contemplating such immense spans of time is like looking into an abyss, an inducement to vertigo, for they are more than we can grasp. Oh, we can talk about them easily enough, just more big numbers, but we can't intuit them. We all know what a second or a week feels like; a million years (or even ten thousand) is beyond all human experience. It is from this incomprehension that this trope draws its power, when done right, an evocation of incomprehensible age that appeals to our sense of wonder. Naturally, a Time Abyss must experience all the years they claim. It doesn't count if they skip over or sleep through them.

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While a Time Abyss is normally a person — perhaps not technically human, but a person nonetheless — objects can also qualify, everything from cities to coins. Imagine an alien monolith that has been sitting on the moon for three billion years. Think about all it has seen; the slow dance of the continents, the long march of evolution, the sudden flowering of civilization. Think, and wonder.

Geographical features can't qualify, though. We expect the hills to be old as dirt. We do not expect people, or any of their works, to be older than the hills.

Five thousand years or so is a decent estimate of the minimum age needed to qualify for this trope, excluding any hypothetical immortal caveman, and yet, in Science Fiction, a Time Abyss will typically be far older than that. Geological time scales are usually involved. In modern-day works of a religious bent (or not), Adam and Eve (or Cain) are likely candidates, as the first ever living sapient creatures.

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A god or major Eldritch Abomination is often a time abyss, as are Precursors and Elves (depending on how much better the elves are, many aren't old enough to follow this trope). These characters may decide that there's Nothing Left to Do but Die because Who Wants to Live Forever?. May even oscillate between Living Forever Is Awesome and bored eternity.

Meta-trope of Living Relic, where the being in question finds themselves the last survivor of their civilization, race, or even species long after their kind has become myth. Being a Time Abyss will often lead to a work's creator wanting to engage in some Exposition of Immortality to show just how much they remember.

See Time Skip for when a long time has passed between two events.


Examples:

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    Multimedia 
  • The 2000 Year Old Man: as titled, he wouldn't be old enough to qualify, but he claims his oldest memories are of living as a caveman. And he says he met Moses.
  • Many Transformers in all incarnations are millions of years old. Some individuals are older than the entire human species.
    • For an idea, in the Transformers: Generation 1 cartoon, Optimus and Megatron had been battling each other for millions of years before arriving to Earth. There's also how Shockwave didn't change much during the four million years the Autobots and the Decepticons in the Ark were in stasis (well, except for being minus one hand).
    • The Thirteen are considered old even by the standards of their species, including Vector Prime and The Fallen. The first creations of Primus, they were old before the war that's been going for millions of years got started. They don't even have faction insignias, since they pre-date their formations by eons (their toys notwithstanding).
      • In Transformers: Prime the Thirteen are said to have battled Unicron in ancient times. Unicron eventually became Earth by collecting debris as he drifted through space. In the canon novel Exodus, which takes place a few million years ago at most, Alpha Trion, one of the Thirteen, speaks to Optimus. In case you haven't figured it out that means Trion is at least five billion or so years old.
    • Kup and Alpha Trion from Transformers: Generation 1; Alpha Trion was around when the Quintessons were driven from Cybertron — about twelve million years ago. Kup could be anywhere from just as old to maybe "only" ten million years old; he's certainly older than Optimus Prime, who is at least nine million years old. Alpha Trion, in other media, was retconned into being one of the Thirteen, although this isn't easy to reconcile.
      • The Quintessons themselves, or at least the ones who were personally around before they lost Cybertron (e.g. the three-face who built the Transorganic energy-leech) also qualify.
    • ...And that's not counting all the resurrections.
    • Starscream is so good at the trope he named that he betrayed time!
      Starscream: My exo-structure was destroyed, but miraculously my spark endured, drifting helplessly thorough the depths of space, beyond the reach of time itself! — Beast Wars, "Possession"
    • Transformers: More than Meets the Eye states that Transformers actually can die of old age... it just takes a little under a billion years for it to happen. In fact they're so long-lived that, for many years, Cybertronians believed themselves to be biologically immortal, expressly because they'd never actually seen someone die of old age.
      • Another continuity (Transformers Regeneration One) has the Transformers aging much faster after their universe is cut-off from Primus, the multiversal being that created the Transformers and influences every universe they appear in.
    • In Transformers Animated, immense temporal units get thrown around casually, emphasizing just how long it is that they can live. For some examples, Ratchet, whose general demeanor is is middle aged, is millions of years old. Meanwhile, in a third season episode flashing back to Prowl's joining of Optimus Prime's team, Prowl claims to have spent a million years in meditation before they disturbed him, and shortly afterwards, Optimus casually refers to 50 or 60 years as being "no time at all" before they can all head back to Cybertron.
    • IDW Kup, mostly seen in The Transformers: Robots in Disguise, was already old when he was sent back in time to the beginning of the Dead Universe. Having taken The Slow Path back to the present before returning to the normal universe none the worse for wear, he is almost definitely older than the universe itself.
    • And then the 80's cartoon gave us Primacron, who in that continuity created Primus, Unicron and the Quintessons, and is still kicking around tampering with Creation in the present day.
  • X-Men villain Apocalypse was born in ancient Egypt and in various cartoons/comics boasts about things like how 20th/21st century superpowers/technology are no closer to besting him than Babylonian fire sticks were.
    "I am the rocks of the eternal shore; crash against me and be broken!"

    Anime and Manga 
  • Ronnie Schiatto from Baccano! is implied to be this. Although he doesn't give an exact date, he does drop a mention that he's been around since ancient times.
  • The Kiltgangs in Captain Earth are so incredibly old that Teppei notes how weird an ordinary day (and life) on Earth feels. Then there's also the problem that anyone the Designer's Children kiss will be confronted via a telepathic kiss with memories worth eons upon eons of aggressive space warrior lifestyle.
  • The Millennium Earl from D.Gray-Man is implied to be thousands of years old. He fought an as of yet unnamed hero wielding the Heart of Innocence during the Great Flood. He's the First of the Noah, and the only one who never reincarnated; moreover, while this made fans speculate that he was the biblical Noah, it's been recently implied that he's actually Adam.
  • Dragon Ball
    • The Kais. The youngest-looking of them is over five million years old and has not aged visibly in that time. Old Kai is roughly seventy-five million years old, according to Word of God.
    • The wizard Babidi, considering his father was killed five million years ago. Unlike the Kais though, Babidi does look quite old.
    • Dragon Ball Super states that Beerus was the one who sealed Old Kai in the sword 75 million years ago. As mentor of successive gods of destruction, Whis is probably a lot older than this.
    • Majin Buu, the Big Bad of the Buu saga(and Babidi's Dragon-in-Chief/killer ) came into being five million years ago. Or rather, that's what people believe. Buu has actually existed since time immemorial. While Bibidi (Babidi's father) thought he had created Buu, he actually only summoned him.
  • Gooyan, the true Big Bad in Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star, is old enough to remember the universe before the Big Bang. He states that the silence was peaceful and that the cacophony of life is abhorrent to him. His entire goal is to remove all life from the universe and return to that nothingness.
  • Guyver: Zoalords Archanfel and Waferdanos were born before the last Ice Age, making them at least three million years old. The aliens who created them had been tampering with life on Earth pretty much since it first appeared, a billion or so years ago.
  • The Pillar Men from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure are an ancient race of vampiric superbeings, stated to have been around since before the dawn of mankind.
  • Ajimu Najimi of Medaka Box is orders of magnitude older than the universe. Apparently it was quite boring before the Big Bang.
  • Dragons in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid are mentioned to have lifespans on the magnitude of billions of years.
  • Garterbelt is one in Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, being forced to relive all of Earth's history since the dinosaurs by God.
  • The Observer of Time in RahXephon: Pluralitas Concentio. Ayato becomes the Observer at the end of the movie.
  • It isn't clear how old Onashia is in Simoun (or how long she's ruled Simulacrum), but her personality definitely qualifies.
  • Soul Hunter: Jyoka and Fukki have been arround since before human's appearance on earth. And with the reveal that Jyoka have restarted the world so many times she herself lost track of the count, and the fact that we don't know exactly how old they where when they arrived on earth to begin with, they're likely several millions years old at least.
  • The Choushin from Tenchi Muyo!. For an uncounted period of time they searched for a being greater than themselves. It's unknown how long they existed like that, assuming time even applies to that state, but they eventually created the entire multiverse of space and time and have been around ever since. And if that doesn't mean anything to you, then one of them created a physical body to exist in which she is still alive and kicking over twenty thousand years later.
  • The living ruins under the town in Uzumaki. Older than sentient life, they exist to cause an Eternal Recurrence of madness and destruction. The story is just one cycle of their purpose.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, the Light of Ruin was a Cosmic Entity that has literally been around for eons.

    Comic Books 
  • Mammoth Mogul from Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog is an immortal, and at least twelve thousand years old.
  • Blackest Night:
    • The Life Entity is the oldest being in existence. It triggered the birth of life in the first place. Nekron, the cosmic void's response to life, is the second oldest being in existence.
    • The being known as Relic is even older than the Life Entity, since he is the only remaining member of the LightSmiths, who were the first discoverers and users of the emotional spectrum, doing things even the Guardians couldn't even imagine. Relic is from the previous universe before the current DC universe the Life Entity created.
  • The DCU: The Guardians of The Universe, source of Green Lantern's power. They were among the first sentient races to evolve, and are several billion years old - as individuals, that is, not just as a species. Additionally the other races that share ancestry with the Guardians, like the Zamorrans and the Controllers. Enemies of the Guardians, such as Larfleeze, Atrocitus, and the older Manhunters, also have ages in the billions. The Emotional Spectrum entities, born from the emotions of sentient life, are similarly old. Each one is stated to be the first living thing ever to experience the emotion of which they are an embodiment.
  • Doctor Strange foe Shuma Gorath and the other Many-Angled Ones were some of the first creatures to ever exist in the multiverse.
  • ElfQuest has quite a few long-lived characters which have been around since the humans were still in their stone age (with later stories taking place in a medievalish period), but ignoring those that got there by skipping millennia still leaves some examples: Two-Edge must be pushing twenty thousand years, was a legend in two troll kingdoms that have since crumbled, and had more or less secretly significant influence on the technological advancement of humankind. His mother, Winnowill saw her tribe of elves go from wild forest dwellers to civilised, was cut off from them and watched/played with humans for some ten thousand years. She was venerated as a goddess by two entirely separate human peoples. Timmain spent most of her time as a wolf, but probably still counts. When the immortal shapeshifting aliens that were the ancestors of elves were stranded on the World of Two Moons, she had lived through their space flight, which was long enough for the marmot and butterfly like animals they brought along to evolve into sentient humanoids. Before that, she was the last of her kind who remembered that they used to breed - which the immortals had given up due to overpopulation of their planet.
  • In Fables, Frau Totenkinder was originally a tribal shaman in the Paleolithic era.
  • Great Lakes Avengers: All indications are that Mr. Immortal is destined to be Galactus's equivalent in the next universe. His power is being completely incapable of dying (or rather, of staying dead). Not even the most powerful of omnipotent beings could kill him off for real, meaning that he will be this trope, whether he likes it or not. And he's a Joke Character.
  • Lucifer:
    • The Jin En Mok predate the creation of the universe and want to escape it.
    • Also The Silk Man, another survivor of a previous Creation, possibly the same one as the Jin En Mok, possibly not.
    • Lucifer ruled hell for 10 billion years - which means every single angel and lilim is older than this.
  • The Marvel Universe is full of this. Galactus is the sole survivor of the universe existing before the Big Bang. Each member of the Elders of the Universe is the last survivor of a forgotten race from billions of years ago who fanatically pursues a personal obsession such as collecting, gaming or fighting. The Proemials were born as the Universe was created, the Elder Gods emerged before life first appeared on Earth, the Eternals are a million years old (created by the even more ancient Celestials), the various Gods are thousands to tens of thousands of years old, the Master of the World is forty thousand years old, the Neanderthal Cole witnessed the sinking of Lemuria twenty thousand years ago, the mutant Selene is seventeen thousand years old, and Black Axe is almost fifteen thousand.
  • The New Gods of the Fourth World and their predecessors, the Old Gods, who predate the DC universe.
  • Perhaps the most extreme non-cosmic example of the Marvel Universe is John Sublime from New X-Men. He is a sentient bacteria who lives on Earth since the beginning of life on the planet, making him over 3 billion years old.
  • Walker from Powers. He's at least old enough to have been part of a clan of missing links, and his DNA has continued to mutate and evolve over time so that he fits right in today. Perhaps fortunately, perhaps unfortunately, his memory only goes back a very limited time, maybe about a hundred years. Things towards the beginning of that span start fading and getting blurry, and eventually are replaced with new memories. Occasionally a catalyst can give him flashes of some long dormant memories, though.
  • The two main antagonists of Rachel Rising are Lilith (in the popular origin story that she was Adam's first wife before Eve was created) and a Fallen Angel named Malus. So both of the bad guys have been around for as long as the human species has existed, or longer.
  • The world of The Sandman is implied to have a handful of inhabitants that inspire one of the quotes on the quotations page. For the most part, we are just assured that they're out there, somewhere. We do meet one or two of them, though.
    • The Endless, Lucifer, and any other angel are said to be ten billion years old, the figure Neil Gaiman used as the age of the universe. Though information revealed later in the comic seems to contradict this somewhat: only Destiny is anywhere near the age of the universe, whereas the rest of them only came into existence when lifeforms complex enough to experience the concept they embody first evolved (then again, lifeforms that qualify include stars and eldritch abominations, pushing things much earlier than might be expected). The angels and other mythical beings exist in a strange Schroedinger-esque state of being as old as time itself and having only existed for as long as humans believed in them — or put another way, they were already ancient when they came into existence.
    • Thessaly, a human being (as opposed to cosmic spiritual entity) and powerful witch, sounds Neolithic when she describes her age in A Game of You.
    • Brief Lives starts one chapter with a rough count of the number of humans and human-like beings on Earth who remember mammoths, Atlantis (the first one), dinosaurs, and were around before the Earth formed. Then it follows a 15,000-year old lawyer on his way to work, until he's crushed by a pile of falling bricks.
    • Endless Nights shows all the Endless around and established when the Earth was still cooling and lifeless, and the green energy of the Guardians of Oa was just a budding research project. So, at least four billion years old.
    • Wendel's Mound was a theatre before Shakespeare's race came to Britain.
      Shakespeare: "Before the Normans?"
      Dream: "Before the humans."
    • The Sandman: Overture introduces beings even older than The Endless: their parents Time (Chronos) and Night (Nyx).
  • Knuckles the Echidna and Chaos in Sonic the Comic were alive during the great war between the Echindnas and the Drakons which happened over eight thousand years ago.
  • The one-shot Superman story Strange Visitor depicts a Superman in a universe where he started fighting crime in 1938 at street-level, but grew Stronger with Age. By 2013, he's stronger than his mainline counterpart and has barely aged... but he finds, as the story goes on, that he's truly The Ageless, and by the end of the story, he's literally survived to the heat-death of the universe. Even moreso, his power has grown to the point that he can hold back the heat-death of the universe, which he does so for billions of years, until the last life in the universe (the god Anu) dies. Even through all this, though, he still remembers to save a group of astronauts that were lost in time in 1939.
  • Depending on his identity, DC's Time Trapper is this. One possible past is Superboy Prime. All the incarnations show the Time Trapper was born at least during the 30th-31st century, but survived to operate at the end of time itself.
  • The setting of Transmetropolitan qualifies, simply because they don't know how old their civilization is. Oh, they have time travel technology, and they have fixed dates for historical events at around our present and beyond - they just don't know what date it is RIGHT NOW. At some point, the ridiculously advanced society simply lost track of what date it was; they currently tell time by counting the amount of years from the historical events of their own history.
  • Ultimate Fantastic Four:
    • Namor has been imprisoned for over 9000 years. The worst this did to him was to cause a bit of muscular atrophy, like astronauts suffer from.
    • Likewise the Super-Skrull, the oldest living Skrull, is over a billion years old.
  • Vandal Savage is one of these, though you'd never know it just by looking at him. He began life as a caveman, and became immortal when exposed to a mysterious meteor. It was revealed in Final Crisis: Revelations that Savage is Cain. Yes, that Cain. In an episode of Justice League, it was shown that he was still kicking thirty thousand years after the end of the world, which, incidentally, he caused.
    • Savage's arch-nemesis, the Resurrection Man. Or maybe not; originally, every time he died, he reincarnated as a baby. Thanks to some scientific experimentation on his current incarnation, he now straight-up resurrects - and survives in this incarnation up through the future of DC One Million.

    Fanfiction 
  • Shinji in Alpha and Omega has been estimated to be 1.68 decillion years old (That's 33 zeroes. Or to put it another way, he's lived through roughly a billion billion universes).
    • Near the end, Shinji realizes one of the Leviathans is even older than he is.
  • The Teen Titans fic Belonging features Kishar, a female demon who, along with her friends, imprisoned Trigon in another dimension 200 million years ago. The friends made a Heroic Sacrifice, while she remained guarding the prison. In the end, she got bored and created humanity to have some company. Toward the end of the story, Kishar summons Death (to discuss the repercussions of a certain difficult choice made) and casually mentions it's been nearly a billion years since she last did that.
  • In the Child of the Storm universe, Doctor Strange admits that, between his longevity and constant time travel, he doesn't remember how old he is. He stopped counting at 100,000, and roughly estimates he's about five times that.
  • A Crown of Stars: Daniel, God-Emperor of Avalon, is 452,388 years old. His wife Rayana is slightly younger... Ten or twenty thousand years younger.
    Asuka’s brain was still refusing to process that number. He was 452,388 years old?! Stone tools weren’t that old! Fire wasn’t that old!
  • Dungeon Keeper Ami: The Light Gods, and Dark Gods as categories have existed since "a time so long ago that even the continents of this planet did not yet have their present shape".
  • In ELOZE, when speaking to the Sand Goddess, she laughs at the prospect of Ganon destroying the world.
    "THIS MEANS NOTHING TO ME. I WAS FIRST. I SHALL BE LAST. THERE WILL BE ONLY DESERT. AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING I, CHAOS, WILL RULE."
  • In Hope for the Heartless:
    • The Invisibles, creations and servants of the Fates themselves, are stated to have existed for a millennium.
    • Arawn, the Death Lord of Annuvin, who died several centuries ago, is revealed to have existed centuries (possibly millennia) before that through various means.
  • The Infinite Loops will, via "Groundhog Day" Loop and other variantions, eventually turn every Looper into one of these... subjectively, anyway.
  • Spirits in the Mansionverse are functionally immortal; Ammit the Devourer (yes, that one) and the One-Eyed Black Cat, two demons of unknown origins, still remember the Egyptian gods of old, and it is theorized some of the bedsheet ghosts in the Mansion are millenia-old ghosts who have, by now, completely forgotten their mortal life, and may have been Neanderthals for all we know.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • In Merely A Mare, Princess Luna casually mentions that she and her sister Celestia are more than four hundred million years old. Pinkie Pie, being Pinkie Pie, wonders how she'll ever fit that many candles on her birthday cake.
    • The God Empress of Ponykind cranks this Up to Eleven when Princess Celestia mentions her true age...which is a bit upwards of four billion years old.
    • Pony fanfiction in general likes to dwell on the princesses' staggering, incomprehensible age. Sometimes it's not pretty. Sometimes it just makes them willing to be a bit kooky because they have the perspective to know it'll all blow over in a few decades.
    • In the Pony POV Series, the Concepts (including which Celestia, Luna, and Discord) are this if they didn't use to be a pony. Celestia reveals at one point she was present for the Big Bang, meaning she's at least 13 billion years old — and she's one of the younger Concepts. That also doesn't take into account the fact time doesn't exist as we know it in the spirit world and they are likely far older than that. If only her physical body is taken into account, she's still several thousand years old The Elders are even older, predating time itself. and have seen the birth and death of the universe several times. In fact, Fauna Luster is the birth of the universe and Entropy is its death.
      • Tirek and the Moochick are both so old that they predate ponies as a sapient species.
    • The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: the Nightmare is old enough that it cannot even remember if it was male or female.
    • In Ἐλπίς ("Elpis", Greek for "hope"), Celestia is not just older than the universe—she is so incomprehensibly, unfathomably old that she has lived through the birth and death of countless universes. Every single time the universe comes to an end, she is forced to re-experience her memories of every single universe that had ever existed up to that point, and then is given a choice: to end the universe for good, or to "try again" and start the universe over from nothing. And every single time, she chooses to restart the universe, hoping that she can prevent The End of the World as We Know It this time. Over, and over, and over...
    • Downplayed in Austraeoh'. While we're never given exact ages for the elder alicorns (namely Celestia and Luna), they predate life as we know it. And they only discovered the world. Whoever built it was probably even older. Whitemane and other lesser alicorn are also old, but note quite to that level of ancient.
  • In Eternal (MLP), unicorns are immortal. Galaxy is the oldest, being older than time itself.
  • A New Chance Series: Many of the older Legendary Pokemon have been around for millions of years. A century in a Soul Dew doesn't really bother Father Latios as much as missing out on raising his children. The infant Lugia encountered in the Whirl Islands is alone older than human history.
  • Harry Potter, or at least a version of him, in On a Pale Horse is old enough that he uses the Earth's age as a unit of time, such as thinking he hadn't been a hero in "about four Earths worth of time".
  • Paris Burning has the personifications of some of the world's oldest cities, such as Jerusalem or Athens. Older still are the beings Cities consider to be the first of their kind, immortals of mysterious origin who reside in Africa and witnessed the birth of the first creatures we would recognize as human. And older, possibly, than them are the Things that sleep in the depths of the earth, one of which once said, "We do not feel pain because we existed before it."
  • In the Project Dark Jade Recursive Fanfic Her Shadowed Realm, due to absorbing the Dog and Horse Talismans, Jade has Complete Immortality, and has been trapped in the Shadow Realm so long that she was already ancient by the time Egypt started the Shadow games thousands of years ago!
  • Rainbow Brite and the War of Darkness notes that Rainbow Brite's lifetime has spanned millions of years, with no sign of slowing down anytime soon.
  • The Eternal War of Sonic X: Dark Chaos has raged between the Angels and Demons for five hundred trillion years. Maledict and Allysion are even older than that; they helped create the entire universe several times over.
  • In Things We Don't Tell Humans, along with the canon Time Abyss Alpha Trion, Jetfire/Skyfire is also that old. It's heavily implied that he was the consort of one of the original Primes.
  • In Top Dog, the roots of wizardry come from an ancient, powerfully magical civilization that existed on Earth about seventy thousand years ago. They created a race of Voluntary Shapeshifters to serve as shock troops in war, and, predictably enough, were destroyed by them. Those shapeshifters later became the Amerai, and the clan heads are still almost all original created Amerai, rather than newer born.
  • The Originals of The Universiad have lived for twelve thousand years.
  • Part of The Reveal in World Enough And Time is that both C.C. and V.V. are this, having existed before this current version of the world did. It's complicated to the point of Mind Screw in how it's presented and even C.C. isn't entirely certain how and why she's immortal as the Fog Of Ages has muddled her memory.

    Film — Animated 

    Film — Live-Action 
  • The Antareans in Cocoon. The first base they built here on Earth? It was Atlantis.
    Walter: Every ten or eleven thousand years or so, I make a terrible mistake.
  • Godzilla is suggested in the Godzilla (2014) prequel comic to have survived the Permian Extinction and shifted between dormancy and active hunting across 250 million years, appearing at various points throughout human history. The MUTOs eggs laid dormant in a massive skeleton for millions of years.
  • Ego, the Living Planet in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is a being that predates all known accounts, originally starting as a giant brain then forming a planet around it. In that time he's created humanoid extensions of himself to travel the stars and meet other races and creatures, reproducing with many of them. Unfortunately all that time spent interacting with other creatures has left him with a tepid opinion of the universe and, seeing that no one out there can match his existence, he wants to destroy the universe and create anew.
  • Howling II: Stirba: Werewolf Bitch: Unlike other werewolves, Stirba can restore her youth. She is very nearly ten thousand years old. Taken Up to Eleven in the Russian dub, where she predates humanity.
  • In Jupiter Ascending, the late Abrasax Matriarch was over 91 thousand years old when she died. Of the "younger" generation Kalique recently passed the 14 millennia mark and she's the middle child.
  • In The Last Witch Hunter, the Witch Queen claims to remember the times before mankind. Depending on which hominid you consider to be human already, her lifespan could be measured in millions of years.
  • John Oldman from The Man from Earth is just about fourteen thousand years old, according to his own count.
  • The nameless monster from No Such Thing, played by Robert John Burke, gives a speech about how he was there "When you were young", referring to life on Earth itself, in which he mentions that the period of time before we evolved into fish (i.e. the Precambrian era) was very boring for him.
  • The creature that possesses the body of Grant Grant in Slither claims to have been around for a billion years, which is likely considering that it travels from planet to planet via meteorite, a mode of transportation that takes tens of millions of years at minimum.
  • Malekith and the Dark Elves from Thor: The Dark World, who have waited in hibernation for thousands of years since losing the war against the Asgardians. Their race has existed since before the universe, and Malekith seems to remember the time before the light.
  • The Djinn in Wishmaster uses the most extreme variation, noting that his kind is older than time itself, possibly unintentionally created by God, and stuck in the void between worlds.

    Literature 
  • Dwellers in The Algebraist are old enough, and patient enough, to have populated the entire galaxy. Without faster than light drives. Individuals are explicitly said to be billions of years old, which means that dwellers are essentially a first-generation society.
  • Animorphs
    • The Chee are androids who came to Earth before human civilization and have since lived through most of human history. Erek, the one we see most often, casually mentions that he helped build the pyramids, among other things. (Though he just helped haul stones, an interesting subversion of the Ancient Astronauts theory.)
    • The Ellimist, who was already millions of years old when Earth was just beginning to form.
  • Circus of the Damned, the third Anita Blake novel, features a vampire named Mr. Oliver who claimed to be "older than time" which she took as hollow boasting until she realized he wasn't a human vampire, but a Homo erectus vampire. Due to the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, he went down far more easily than many enemies since then, making him rather disappointing in retrospect.
  • Arthur C. Clarke:
  • Jane Lindskold wrote the Athanor duology, where the title character of the first book, Changer, was literally one of the first two life forms on the planet, even before there were continents.
  • Any and all demon-like entities in The Bartimaeus Trilogy. For example, Bartimaeus used to be best friends with Ptolemy, and at that point, he was about 3000 years old.
  • The Disciples of Aldur and Torak in David Eddings's Belgariad and Malloreon. Polgara is the youngest coming in at a "mere" three thousand years old when the series begins. Belgarath himself is the oldest at seven thousand and shows no signs of dying any time soon. They don't generally act it, but they can be very casual in mentioning events that happened centuries previously in ways that other characters find disconcerting. The Prequel Belgarath the Sorcerer really hammers it home when you realise that he's almost as old as human civilization itself.
    • Even more so the two opposing sentient purposes that drive events throughout the books. And they are actually split personalities formed from the original purpose of the universe which is, oddly enough, as old as the universe itself. The gods fall somewhere in between.
  • David Eddings really likes this trope, with it appearing in similar forms in many of his books. The gods in The Elenium and Tamuli series casually talk about times dating back before humans and trolls had evolved from a neanderthal-esque species. Trolls themselves are apparently immortal, although not really given to remembering anything much about the past. Bhelliom and Klael are older than the planet itself, having created not only it but also many others before.
    • The Redemption of Althalus also has a similar setup to The Belgariad, with the titular Althalus becoming essentially immortal when he becomes the disciple of a god, and it worked the same for his even older evil counterpart.
  • The term is used explicitly in the tenth book of The Black Company by Glen Cook, as Blade ponders the perspective of the demon Shivetya, who is nearly as old as the plain of glittering stone between worlds and who may be as old as (or older than) the gods themselves. If the gods can be said to have properly existed.
  • Saetan, Andulvar, Mephis, Prothvar, Hekatah, and Cassandra from the Black Jewels series, all remember a cataclysmic war fifty thousand years ago, Cassandra more so than rest, as she is from a short-lived race among the Blood, meaning her natural lifespan should have been one fifty, at best, compared to the five thousand of the long lived races, never mind Geoffrey, Draca or Lorn, the first being from an ancient race long, long forgotten even fifty thousand years ago, the latter two being dragons who created the Blood in the first place.
  • In Boundary's Fall, High Wizard Aemon (around five thousand) and Emperor Alwellyn of the elves (over six). In fact, Alwellyn is only the second Emperor the elves have ever had.
  • Robin Goodfellow in Rob Thurman's Cal Leandros series casually mentions his encounters with famous historical and mythological figures, from Freud to Bacchus. He also mentions being around since before humans came out of the caves. Although he never comes out and says it, it is surmised that he is hundreds of thousands of years old.
  • Codex Alera has Alera, basically the Anthropomorphic Personification of the country, who remembers the last few ice ages. "I have seen thousands of millions of years, Octavian."
  • In Cosmicomics, Qfwfq recalls memories from before the Big Bang.
  • Days of Solomon Gursky begins with a normal human discovering the secret of living on after death via nanites as a result of a tiny choice he makes. He ultimately lives until the end of the universe as an increasingly powerful post-human but regrets having lost his wife. At the end of the universe he and other galaxy-sized super-beings use the collapse of reality to create new simulations of the universe, letting him outlive his own universe. However, the new universe is one in which he makes the opposite choice and doesn't discover immortality.
  • The Flowing Queen from the Dark Reflections Trilogy not only happens to be one of the old gods, who walked the Earth long before ancient Egypt, but also is stated to be older than any form of life in a sea.
  • The Salaxalan ghost in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. He has been around literally since the beginning of life on Earth, which means that he literally spent two billion years surrounded by mud and "slimy things with legs". The time has driven him... a little bonkers.
  • Discworld
    • In Going Postal, Anghammarad is a nineteen-thousand-year-old golem who finds work as a post officer. He expects to wait for the next universe (golems believe time goes in circles), so he will be able to deliver that one message he couldn't. As he says about "big green things with teeth". Bigger. Greener. More teeth. Quite appropriately, he is given the position of 'Extremely Senior Postman'.
      • And he/it's a comparative newcomer compared to the Golems of Um in Making Money, none of whom are less than twenty thousand years old (they don't speak the same common language, and that's at least twenty thousand years old), and some may be as much as sixty thousand years old.
    • In Hogfather, the first Bogeyman reminisces about the days before men had fire and metal, when the continents were different. Anybody who lives in his realm will never die, simply fade away.
      "You don't die here. You just get old... listening to the laughter..."
    • Similarly, the Elf king in Lords and Ladies dreams not just of such a time in the past that he witnessed personally and ruled over, but of the time to come when such will happen.
    • The Anthropomorphic Personification of Time is described as old, not for humans, but old like darkness and stars.
    • And then, of course, there is Death, who was there when the first lifeform died, and whose job it will be, at the end of the universe, to metaphorically put all the chairs on the tables and turn out the lights. Then there's his boss, Azrael, the Death of Universes, who can think on the answer to a question for long enough that a star can be born, live, die, and collapse into a black hole, and whose body parts are most easily measured in terms of the speed of light.
      • According to Eric, Death won't just be there to metaphorically "close up shop" but he'll be there when the next universe starts up.
    • Dios in Pyramids. At first glance, he is merely middle-aged or elderly. It quickly becomes apparent that he has some kind of personal knowledge of the past six thousand years of his country's history. At the end of the novel, it's shown that he is, more or less, a living Stable Time Loop. In one sense, that means he's as old as ETERNITY, but he only experiences it six thousand years at a time. "Only."
    • In The Last Continent, the Luggage spends so many millennia buried under the soils of XXXX that a layer of opal forms on its surface. While this could be a case of sleeping through the Time Abyss, it's awake and bored enough to be even more pissed than normal when someone finally digs it up.
      • Similarly, in The Science of Discworld, the Luggage gets stuck in the earth on our world for a couple of geological periods.
    • The Great A'tuin and the four elephants who stand on his back. How many millennia have they watched the play of stars and felt the feet of mortals walking upon their backs?
  • The dragons introduced in Diane Duane's The Door into Shadow can live to be thousands of years old and can remember clearly enough to calculate their ages by counting sunrises backwards. Furthermore, they also inherit the memories of their ancestors, although those memories tend to fade over a large number of generations as they're spread over a progressively larger number of descendants.
  • In Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle's Post Office, Dr. Dolittle encounters Mudface, the turtle who was a passenger on Noah's Ark. In a posthumously published volume, Dr. Dolittle and the Secret Lake, we eventually get to hear the Mudface's story of the Great Flood which is alluded to, but not presented, in the earlier volume.
  • Warhammer: The eponymous villain of the spin-off novel Drachenfels (written by Kim Newman) has prolonged his life through dark magic for thousands of years, and can recall living through events that are now dismissed as superstitious myths. When he finally dies, his last thought is the realization that, despite this, his entire lifespan is still only an eyeblink in time.
  • In the Dragaera series, Sethra Lavode: a vampire sorceress at least a quarter-million years old, with enough power to make gods nervous. She's friends with Vlad and likes to have people over to dinner.
  • The Dresden Files
    • Nicodemus and Tessa are two humans who act as hosts to fallen angels. Tessa (who looks 14-ish) was sold as a slave in ancient Egypt, before she met Nicodemus (who was already immortal and old at that point) and he gave her a coin containing her Fallen Angel. Nicodemus's precise age is unknown, as he makes a point to destroy the church's records of him every few centuries, but he wears the rope Judas used to hang himself around his neck as a tie. The angels that inhabit them are even older. At one point, Lasciel mocks the idea of Harry trying to change her mind, pointing out that if she hasn't in the thousands of years since she fell, he certainly isn't going to make a difference. Additionally, she boasts of living through "infinite thousands" of years, which might as well be true if the White God of the series is the actual creator of the universe.
    • Word of God implies that Demonreach predates the ice age. Cold Days gives the creation of The Well as around seventy-five thousand years ago (yet still simultaneously created a few thousand years after that, and after that, and after that), and it can be assumed that Demonreach came into being then or shortly (relatively) thereafter.
    • The Red King is a textbook example. Humanity doesn't know how old he is, because they haven't had a written language that long.
    • Mab is comfortably older than human civilization (Mother Winter is even older). The construct Archive (not its hosts, who expire) is also somewhere in the region of five millennia old. Then there are the various gods who are at least as old as their religions - so some of them will qualify. We also have the Old Ones, ancient Eldritch Abominations who have been banished from the world in ancient times - but are probably far older than that. In short, The Dresden Files is full of examples.
    • The current standout example is Archangel Uriel, who claims in Skin Game that he was fighting in wars before Earth had formed, and Word of God is that every angel "predates" linear time.
  • J'osui C'reln Reyr, the "Creature Doomed to Live" in The Elric Saga novel The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, who disobeyed Arioch and was condemned to live until he returned, ten thousand years later.
  • Mr. Turtle in An Exaltation of Larks by Robert Reed. Mr. Turtle is essentially a time traveler from the end of the universe where entropy has reached maximum and the underlying fabric of reality begins to break down - meaning he is at least a trillion years old. When the protagonist conjures up a number for his age (one hundred billion), Mr. Turtle simply laughs.
  • Fate of the Jedi has Abeloth.
  • Damon Julian of Fevre Dream is old even by vampire standards. It's impossible to say exactly how old, because he was born before vampires had language. At one point, his rival Joshua York argues that Damon isn't really evil, because deep down, part of him is still just a wild animal that can't imagine survival without killing weaker animals.
  • The Great Ship universe features numerous characters that are tens or hundreds of thousands of years old - the vast majority of humanity are nigh-unkillable Transhumans. Quee Lee, a recurring character, was originally born on Earth eons ago - and was one of the first people to receive the immortality treatments and emergency genes. The short story Alone features a sentient robot which has been walking the hull of the Great Ship for so long that it no longer remembers its name, function, or origin.
  • The short story "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" by Clifford Simak has an immortal human who was at least twenty-thousand years old. He tells an archeologist friend that he has learned to survive by "being on the fringes, always an observer, never a participant."
  • Luthe's teacher Goriolo in Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown "could almost remember when the moon was hung in the sky." The heroine's late mother studied with Luthe. For calibration, Luthe remembers the previous active Great Dragon, "one hundred generations ago".
  • Several beings and even races in Andrey Livadny's The History of the Galaxy have lost count at several billion years old. While this may put them in the Precursor category, they are still around. One novel in particular deals with an Energy Being living in the magnetic fields of a gas giant that members of a Lost Colony call God. A scientist contacts the being and finds out that it is the oldest being in the galaxy and, possibly, the universe. The mindless Forerunners that were originally thought to be the oldest lifeforms in the universe were, in fact, this being's creations meant to carry it from its dying homeworld to other gas giants. The Forerunners also had rudimentary DNA, and many of them ended up dying on planets... starting biological life. So, yes, this being is God in this sense. Others, while younger, include the Evolgs, a race of Energy Beings, and the Emulotti, Human Aliens whom the Evolgs helped become like them to escape a race of Abusive Precursors known as the Shvergs. All this happened billions of years ago, and still-functional Emulotti/Evolg machinery has been found. This kinda puts the other, better known races, who have been around only three million years ago, into the category of "just happened."
  • Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe he ends up thirty-seven times older than the universe due to incautious use of time travel. It starts when he's stuck on a planet from circa 1980 through the end of time.
    "The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million, they were the worst, too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline."
    • The same series gives us Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, who is rather annoyed at having accidentally become immortal and has therefore made it his goal to personally insult every being in the universe, in alphabetical order.
  • The Souls from The Host. They have been around for millennia and can live forever. They even spend up to centuries in hibernation when they are traveling in space. At one point, Wanderer, who has lost track of her own age she's been around so long, can only pinpoint an event as being "after the dinosaurs lived on Earth".
  • The titular creatures from "The Hounds of Tindalos" by Frank Belknap Long are from an age "before space and time". They can move casually through the angles of time, to hunt those humans who have travelled in time and devour them.
  • A frequent theme in H. P. Lovecraft's stories, where the characters find themselves in awe and dread of what primordial secrets they learn about, and usually find at the end that something from those times still lives, or at least exists actively even if they're not alive in the usual sense.
    • In At the Mountains of Madness, the city of the Elder Things had been continuously inhabited since the Earth was young, for billions of years. The same applies for whatever it is that lies beyond the titular mountains.
    • In "The Haunter of the Dark", the protagonist writes down the history of an ancient artifact after gazing into it. Said artifact was originally created on planet Yuggoth (AKA Pluto), and came into the possession of the aforementioned Elder Things on Earth billions of years ago. Later it was worshiped by a race of serpent-men in ancient Hyperborea, until it was lost for millions of years before being found by the first humans in Lemuria and millennia later again in ancient Egypt, where the eponymous Avatar of the god Nyarlathotep was given its familiar name, and was involved in the fall of an entire dynasty. A few thousand years later it was found in the ruins of a temple and brought to Providence, where an occult cult formed around it.
    • Yog-Sothoth is the Gate. Yog-Sothoth is the Key. Time and space are one in Yog-Sothoth, for he is the All-in-One and the One-in-All. He knows and sees all that is, all that was and all that will be. He knows the answer to every question but only very brave or very foolish mortals would dare to ask him, for the price of ultimate knowledge is great indeed.
    • All other Outer Gods and Great Old Ones count too; while Yog-Sothoth is unique in existing in the past, present and future at the same time, all Outer Gods are impossibly ancient (older than all of space and time, in fact). Great Old Ones are millions or billions of years old too, although they have spent a portion of it in hibernation when the stars aren't right for them.
    • Azathoth, seeing as he is the creator of the universe (not that he noticed it...)
    • "The Shadow Out of Time" plays this to full effect by having the older-than-humanity scroll written in the narrator's own handwriting. While the scroll's writer time traveled, the scroll itself, and what remains of the Great Race's city (not very much, really) are still over 200 million years old, and are both expected to last at least as long into the future.
    • The eponymous city in "The Nameless City".
    • Casually exaggerated in "The Call of Cthulhu", in which the narration claims that Cthulhu is rising for the first time in vigintillions of years. Depending on whether it's in American or British notation, that's either Ten-to-the-63rd or Ten-to-the-120th years, or a vastly greater span of time than the duration of the known universe.
  • Isaac Asimov
    • R. Daneel Olivaw, AKA Eto Demerzel, AKA Chetter Hummin is 22,000 years old at the end of Foundation and Earth. Gaia, a living planet is also very old, but younger than Daneel. Its exact age is unknown, but is estimated to be rougly 19,000 years.
    • The short story The Last Answer (not to be confused with the vastly more famous The Last Question) features a timeless entity that says it has no beginning or end, and simply is. Notably, the entity itself is not entirely pleased with this; for this reason it has created the entire universe, from which it harvests minds that it forces to think - eternally - for a way of ending itself.
    • Speaking of The Last Question, the AC. It has the memories of the first big AC on Earth. The story ends some unspecified (but extremely long) time after the heat death of the universe.
  • In Larklight, it turns out that Art and Myrtle's mother is a member of a race known as Shapers, so-called because they play an important role in creating solar systems.
  • Larry Niven
    • "Cautionary Tale" has an alien over ten thousand years old on a fruitless search for immortality.
    • Several of the Draco Tavern stories deal with this: "The Death Addict"'s danger-seeking alien doesn't have a specific age given, but he's afraid of living long enough to be "the last cluster of protons in the universe". The Chirpsithra have immense lifespans: one in "The Green Marauder" is almost two billion - though relativistic Time Dilation makes her subjective age somewhat less - and visited Earth before its atmosphere had oxygen.
    • In Ringworld's Children, the Protector Proserpina is around a million years old.
    • For human characters, Douglas Hooker from "The Ethics of Madness" becomes Known Space's record-holder for this trope, once he's spent 120,000 years (give or take a few centuries) fleeing his nemesis's vessel in a one-man ramship.
  • In The Last Rune series of books some of the Old Gods may have been around for long enough to fit this trope, but the dragons, who predate the creation of the universe, definitely qualify.
  • The Arisians in the Lensman series. Some of them are two billion years old, and they are capable of plans spanning the entire run of human history.
  • The Lord of the Rings
    • Treebeard, who's said to be the oldest of all living things, and Tom Bombadil, who claims to be older than the Earth and apparently just showed up all by himself right after the world was made. Lampshaded when Treebeard refers to the ancient wizard Gandalf as "young Master Gandalf", which even given that its his mortal form that's young its still a bold claim.
    • Both Ents and Elves are not subject to dying of old age, though Ents get "sleepy" and more and more tree-like as they age, and Elves eventually get "weary" of watching all the death and decay in Middle-Earth and decide to leave it to go to the Undying Lands. Fangorn (Treebeard) is unusual in the fact that he's still active despite being one of the first Ents. Most of the really old Elves in Middle-Earth in Frodo's day have been forbidden to (re-) enter Valinor unless/until they humble themselves and repent.
    • Elrond has outlived every nation in the world, but he's still a kid compared to Glorfindel (well, kind of) and Galadriel, who is, in some materials, described as being older than the sunnote , though the sun is relatively young (about 7000 years old at the time of the War of the Ring) in the LotRverse.
    • Círdan, described and only actually seen once, is the oldest Elf around and mentioned at the time of the War of the Ring. He was probably among the first to awaken of the elves at least 11,000 years prior to the War of the Ringnote . He's old enough to have a long, white beard. Elves don't grow beards until their third cycle in life, each cycle takes a few millennia.
    • Gandalf, Radagast, Saruman, and Sauron are actually just 2,000 year old, temporary forms of the Maiar (i.e Angels), all of whom entered Eä (the universe) at the beginning of time. Sauron's particular physical form is older than the others (it was fixed after the Fall of Numenor, over 3,000 years before the War of the Ring), and he had a load of other shapes before that.
    • The Witch-King is close to 5,000 years old, though he doesn't quite make it. He lasts 4800 years or so.
    • Gandalf states that there exist creatures even older than Sauron, which can be reconciled with the above in at least two ways, but only with careful interpretation.
    • The Silmarillion: Galadriel is indeed ancient, but one will be astonished when they discover that her parents Finarfin and Eärwen are apparently still alive in Valinor. Finarfin's mother Indis is presumably living there too, as well as Eärwen's father Olwë and his unnamed wife. All of them are at least 12,000 years old. So Galadriel not only has a living mother and father, but three living grandparents. Source material establishes that Elves nevernote  die permanently from the world, and that their "underworld" is sort of a penalty box.
      • It's also likely that Fëanor's widow Nerdanel still lives in Valinor, too. She's older than Finarfin and his wife, but still younger than Indis and Olwë.
      • The Ainur (Valar and Maiar), as well as Ungoliant, are truly ageless, all of them being older than the physical planet. Actually they are older than time itself, which doesn't even have any real meaning to such divine beings.
  • In The Lorax, the titular creature is as old as time itself.
  • Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont has a background story going back 300,000 years. And many of the gods and Ascendants were old even back then.
    • Kallor, the High King, has notched up a hundred thousand years, without the benefit of Ascension even (long story short, he was cursed with immortality but not eternal youth for being such a genocidal bastard).
    • The T'lan Imass, an extremely important race in the world's history, have each lived for over 300,000 years. They have passed this time hunting down and exterminating all remnants of the Jaghut, who had oppressed them in that distant past. Their racial history goes back into unknowable distances, until 300,000 years before the main story, when nearly all those who still survived took part in a necromantic ritual that made them all undead.
    • Anomander Rake. He was the first son of the goddess that created existence. (Well, except for the warren of chaos and the eldritch abominations in it.) The Tiste Andii lived for at least thousands of years in their warren before they emerged into the normal world over 300000 years ago. They're so old they don't want to live any more. They just don't care.
    • The Errant was around by the time The Kharkanas Trilogy prequel takes place and is still alive and kicking during the main series, making him older than many of the current gods of the setting and wittness to the rise and fall of entire civilizations.
  • In Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, the Norn Queen is the oldest living thing on the planet, more than twice as old as her closest competition. Said competition is Amerasu, matriarch of the Sithi, who is millennia old and revered as an ancient even by a race of immortals. Exactly how old that makes the Norn Queen probably doesn't bear thinking about.
  • Master Secundus Minutius Hora, the keeper of time from Momo by Michael Ende. His apparent age fluctuates wildly, but twice he's described as "old, not as an old man, but as a mountain".
  • In The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, the Great Redoubt is an incredibly ancient City in a Pyramid, with a history that "dealt not with odd thousands of years; but with very millions; aye, away back into what they of that Age conceived to be the early days of the earth, when the sun, maybe, still gloomed dully..."
  • The One Who Eats Monsters: Ryn is old enough to remember when humans started using fire, and doesn't bother learning America's name since the country is too young for her to care about.
  • In the Parrish Plessis series, Brilliance is a Homo erectus, making her over a million years old. She was infected with The Corruption, but managed to suppress and harness it to gain eternal life.
  • The Power of Five: The Librarian, and the Old Ones.
  • Remy Chandler, a.k.a. Seraph Remiel, of the Remy Chandler Novels, remembers, among other things, the War in Heaven, watching Noah as he built the Ark, and a time when humans carried melee weapons around as naturally as modern people carry iPods and cell phones. His memories are interspersed with very recent recollections (less than fifty years at the outside) of his wife, his dog, and his friend, which lends the times when he does remember way back an air of authenticity.
  • In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series:
    • The Inhibitors, a race of genocidal machines dedicated to wiping out all civilizations they deem too advanced, are millions of years old, perhaps even older. Interestingly, their ultimate purpose will not be fulfilled for another three billion years.
    • In the first novel, the "Sun Stealer" has been around for at least 900,000 years, Body Surfing from person to person.
  • In The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, most of the Immortals are centuries old at the very least, but that's nothing compared to the beings that ruled the world before Humans: The Next Generation are thousands of years old, and are still adolescents compared to the Elders, who in turn were young compared to the Great Elders. The Archons are even older, the Ancients were around before them, and the oldest are the Earthlords, who are at least tens of millions of years old.
  • The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin has the Lord in White, who was estimated to have an age several times the heat death point of the universe.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire
    • The Wall is said to have been built over 8000 years ago.
    • The weirwoods don't die of old age; some might be around in Westeros from before the Age of Dawn (~12000 years).
    • However, note that history is unreliable in-universe. Medieval Stasis appears in this world, and there are hints that there's a story-relevant reason for it. So the Wall and weirwoods *may* be as old as we're told, but maybe not.
  • The Lilim in Stardust are described as being old enough to have noticed continental shift and oceanic movements. At one point, the youngest of them looks out over a petrified forest and recalls when it was a collection of seedlings.
  • Charles Sheffield's Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about a man who has his wife cryogenically frozen to search for a cure to a nonspecific brain malady. He himself is frozen, after reading up on contemporary music to provide research as a reason to thaw him out. No matter how far into the future he goes, however, his wife's illness is never cured. Eventually most of humanity transcends its former species and leaves him in the dust. His body eventually falls apart from all the freezing and thawing and his brain gets uploaded into a computer. Eons pass, he gets cloned a few billion times, merges with the clones, becomes a god, and restores his wife on his own. The end.
  • In War of the Dreaming by John C. Wright, this applies to Oberon and Titania, who were around long before humans, and are implied to have been there when life first evolved on earth.
  • Jack Chalker's Well World has Nathan Brazil, who is as old as they come and then some, pull this one sometimes. He claims to have rebooted the Universe several times. But then, he also admits to being a very talented compulsive liar.
  • A Wrinkle in Time
    • Mrs Whatsit gives her age as some absurdly precise number in the billions of years (2,379,152,497 years, 8 months, and 3-days-old exactly). She is still far younger than Mrs Who and Mrs Which.
    • The Black Thing is probably almost as old as time.
  • Xeelee Sequence
    • The Xeelee themselves are only 200 million years younger than the Universe itself. They created the Antixeelee made of Tachyons to take their seeds back in time to when Baryonic matter becomes stable enough for them to exist. They then spend the next 10 billion years building a great attractor to leave this existence. Some Xeelee have seen the entire universe from the beginning.
    • A group of humans known as the "Jasofts" - Collaborators with the alien overlords who conquered Earth, who were given eternal life in return.
    My name is Luru Parz. I was born in the year AD 5279, as humans once counted time. Now I have lived so long that such dates have no meaning. We have lost the years, lost them in orders of magnitude.
  • Needful Things: Leeland Gaunt has been roaming the Earth for ages, playing his sick mind games with people all throughout history.
  • Robert Silverberg's Across a Billion Years features archaeologists searching for artifacts of an ancient race which disappeared about that long ago. Throughout the novel, they first discover some sentient robots, and toward the end, the remnants of the race itself... a few thousand mindless husks on life support. It has been fifty thousand years since one died. Four million years since one was born.
  • The last part of The World at the End of Time, set at 10^40 years in the future (see the Literature folder on the Quotes section), has the plasma-based entity Wan-To, who lives inside stars, precariously surviving in proton decay-produced energy and pondering to leave its dead star at its time to go to a black hole where he'll be able to live much longer before that finally decays too.Viktor Sorricaine, the main human protagonist of the novel, is faring much better having lived to those faraway times too thanks to both relativistic time dilation and suspended animation.
  • R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse has the Nonmen, a race that was cursed with immortality, which their minds are not equipped to handle. After tens of thousands of years, they tend to suffer from The Fog of Ages and forget most of their lives. Those among them called Erratics can only remember something if it's associated with pain and suffering. They're driven to kill everything they love so that they can lock it in their minds.
  • Zarathan, the setting of The Balanced Sword, has gods, demons, Ancient Saurans (Precursors who never went anywhere), and a few very long-lived wizards, so it happens more often than you might think that a character casually mentions how this reminds them of something that happened to them four hundred thousand years ago.
  • Pretty much any book about astronomy that deals with the future of the Universe will feature a Time Abyss. Such an example is Deep Time, a book that follows the life of a proton from shortly after the Big Bang to the very far future when it disintegrates because of proton decay, going even much further away with a positron born in the latter event.
  • Brandon Sanderson:
    • Wax and Wayne: The older kandra (revered as Faceless Immortals carrying out God's will) are often treated this way. They have centuries of experience infiltrating and manipulating human culture, and are in fact older than the world itself. The thing is, the world is only a few hundred years old, since God had to restructure the old, dying world in order to save everyone. So they are technically not examples. Note that the younger kandra are also older than the world (if only by a century or two), but they don't act with the same age because they were mostly confined to their Homeland before the world was changed.
    • The Stormlight Archive: The ten Heralds of the Almighty are at absolute minimum four and a half thousand years old; they spent an unknown amount of time (but more than a few centuries) being repeatedly resurrected to help humanity fight off the Desolations, until they finally had enough and gave up their oaths. They wandered the world in anonymity for four thousand years, slowly going more and more insane.
    • Then there's Hoid. He's been seen in every series in The Cosmere, including ones that were centuries apart, and looks as old as he wants to. In Oathbringer, Shallan asks him if he's a Herald, and when he confirms he's not that, she asks if he's as old as they are. He says that he had lived dozens of lifetimes before they were even born. He was present at the Shattering of Adonalsium, making him roughly the same age as all the original Shards.
      Hoid: Some men, as they age, grow kinder. I am not one of those, for I have seen how the cosmere can mistreat the innocent—and that leaves me disinclined toward kindness. Some men, as they age, grow wiser. I am not one of those, for wisdom and I have always been at cross-purposes, and I have yet to learn the tongue in which she speaks. Some men, as they age, grow more cynical. I, fortunately, am not one of those. If I were, the very air would warp around me, sucking in all emotion, leaving only scorn. Other men... other men, as they age, merely grow stranger. I fear that I am one of those. I am the bones of a foreign species left drying on the plain that was once, long ago, a sea. A curiosity, perhaps a reminder, that all has not always been as it is now.
  • In The Sack, the titular alien is four hundred thousand years old, and has been the Last of Its Kind for ten thousand of these.
  • In John Maddox Roberts' science fiction novel Space Angel, the crew of the eponymous starship encounter a being that lost a battle with another of it's kind and wrapped itself in rock to hibernate and regenerate. By the time the Space Angel's crew find it, that rock had evolved into an Earth-like planet, complete with a fully-functioning ecosystem. Although never explicitly stated, it is implied that the being had existed since very near the beginning of the universe.
  • Domina: When asked how old she is, Silk says she is older than every single living human combined, which totals up to two trillion years. She then laughs, claiming to be far older than that. It's implied that this number includes all her bodies added together, so by a straight timeline she's likely significantly younger.
  • The Downstreamers from Stephen Baxter's Manifold series are humans who have survived past the heat death of the Universe, over 10117 years.
  • In Fred, The Vampire Accountant, Fred meets a vampire named Deborah, who is a representative of the Blood Council, which oversees all vampires in the world. When Fred speaks to Lilian about the Blood Council, she tells him that it's composed of some of the oldest and most powerful vampires and is not to be trifled with. Fred suggests that Deborah can't be that old given her name. Lilian counters that the name Deborah is in the Bible, making it at least that old. Several chapters later, Deborah and Fred are sitting in the woods by a campfire, when the former starts talking about how she used to hunt humans before there was such a thing as civilization. Fred realizes that Deborah is incredibly old. She habitually calls any vampire under 1000 years old a child.
  • Atoning Unifex in Julian May's Saga of the Exiles and Galactic Milieu is an ancient alien responsible for first setting up the Galactic Milieu. It's eventually revealed that it is actually Mark Remillard, an immortal human who was one of those who travelled back in time to the Pliocene era and ultimately took the long way around to get back to the present, making him around six million years old.
  • Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower: The Old Gods who came into existence before humanity are the subject of superstitious awe even from other gods. The Strength and Patience of the Hill's earliest memories are of an ocean filled with trilobites, which have been extinct for 250 million years on Earth; after continental drift deposited it on land, it came to enjoy watching the slow revolution of the solar system around the galactic core.
  • Good Omens: Aziraphale and Crowley are both at least as old as life on earth (both were active in and around the Garden of Eden), although since the timeline of Good Omens is based on the Ussher Chronology, this is less impressive than it otherwise would be.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Babylon 5: Lorien and most, if not all, First Ones encapsulate this trope. Lorien most embodies it, however; he was the first sentient being ever (in the Milky Way, at least).
  • In the Being Human (UK) episode "The War Child", Mr. Snow, the leader of the Old Ones, is old enough that every vampire currently undead descends from him. His actual age is never given, but he claims to have visited Egypt while it was ruled by the pharaohs and once "met the son of a carpenter" (implied to be Jesus Christ).
  • Various beings in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel. There are demons who have been plotting and working towards various ends since before recorded history. One example is the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart of Wolfram and Hart. Minor demons during the time of Illyria, they have spent the intervening millennia developing a deep control over the mortal and hellish dimensions.
  • The Daily Show and The Colbert Report both liked to jokingly identify John McCain as an unbelievably ancient entity — someone who has walked with Jesus, done cave paintings, and crawled out of the primordial seas. Lampshaded with the joke that "The only thing older than jokes about John McCain's age is... John McCain. " And yet, according to his wife Cindy McCain (via an Onion video) "He's not nearly so old as the Ancient Ones. His outer shell has not even yet calcified."
  • Doctor Who:
    • While the Doctor technically doesn't qualify, being only 2000ish as of the Twelfth Doctor (he says), they are often portrayed in this manner. Their travels have allowed them to be there for a great deal of the history of many cultures, and after the loss of their own people, a lifetime of agonizing choices between "horrible" and "more horrible", and seeing the cruelty of many to others, they feel old and tired. They've seen the heat death of the universe, and the first written words of all time were written to them. They've lived much more than characters who have lived much longer. Though following "Hell Bent", where the Twelfth Doctor took the long way around spending billions of years making it through his diamond wall in his own personal hell, resetting a new version of himself after the last version died, and remembering every bit of it in the Confession Dial, while physically they're not much older than they were prior to "Hell Bent", mentally they're billions of years old.
    • The Time Lords are this as a culture. While merely long-lived as individuals, the sheer scope of their civilisation's history is staggering. We learn during the course of the series that they are "the oldest civilisation", have had "ten million years of absolute power", and "a billion years of history". They "practically invented" black holes and mastered teleportation "when the universe was less than half its present size". Their history is so long and filled with so many dubious events that even most modern Time Lords are not aware of much of it, and genuine historical events and artifacts are considered mere myths and legends even amongst themselves.
    • Sutekh was imprisoned thousands of years ago, the war inspiring Egyptian mythology, and was active for thousands of years before that.
    • The Fendahl might not qualify, considering that it has technically been dead for 12 million years.
    • The Great Vampires fought against the Time Lords during the early years of the universe, and the only known survivor hid in exo-space (albeit mostly dead) since then.
    • The Face of Boe lives to be more than 5 billion years old.
    • Jack Harkness, being immortal and effectively indestructible, is headed for this at some point. Assuming the line about him becoming the Face of Boe wasn't just a joke, he has a good few billion years left before running Out of Continues. He's currently over 2000 years old, having been Buried Alive for two millennia under Roman Cardiff.
    • The Beast claims to be from before time, and even if that isn't true he is still so old that his language predates the Time Lords.
    • The Racnoss Empress fled and hid almost five billion years ago, and another Racnoss ship is the core of planet Earth. No, the ship isn't hidden in the core; it is the actual, original core, around which the planet formed.
    • The Weeping Angels are so ancient, even the Doctor doesn't have a clue what they are or where they come from. Even the Time Lords call them "the Weeping Angels of old".
    • "The Doctor's Wife": When House hijacks the TARDIS and goes adventuring, it casually mentions that it "should have done this half a million years ago."
    • Ashildr/Me takes The Slow Path from Viking Scandinavia all the way to the final moments of the Universe, but only has a Human-sized memory, leading to an extreme case of The Fog of Ages. What makes this even more impressive is that she's Ageless, but not Invulnerable — and yet she outlives all other Immortals "brilliantly". Before the total collapse of everything, she is picked up by the Doctor and sets off to have her own adventures in space and time, during which she will truly have no equals.
  • The Artifact in Eureka is dated to the previous universe. How they have managed to date something that is older than matter itself is unclear. Of course, considering that the theory of continuing Big Bangs and Big Crunches (i.e. the universe collapsing and re-expanding every so often) has been disproven by new evidence, this may no longer be the case.
  • The Good Place:
    • Gen. Her name is short for "Hydrogen", because that was the only thing that existed when she was created.
    • Michael mentions a few times that he has existed for as long as the universe. It's unclear if that makes him older or younger than Gen, and the afterlife's bizarre timeline doesn't help.
  • Methos in Highlander: The Series is at least 5,000 years old. He may actually be much older than that as he claims to not really remember the time before he took his first head, which was about 5,000 years ago. His ancientness is somehow even more disorienting because he seems like such a normal guy. He is also one of the four immortals who inspired the "Four Horsemen" myth (Methos was Death). The episode where this is revealed shows that the other three are also still alive (until the end of the episode, that is).
  • Lexx:
    • The Prince of Fire claims to have existed since the beginning of time. Which makes sense, since he's essentially Satan.
    • The Time Prophet's own age is unknown, but her memory stretches into the endless cycles of the universe, and she has personally lived from before Brunnis 1 was abandoned to at least the fall of Brunnis-2. It's hinted Vlad, being played by the same actress, is the Time Prophet herself still alive to the present day being tens of thousands of years old.
  • Mr. Young: Mrs. Byrne is so old, she misses the days before the Sun existed.
  • Once Upon a Time: Many of the magical creatures like the fairies (the Blue Fairy being a notable standout) are thousands of years old. Mother Gothel, from season seven, takes this a step further: she caused the extinction of humanity and the erasure of magic in The Land Without Magic thousands of years ago, and is actually the current Mother Nature.
  • Played with interestingly in an episode of The Orville. The crew discovers a planet that phases in and out of our reality, and whenever it reappears, a period of about ten thousand years has passed on the planet. So to the inhabitants of the planet, the Orville's crew are the abyss.
  • In Power Rangers, aliens and other nonhumans tend to be longlived. The backstory of most series was either 10,000 years ago (MMPR, Jungle Fury) or 3,000 years ago (Lost Galaxy, Wild Force) and pretty much any major player outside the teenagers with attitudes will have been there for round one. And of course, being around thousands of years ago doesn't mean you are only that old. Zordon, the original mentor, is especially portrayed as being just so ancient he knows everything you could possibly need to know. However, the character who truly takes the (planet-sized birthday) cake is Power Rangers Operation Overdrive's Sentinel Knight. The five Plot Coupons are scattered across the world because the continents were one when he placed them on Earth. That places PROO's backstory over 250 million years ago. The villains were a Sealed Evil in a Can case, so not even Sentinel's oldest enemies qualify - they slept through all that time while he has been active.
  • Stargate-verse
    • Merlin/Myrddin in Stargate SG-1. Lived some 10,000 years ago, then "ascended" into an energy being, only to take back human form millennia later, living amidst humans, then going for suspended animation and sleeping there for a few hundred years more. When he transfers his memories to Daniel Jackson, Daniel notes that "he wasn't kidding about having lived many lifetimes".
    • A lot of aliens in the series are extremely long lived. Many of the Goa'uld System Lords such as Ra and Apophis were running galaxy wide empires at least 5000 years ago, Asgard such as Thor and Loki inspired the idea for the Norse gods and live on through cloning and mind transfers, the original Replicators from the Pegasus galaxy were built to fight the Wraith over 10,000 years ago, many of those Wraith are also still around due to their own regenerative abilities, and many of the Ancients, notably the ones who Ascended have been around for 10,000 years minimum. In fact, a lot of Ancient technology also counts, including Atlantis, which is at least 1 million years old. The Stargates and Destiny are even older.
    • Thanks to the cancellation of Stargate Universe, we'll never know what Rush meant when he said that the Destiny's mission involves finding a structure as old as the Universe itself.
  • Star Trek
    • The Immortal Flint from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode, Requiem For Methuselah.
      • In the episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, Bele claims to have been chasing the political "criminal" Lokai for 50,000 years. He later discovers that in his absence, his people have annihilated each other in a genocidal race war.
      • The Guardian of Forever, from "The City on the Edge of Forever." The reason it can serve as a Portal to the Past is because it was physically there for everything.
    • The Borg Collective is once described as "thousands of centuries" old.
    • The disembodied mind Sargon has existed for at least 500,000 years.
    • The Q Continuum are a race of bodiless Energy Being creatures that evolved from a mortal race that existed shortly after the formation of the universe; some of the oldest members of the Q race are noted to be upwards of 10 billion years old or more. The principal Q with the most screen time in the series (portrayed by John De Lancie) that has a rivalry with Captain Picard, notes offhand that he had a romance with another Q that has been "on again and off again" for 5 billion years; making him at least that old, if not more sonote .
  • Supernatural:
    • Death. With massive amounts of terror, Uncanny Valley, Cryptic Conversation, and all other manner of unsettling tropes. In his few appearances he has explained several times that he will persist throughout eternity, and is the only thing that could truly never die. He also claims that he's destined to be the one to eventually reap God as well.
      Death: This is one little planet, in one tiny system, in a galaxy that's barely out of its diapers. I'm old, Dean. Very old. So I invite you to contemplate how insignificant I find you.
      Dean: I gotta ask, how old are you?
      Death: As old as God. Maybe older. Neither of us can remember anymore. Life, Death, chicken, egg.
    • Angels are no slouches either. Castiel (one of the less important angels) remembers when the first fish crawled its way onto land. One of his older brothers, the Archangel Michael, told him not to step on it. "Big plans for that fish." Even more so for the Archangels, who were eventually revealed to predate the universe itself.
    • The Leviathans were apparently one of God's first creations.
    • The Darkness is so old she has no idea who Death is, since she was sealed away before Death existed as a concept. It turns out that she and God are "siblings", the first beings to ever exist.
    • The Nameless Entity that rules the void known only as the Empty is implied to be the oldest of them all, as he predates The Darkness, God, Death and Creation, as he was the original nonexistence before everything.
  • While even "young" vampires in True Blood are generally old by human standards, only a handful reach the ages required to qualify as a time abyss. From what we see of the handful who do, though including Russell Edgington on the low end, along with Warlow and Lilith as more dramatic examples, that's probably a very good thing.
  • The Ultramen certainly qualify. Every single known individual is thousands of years old, with the original Ultraman claiming to be twenty thousand years old in the final episode of his series. Ultraman Mebius and Ultraman Zero are less than seven thousand years old, and considered teenagers. The oldest known Ultras are Physical Gods with Mysterious Pasts Ultraman King and Ultraman Noa, who are both over 300 thousand years old, while the Father of Ultra (the oldest standard Ultra) is over 130 thousand.
  • Played for Laughs in Wizards of Waverly Place. Juliet is a vampire who is over 9500 years old, and Prof. Crumbs, the headmaster of Wiztech, considers it a compliment when Alex says he doesn't look a day over 800, and was an adult when the wheel was invented, making him nearly as old as Juliet.

    Music 
  • This music video of Barber's Adagio for Strings uses this trope by focusing on a tree while human buildings fade in and out around it.
  • Time Forgotten One by vocaloid KAITO. It takes a bit of thinking to realize he's just a statue
  • "Farewell..." by Dreamtale.
  • GWAR brings this up from time time, stating to have been alive since the beginning of time after the creation of the universe by the Master, being banished to Earth for 65 million years ago by the Master, wiping out the dinosaurs, inventing music, creating the human race from prehistoric animals, wreaking havoc on human civilizations, and being Frozen in Time for thousands of years by the Master until the 1980s.
  • A concept album The Elders by KISS introduces the titular Council of Elders with "When the Earth was young, they were already old..."
  • Most likely Universe Man from the They Might Be Giants song "Particle Man" represents this trope seeing as he has a watch with a minute hand, millennium hand and an eon hand.

    Mythology and Religion 
  • According to most major monotheistic religions in the world today, God is not technically one of these, because age is a foreign concept; time can only be an abyss to those that are bound by it. God wasn't created or born like humans are, He didn't have a beginning, He IS the beginning, everything is here because of Him therefore making Him the abyss rather than time. Titles like Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the one who was (existed since the beginning), who is (presently is), and who is yet to come (always will exist), the Great I Am are richly deserved.
    • According to some philosophers, time itself is meaningless to God. He created time, and existed before... He existed when... well, explaining it is hard, though in one analogy God is like the author of a book. At what point does an author exist in his book's - his universe's - internal timeline? He can turn to the first page, or to the last page. He can write scenes out of order, go back and forth, and generally follow no continuity or causality.
      "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."
      — 2 Peter 3:8, NIV translation
    • Enoch, father of the more famous Methuselah, is sometimes argued to have lived the longest out of all humans named in the Bible. This is because he is mentioned to have been "taken by God" and to "not see death", which is interpreted to mean he never actually died and was carried to Heaven while still alive. Given common Biblical timelines, that would make him around 5,000 years old.
    • A similar argument is sometimes made for Elijah as well, although since he only lived around 900 BC he hasn't quite reached this trope yet.
  • In Hindu Mythology, reality and everything within it lasts as long as the lifetime of Brahma the creator. Brahma will live to be a hundred years old, except that a single day in his life is over four billion human years.
    • Assuming he lived even so much as a hundred "days" Brahma would have by then lived for over 400 billion years. To put that in perspective, it's currently believed that the universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old. If we get into the years the number goes into astronomical proportions longer than the predicated life span of the universe. Entire universes could die and be reborn many times over before Brahma ever even reached "middle age", such concepts as "time" and "space" might very well collapse and become meaningless terms as the wear and tear of the eons go on.
      • The Shiva Purana states that Vishnu ages one day in the time that it takes Brahma to grow old and die, and that Shiva, in turn, ages one day in the time that it takes Vishnu to grow old and die.
  • Depending on religion and whether any given denomination thereof believes in and/or counts the afterlife a person's spirit may live as long as the respective deity would, given a belief in a spirit's eternal qualities.
  • Father Time.
  • The Jade Emperor of Chinese Mythology didn't ascend to the throne until he was nearly 227 million years old.

    Radio 
  • Nicholas Parsons is regularly claimed to be as old as time by panelists on Just a Minute and other BBC Radio 4 programmes. On The Unbelievable Truth, someone claimed that there could be a parrot that was older than him, to which David Mitchell replied "Nicholas Parsons has always...been."

    Roleplay 
  • Fesxis from Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues has lived for so long that she's possessed hundreds of bodies, and been everything from a destroyer to a saviour. This has shaped her philosophy, leading her to develop a personal code of honour rather than act aimlessly like she's done for so long.
  • The Abyss is an immortal Homo habilis from the Global Guardians PBEM Universe. He's kept most of his memories of the last million and a half years (though he's been alive for 2 million years... his memory of his early days is no longer so clear). He once gave a Hannibal Lecture in which he described the day he was nearly killed by a terror bird.
  • From Yukari Is Free, B-3-K claims to be over 400,000 years old, and that the alien force she heralds, the Cluster, are even older.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Semyon Nikolaev, The Archmage and a Trickster Mentor Extraordinaire from Age of Aquarius. We do not learn what exactly he is, presumably some kind of spirit that is permanently embodied, but his age is stated by Word of God to be 14000 or 15000 years.
  • Dungeons & Dragons
    • Dragons are very much like this. They have about ten age categories, from wyrmling to great wyrm, which takes over a thousand years. Then they're just about fully grown and live a few more thousand years before old age starts to set in. And some of them can become truly immortal.
      • Time Dragons, the most powerful of the epic dragons, are truly immortal. Able to travel in time at will, a Time Dragon could be tens of thousands of years old or ten minutes old, and still be a Great Wyrm in both cases thanks to how their age is tied to the time stream. They keep their lairs in places unimaginably distant in space and time, and rarely bother to even interact with gods.
    • All Aboleths have genetic eidetic memory going back to before the dawn of the gods; they reproduce asexually and inherit the memories of their progenitor. Since they can live indefinitely, it is possible that there are ones still alive that were around before the creation of the current universe (and yes, their race really is that old).
    • Most every planar ruler qualifies, guys like archdevils, demon lords, the Hebdomad, and the like. Such beings are immortal unless they are killed (which rarely happens, given how powerful they are) and some can trace their roots back eons, some to a time before mortals existed. And then there are beings like the Obyriths, the Baernaloths, and Zargon the Returner who ruled their respective planes before the current rulers took over.
  • Exalted:
    • The Celestial Exalted themselves live for a long time, but only one of the currently existing crop actually meets the 5,000-year minimum age requirement for this trope: Chejop Kejak, head of the Bronze Faction of Sidereals. He has the distinction of having been born at the very start of the First Age, making him literally as old as history itself (anything that happened before the First Age is per definition pre-historic). These Celestial Exalted, however, are merely superlongevic demigods. The more powerful of the gods themselves are older still, having been made early in the process of the Creation of the universe, making them as old as the concepts they govern.
    • Third Edition introduces a Celestial Exalt older than Kejak: the renegade Sidereal Rakan Thulio, who was born in the time before the First Age, and who tore the thread of his destiny from the Loom of Fate, rendering himself The Ageless.
    • The Primordials, and the various beings that were once Primordials (the Yozis and the Neverborn), who pre-date Creation and all of the concepts that make it up, since they're the ones who, well, Created everything. Among the Primordials, Oramus pre-dates even his own existence; to be more precise, he is the proto-type and represents the possibility of the existence of the Primordials, having known of himself and his siblings when they were merely dreams of their true selves. When Cytherea, the Divine Ignition, gave birth to herself and her Primordial siblings (arguably the first true event in the Exalted chronology), Oramus came into being and said, "I was waiting for you to awaken. I thought it should never happen."
  • Magic: The Gathering: Both Nicol Bolas and Ugin are Elder Dragons. Ugin is described as unfathomably ancient, and Nicol Bolas is said to be over 25,000 years oldnote  .
    • The Eldrazi Titans also qualify, being alien gods formed before colored magic even existed. This means that they're older than Nicol Bolas, putting their age in the tens of thousands of years.
    • Any of the living, active Paruns in Ravnica (A parun being the founder of any of the 10 guilds) counts, given that by the time of the first Ravnica block story, the guilds have been around for 10,000 years. The only survivors are Niv-Mizzet (the Mad Scientist dragon of Izzet), Rakdos (the demon in charge of his namesake guild), and Mat'Selesnya (the godlike elemental leader of the Selesnya, although unlike the other two they have not been directly seen in card form). There is actually one more: Azor, the parun of Azorius, but being a planeswalker, he is currently not in Ravnica, but nevertheless alive and well.
    • Ugin's one-time allies Sorin Markov and Nahiri also qualify to a lesser degree. Sorin, a vampire planeswalkers, is about 8000 years old (as they first meet 4000 years ago and she remarks upon escaping the Helvault in modern times that she is now older than he was when they first met). While Nahiri was technically in suspended animation for most of her life she was conscious the entire time and constantly tormented by the legions demons sealed inside with her.
  • Numenera:
    • The game is set about one billion years into the future. The main feature of the game are artifacts from earlier periods, collectively called numenera, which are based on technology that is like magic to the contemporary people, whose knowledge of history reaches back only for the last thousand years. Given how far in the setting's past the civilizations responsible for the technology rose and fell, the titular numenera can be anywhere from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years, many likely predating the formation of the setting's single supercontinent.
    • More specifically, the intelligent octopi who live in the oceans are an extremely ancient species, old enough to have seen at least some of the great ancient civilizations rise, flourish and either die out or leave. This is part of the reason they do not interact much with other species — from their perspective, none ever last long enough for any meaningful interaction to occur. This also applies to individual octopi; they managed to make themselves ageless long in the past, and many octopi are thus very old indeed; their current queen, for instance, is over a million years old.
  • The New World of Darkness: Certain spirits claim to have been spawned before recorded history, while a handful of Abyssal demons go back as far as Atlantis. Whether the Dark Mother was the first explorer of the Primordial Dream, humanity's collective fearscape, or the Dream itself made manifest, her children know instinctively that she still lives. The Cheiron Group's Board of Directors date back to at least ancient Greece, while the Strix were kicking around during ancient Rome (as well as some particularly ancient vampires, some of whom could conceivably stretch back further). Osiris has been hinted as still being around; if true, this would make him the single oldest living creature on the planet (inasmuch as Prometheans are alive). The Fae have been screwing with people for all of recorded history, and since the realms of the Kerberoi are largely immune to the ravages of time, it's practically impossible to know how old they are (prevailing wisdom is that they are all innumerably ancient). The Judges of Duat, Anpu and Ammut have been around at least since the time of Irem, almost six thousand years ago. It's conceivable, if improbable, that a mummy might have been active for the majority of that time as well. And the God-Machine may have brought human civilization and technology into being just so that it would have a means to modify its own processes and boost its Infrastructure.
  • Old World of Darkness:
    • The Antediluvians of Vampire: The Masquerade—so named because they were the only vampires who survived the Biblical Flood. They aren't so much vampires as they are undead gods by the time of the modern age, and they can do truly mindbending things with their power. The Gangrel Antediluvian, for example, apparently earthmelded with the entire planet, and slowly sank deeper as time went on, gently rocked in her slumber by the Earth's core.
      • Elimilech, a 4th generation Malkavian antitribu and Seraph of the Black Hand, whose embrace date was given as Ruth, 1:3. Because he's supposedly the husband of the Biblical Ruth, whose death is mentioned in that verse.
    • The Triad of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Wyld, the Weaver and the Wyrm, are also this, being the physical manifestations of Chaos/Dynamism, Order/Stasis and Entropy/Destruction, respectively. In fact, the Wyrm actually spawned beings who are personifications of its thoughts and feelings, children by its standards, that are still old as time itself.
    • The supplement Gehenna features an optional character that fits the trope even better than the traditional Antediluvians. A 3rd Generation vampire who serves Lilith, and is suggested to be the true clan founder of the Brujah, manages to escape being diablerized by displacing himself from time. However, something goes wrong and he is sent on the extremely slow path back to the present, living and being fully aware of over 100,000 years passing.
    • The Elohim (an umbrella term for both angels and demons, though only the Fallen are present for the Time of Judgement) from Demon: The Fallen may be the true Time Abysses of the oWoD: they have been around since the dawn of time and one of their Houses was in charge of creating time in the first place. You'd think that the endless years spent inside the Abyss, the absolutely empty prison of the Fallen, would count as suspended animation of sorts, but no: part of their punishment by God was that they remain fully aware of the void of the Abyss and of their own utter impotence until the end of time. No wonder they hold a grudge against the Big One Upstairs.
  • Shadowrun has more than a few. Immortal Elves such as Harlequin all qualify, having been born in the Fourth World of Earthdawn, and lived through all five thousand years of the Fifth World to reach the Sixth, which began in 2012. All Great Dragons were born in the Second World - the Age of Dragons - which was separated from the Fourth by another five thousand year gap.
  • Warhammer contains quite a few examples between the various elves, dwarves and daemons.
    • The most notable are certainly the Slann, all of whom have been alive since well before the Coming of Chaos, an event which occurred over 7,000 years ago. Granted some of these have been in a near-comatose state of meditation since Chaos arrived, but not all have and some of the ones that haven't can rightly claim they were alive before Man existed. The Saurus, while often dying relatively early due to their lives of constant war, are theoretically as ageless as the Slann — the legendary Saurus warrior Kroq-Gar, for instance, was already an experience veteran during the coming of Chaos seven millennia in the past.
    • Among the elves, Malekith the Witch-King was born 4458 years before the funding of the Empire, shortly after the end of the first Chaos incursion, and has ruled over the Dark Elves for the entirety of their history, remaining a constant in the elven civil war while the Phoenix Kings of the High Elves rose and fell. He's still only the second oldest Elf alive, however — the title of eldest most likely goes to his mother, Morathi, who's still quite alive as well. Elves don't normally live this long — Malekith, Morathi, and other Dark Elf sorcerers have lasted as long as they did entirely through habitual use of dark magic.
    • The High Elf lord Alith Anar is also said to have taken over rule of the realm of Nagarythe shortly after the Dark Elves' rebellion more than five thousand years before the setting's present day.
    • Nagash, the First Necromancer, can possibly claim to be over 5,000 years old depending on how you count all his accumulated time dead. A few other undead (Arkhan, the original Vampires, Settra) have been around just as long without having spent any of that time dead.
    • Dwarfs, while long-lived, don't last as long as elves. However, some have lived long enough to qualify, such the Ancestor Gods — Grimnir for certain, possibly Grungni and Valaya — and the White Dwarf — who lived more than a thousand years as Snorri Whitebeard, died, and has been popping up ever since.
    • Even older examples are Durthu, the oldest treeman, who is as old as Athel Loren, a forest the Old Ones seeded when they first arrived on the planet over 10,000 years ago. The Dragon Ogres and Dragons were native to the world prior to the arrival of the Old Ones, and their Monster Progenitors Krakanrok the Black and Kalgalanos the Black are both still alive, though they're both currently asleep. Krakanrok's oldest living son, Kholek Suneater, is considerably more active and was present at the arrival of Chaos all those millennia ago.
  • Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: A number of characters from the old Warhammer setting managed to survive its destruction and endure into the Mortal Realms' present day, making them all thousands of years old and technically older than the world they inhabit.
    • The most notable examples are the formerly mortal gods of the realms, Sigmar, Tyrion, Teclis, Alarielle, Malerion (formerly Malekith) and Nagash, who played large roles in shaping their homelands into being the way that they are. A few deities from the old world, such as the Orc gods Gork and Mork and the Dwarfs' Ancestor Gods, who were already staggeringly ancient to begin with, are also still around.
    • A few mortals have also hung around for very long times, such as the Dwarf Slayer Gotrek, who spent unknown amounts of time wandering in the Warp before remerging in the Mortal Realms, and the Skaven Grey Seer Thanquol, who lived through the End Times and the entire history of the Mortal Realms to become what's likely the oldest living Skaven in existence.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Almost all Eldar live to be at least a thousand years old or so, and some live well over ten thousand (such as Eldrad, who was already a powerful psyker back in the early years of the Imperium), while the Phoenix Lords were around long enough to found ancient schools of war. Dark Eldar meanwhile are made of Immortality Immorality, and on average are even older than most Eldar. Their de facto ruler, Asdrubael Vect, is old enough to have seen the Fall of the Eldar and to remember a time before the Chaos God Slaanesh existed, making him the oldest unambiguously, continuously living thing in the setting, Necrons and the near-dead God-Emperor aside. Or so he claims, at any rate.
    • Many Chaos Space Marines are the original Traitor Marines, who rebelled against the Emperor in the Horus Heresy ten thousand years ago. However, they spend most of their time in the Eye of Terror, which due to an overlap with the Warp lacks anything resembling a linear time stream and proper causality, so the actual age of any individual is usually a mystery. For example, the two canonically confirmed oldest Space Marines are Kharn the Betrayer and Ahzek Ahriman, both being born during the Unification Wars on Terra, this means they're both over 10,000 years old.
    • The Immortal God-Emperor of Mankind is approximately 50,000 years old, if his backstory is accurate, although he's spent ten thousand of them on life support.
    • The Necrons fought and ultimately lost a war for control of the galaxy long before the dinosaurs died on Terra. While most of them where asleep for their sixty million+ years of self-inflicted sealing, some like Praetorians, the Flayed Ones and Szarekh the Silent King were awake the entire time.
    • The C'Tan, masters of the Necrons, were literally the oldest beings in the universe, being not that much younger than the first stars. Were being the operative term, considering the Necrons Turned Against Their Masters and shattered them into pieces.
    • The Chaos Gods are pure beings of the Warp, and thus time is literally and utterly meaningless to them. The Great Game, the perennial war between them fight for dominance of everything, has been going on for eternity and will continue for eternity, with none of them ever emerging the true victor. There's also some Timey-Wimey Ball with this, as the Warp was calm and uninhabited for much of the setting's history; Slaanesh for example came into being around the year 30,000 and suddenly he'd always been there, and the Emperor was created by early humanity as a counter to birth of the others.
    • The Swarmlord of the Tyranids has been around as long as the Tyranid race has, and has more autonomy than any other Tyranid, likely to the point of having a sort of consciousness of its own. Considering that they have attacked the Milky Way from multiple directions, it would follow that they are attacking from different galaxies, and as such have stripped multiple galaxies of all biological matter. Such a process would take eons, making the Swarmlord incredibly old. Seeing as the Swarmlord is reborn with all of its experiences, memories, and character whenever it is killed, it will continue to exist for as long as the Tyranid race does.

    Toys 
  • Tren Krom, the resident Eldritch Abomination in BIONICLE, acts this way, what with his "I watched your universe be born" and all. Fridge Logic then kicks in, however, as even though Tren Krom is the oldest being in the Matoran Universe, that universe is actually a giant space-traveling robot, constructed many, many millennia ago. Its creators are still alive and has been waiting for its return, which makes them much older than Tren Krom. This goes for many other inhabitants both inside and outside the Matoran Universe as well: They are truly ancient by our standards, but their own feeling of age varies vastly. Of course, that means that he's only 100,000+ years old.
  • Draculaura, the Genki Girl Vegetarian Vampire from Monster High, reveals in her second diary that her "father" is not only not the Dracula we know,note  but also was already an ancient vampire "by the time togas were first becoming fashionable." Pretty eerie and ominous stuff for a doll line rated ages 6+.

    Video Games 
  • The Silver Lady from Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, while considered incomprehensibly ancient even by the oldest of elves and dwarves, probably falls short of required minimum age by about a thousand years or so. Nashrudin, on the other hand, was considered to be the oldest living being at the time when a certain annoying Silver child was interrupting his works and he is still around at the time the game takes place.
  • The Demi-Gods of Asura's Wrath are an entire race of these. 12,000 years old is basically a few months as far as aging is concerned, and there have been at least 127 emperors, all really old themselves, making the civilization even older then thought. Chakravartin is at least as old as the universe, and it is implied that this isn't the first he's created.
  • BlazBlue
  • Chrono Trigger
    • Lavos, whose life cycle was over 65 million years long, and that's only counting the amount of time since it landed. There's no telling how long it spent on its birth planet or how long it drifted through space before landing on ours.
    • Queen Zeal probably also qualifies, at least in any time period other than her native one. By the time Lavos is due to rise, the Queen is 14,000 years old; she's probably gone more than a wee bit crazy from spending millennia locked up inside the Black Omen with—from the look of things—absolutely no one else to talk to. Note further that she had indeed achieved the immortality she sought; had the Lavos timeline played out, she would have eventually been the very last human—indeed, the very last ANYTHING on that world.
    • Chrono Cross shows that Lavos can live in the Time Crash. Every time Chrono or Serge defeat Lavos, it just retreats there, picks a different timestream where it didn't die, and returns. How long has it spent in the Darkness Beyond Time, learning history from different time streams?
    • It turns out that the Nu are also this, as in the DS remake one can be fought in the prehistoric era and shows up for round two in the Dark Ages.
    • Which also explains why Spekkio's strongest form is a red Nu. "The stronger you are, the stronger I look", to paraphrase. He too is probably an example as he's the embodiment of magic... possibly.
    • Spekkio lives in "The End of Time", some sort of vaguely-explained dimension that exists outside of time. So how old he is would be a matter of perspective. To him, time probably doesn't have much meaning.
  • In Civilization, the player is this. They take control over a civilization back in the Neolithic and observes millennia of its history during their rule.
  • Dark Souls III
    • Slave Knight Gael, the final boss of The Ringed City DLC. Gael was a lowly cannon fodder knight for the gods in their heyday, and by the time of Dark Souls 3, the Gods' time is long gone, making him one of the oldest existing undead in the series. By the end of the DLC, you travel to the end of time to face him, where everything is nothing but ruinous ash and dust. Through unbelievable dedication and willpower, Gael was able to live for millennia, possibly even billions of years, of consuming the dark soul of everyone on earth to harvest the Dark Soul of man to help his niece paint a new world. In the end, his will was so strong that he became the apotheosis of everything the gods feared about the potential of man, and this nameless man all but outlived every single one of them.
  • Dead by Daylight:
    • Benedict Baker's journal entries for the three original killers are dated 1896. That's nowhere near as long as most of the examples on this page, but it's a long time to be in the Entity's realm.
    • The Plague is a particularly strong example; she's been killing people for the Entity since the days of ancient Babylon, making her several millenia old.
  • Kane of Command & Conquer is revealed to be on earth since the dawn of humankind at least, guiding mankind from cavemen to where they are at the end of Tiberium Twilight.
  • The Elder Scrolls
    • From the series primary Creation Myth come Anu and Padomay, the anthropomorphized primordial forces of "stasis/order/light" and "change/chaos/darkness", respectively. Their interplay in the great "void" of pre-creation led to creation itself. It is from their spilled and intermingled blood that the et'Ada would emerge.
    • All of the et'Ada, pre-creation spirits, qualify. Depending on their actions during creation, they would come to be known as either Aedra ("our ancestors" in the old Aldmeris language) or the Daedra ("not our ancestors"). All have existed since before linear time was even conceived of as a concept. Of them, Akatosh, the Chief Deity of the "Nine Divines" pantheon, was said to have been the first to manifest out of the raw energy of the universe. Perhaps fittingly, he governs over time itself. The Dawn Era came to an end when he and the other pre-creation spirits settled into their roles, with Akatosh specifically creating linear time as a concept.
      • This also includes the lesser et'Ada, such as the lesser Daedra and the dragons, who are divine lesser Aedra. There is no definitive answer regarding the origin of dragons other than that they come from Akatosh. A Dremora, a member of a lesser Daedra species, upon being questioned simply answered that dragons "just were, and are," with no definitive beginning. The very concepts of mortality, being finite, and being temporary are so alien to dragons that these words, spoken in draconic, were used against them in a mortal-created Thu'um shout which temporarily cripples dragons.
    • The Hist are a race of ancient, sentient, and possibly omniscient trees native to the Black Marsh where they are worshiped by the Argonians. They are said to be the oldest beings on Tamriel, older than any Man or Mer, and were around to see the wars of the Ehlnofey during the Dawn Era, before linear time had even been conceived of as a concept. According to The Annotated Anuad, the Hist were originally from one of the 12 "worlds of Creation," which were destroyed by Padomay, the embodiment of change, and reassembled into Nirn by Anu, the embodiment of stasis. This would make the Hist literally older than the world itself.
    • The eponymous Elder Scrolls themselves, referred to as "fragments of creation", are a history of all time - what was, what might be, what will be, what could have been - written in a complex, mind-searing form. Also, while each Scroll is a definite object, any scroll that a sentient mind isn't keeping track of may or may not exist.
    • The Dwemer as a race, but likely not the individual Dwemer themselves (though with their abilities, it isn't out of the realm of possibility). It is said that, during the Dawn Era (an era before linear time existed while the mortal plane was still settling post-creation), they studied the "death of the Earth Bones", essentially the laws of nature and physics, to find ways to manipulate them.
    • In Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion, you meet Dyus, keeper of all the knowledge Jyggalag's library held (which knew all the actions of all beings divine, mortal, and creature) prior to being being made immortal and imprisoned by Sheogorath when he destroyed the library. It's unknown how long he's been imprisoned, but given that Sheogorath was Jyggalag before being cursed by the other Daedra, it's probably a good bet it's been a few thousand years.
    • Gelebor and Vyrthur from the Skyrim DLC Dawnguard are the last two original, uncorrupted Snow Elves from the time of the war between their race and the immigrant Atmorans (who, in time, would become the Nords). The reason for Gelebor's longevity is presumably a special blessing from Auri-El (the Elven name for Akatosh), and Vyrthur is a vampire, one of the first in Nirn that wasn't directly converted by Molag Bal.
  • Akron, the final boss of Epic Battle Fantasy 3, muses on this in his Boss Banter. He has lived for billions of years and no longer even remembers when or how he came into being. He remarks that he has been defeated, weakened, and imprisoned countless times, but ultimately, he endures while his enemies fall to the ravages of time.
  • The four Ancients from Eternal Darkness are all millennia old at the least.
  • Fable.
    • Jack of Blades is one of three demon-like creatures from the Void and was old before the world was made.
    • Scythe is hinted to be the original Archon, William Black, who lived in the time when mankind was young and forged the Sword of Aeons and ruled the Old Kingdom for millennia, and it still alive millennia after it fell.
  • The Creator from Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is implied to be several thousand, if not several million, years old. Old enough to conduct biology experiments on a macroevolutionary timescale.
  • Final Fantasy VII
    • Jenova crashed on the Planet some thousands of years ago. It saw/caused the extinction of an entire sentient race. It's implied life cycle is similar to Lavos from Chrono Trigger, as described earlier: going from planet to planet, wiping out all life, absorbing all the souls on the planet, and then moving on to a new world to absorb (with god knows how long spent in space in between).
    • The WEAPONs, on a smaller scale. They were created when Jenova landed, and are biological weapons that protect the Planet's consciousness from any threat.
  • Garland from Final Fantasy IX is at the very least 5000 years old, having started the process of assimilating the player's world of Gaia with his world of Terra that long ago through a ridiculously complex procedure too nonsensical to fully explain here, but it's never stated how long he lived before that. Ancient structures he built on Gaia can be explored as dungeons filled with Lost Technology. He's watched the growth of all the major civilizations on the planet. For example, he built the massive Iifa Tree and is responsible for the natural phenomenon called "Mist".
  • The fal'Cie from Final Fantasy XIII have been around for thousands, if not millions of years, and it's very possible that the vast majority of them will live eternally until they are killed. No wonder they all want to die.
  • The Elder Dragons from Guild Wars 2 are stated to awaken about every ten-thousand years, with heavy implications that this is not even the second or third time they've awakened, drastically changing how old the world is. And on a smaller note, the human gods and titans may also qualify.
  • Halo:
    • The two monitors we see in the original trilogy, 343 Guilty Spark and 2401 Penitent Tangent, were both built around the same time as the Halo rings themselves, which was over 100,000 years ago. Penitent Tangent was captured, and we don't see much of him, but we clearly see that the years have turned Guilty Spark into a narcissistic nutcase. Mendicant Bias, another AI made by the Forerunners, betrayed its masters and sided with the Flood, much to its remorse; by the time the games takes place 100,000 years later, it is broken and fragmented, only appearing in certain terminals the player can activate and read in Halo 3.
    • The Gravemind. It was around long before any of the above-mentioned AIs, and fought against the original Forerunners. The Forerunner Saga reveals that it's millions of years old, since all Graveminds past and present share the same consciousness (that of the Flood Hive Mind), with the Primordial Gravemind having been the last Precursor, the race responsible for the existence of humans, Forerunners, and every other sentient race seen so far.
    • The Precursors have been established to be millions of years old, but Halo: Silentium shattered all expectations: They have existed for over a Hundred. Billion. Years. Somehow, they are several times older than this universe.
    • The Didact is 10,000 years old at the time of the Forerunner-Flood War, while his wife, the Librarian, is 11,000 and eternally young. Forerunners as a race usually live to be thousands of years old, thanks to the incredibly useful armor every one of them wears. In fact, their highly advanced interstellar civilization itself managed to thrive for over ten million years.
  • Honkai Impact 3rd has Fu Hua. Random dorm chatter reveals that she knows the original writers of ancient Chinese texts and "The Forgotten" event reveals that she was among those who helped establish ancient China. She is in fact over 50,000 years old, being one of the only survivors of an earlier advanced civilization that was wiped out by the previous awakening of the last Herrscher.
  • While many of the more powerful vampires in the Legacy of Kain series measure their lifespan in millennia, the crowning glory has to go to the Elder God that helpfully resurrects and guides Raziel on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge in the Soul Reaver branch of the games. Considering that the Vampires and the humans fought for untold thousands of years, then Kain won the war and destroyed the Pillars of Nosgoth, and then the Vampires ruled for thousands of years after that before the first Soul Reaver game, it's something of a shock to realize that this tentacle-and-eyeball-laden entity has been guiding souls across the Wheel of Fate to their resurrections and/or final rest for all of it and longer. Until you find out in Defiance that it was all a big lie and he was eating said souls; he's pissed at the vampires because their souls are delicious but, being quasi-immortal, he can't eat them any more!
  • Sentient A.I. Durandal from Marathon plans to survive the collapse of the universe and witness the big bang that creates the next one. He lives to the end, but chooses to stay.
  • Mass Effect
    • The true age of the Reapers is not known, but even the absolute minimum figures given are staggeringly high. Mass Effect establishes they are part of a cycle that occurs every 50,000 years, Mass Effect 2 pushes that back to at least 37 million years (or rather, the lucky shot that killed a Reaper eventually impacted a planet 37 million years ago), and Mass Effect 3 confirms the existence of a Reaper corpse over a billion years old.
    • The end of Mass Effect 3 reveals the Catalyst, an AI housed in the core of the Citadel. It was what masterminded the creation of the Reapers, so it at least as old as the oldest of them, probably more so.
    • In the "Control" Ending, Shepard becomes a Time Abyss. "Eternal. Infinite. Immortal."
    • The Prothean VI Vigil has been around for at least 50,000 years, most of those spent entirely alone. In Mass Effect 2, Shepard is informed that Vigil has shut itself down and all attempts to reactivate it have failed.
    • The Thorian saw the rise and fall of the the Protheans more than 50,000 years ago, and is thought to be more than 100,000 years old.
    • The Leviathans are the best example in the series, being the race that created the Catalyst. It isn't clear if the ones met in the game had personally been around the whole time or not since they use intentionally vague terms.
  • In Mother 3, Porky is this, due to having achieved immortality through repeated abuse of Time Travel. When you meet him, he's bedridden due to his insane age, and utterly bored with all of creation, but underneath that he's still the spoiled brat he always was. He says that even he doesn't know how old he is anymore. Might be 1,000 years, might be 10,000. Who knows? Truly exemplified in the ending, where he traps himself in the Absolutely Safe Capsule. You can't hurt him... Nothing can. Not even age. Forever and ever.
    • And he loves it.
  • Planescape: Torment's Player Character The Nameless One would have become this if only he wasn't cursed to forget everything upon each death. He has been around for millennia but has only the scraps he can recover during the game to prove it. His scars are another story altogether. Incidentally, the person who gave him that immortality is still around. As is the Big Bad, The Nameless One's mortality, who cannot die while he does and does remember everything The Nameless One has ever forgotten.
  • Pokémon
    • Arceus is heavily implied to be the creator of the Pokemon universe, if not at least the God of Pokemon as it is the original Pokemon that came before all others. A special event in HeartGold and SoulSilver, where Arceus offers the player a choice of three legendary Pokemon (Dialga, Palkia, or Giratina), gives a glimpse of the sheer enormousness of what it has lived through.
    • Dialga, Palkia and Giratina themselves are an example. Dialga's Pokedex entry even states that time itself started to flow when it was born. By extension, the Lake trio (Uxie, Mespirit and Azelf) are also as old.
    • Mew is believed to be the ancestor of all Pokemon, though this probably doesn't apply to the above.
    • Wartortle is said to live 10,000 years. Though not as extreme as Arceus, that's still a long time.
    • Heatran might also be extremely ancient, as it was apparently born from lava that pooled at around the same time that the earth was first formed.
    • It is noted in the Pokedex that Rayquaza has lived in the ozone layer for several hundred million years because it gets its energy from water particles and sunlight in the ozone layer, meaning that it doesn't ever need to go down on solid ground to survive. It is for this reason that its existence went into legend as it hardly ever left the sky. For perspective the reign of the dinosaurs was approximately 200 hundred million years on this Earth, Rayquaza is at the very least slightly over 3 times older than the existence of the dinosaurs.
    • Kyogre and Groudon are mentioned as having produced entire seas and continents. If this is talking about the entire Earth then they are at least 4 billion years old, but if it is talking about the region of Hoenn then it could be at least a few million years. In Emerald the elders who have the orbs that are said to control Kyogre and Groudon don't ever specifically call those two or even Rayquaza by name, only claiming them to be super-ancient Pokemon, which is putting it lightly.
    • Xerneas and Yveltal from X and Y are at least 3000 years old when the Great Offscreen War happened. How long they were in existence before that is unknown but they're said to be the embodiments of Life and Death in the Pokéverse.
    • Genesect's Pokedex entry states that it existed 300 million years ago.
  • Primal Rage: All of the Virtuous and Destructive Gods are at least a million years old.
  • Marduk from Sacrifice makes the claim of Time Abyss during his final appearance. His innate purpose, apparently, is to destroy all 'unworthy' aspects of creation (and he doesn't seem fussed about collateral damage), which would make him as old as existence itself.
  • Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time reveals that Clockwerk, the Big Bad of the first game is much older than supposedly 3200 years old, having existed during the Ice Age. He also somehow was able construct his metal body around that time, too.
  • Sonic Unleashed has Dark Gaia and Light Gaia AKA Chip who are the same age as the Earth and have lived through multiple cycles of destroying and rebuilding the planet. In fact, Chip himself claims they have existed since "the beginning of time."
  • StarCraft:
    • The Zerg Overmind can legitimately claim to be ancient, but has some demerit points on his Time Abyss license since being killed off. Silly Dark Templar with the ability to kill off parts of the Zerg Hive Mind. (Of course, he got some of those points removed since it was revealed he intended to die).
    • Samir Duran, in Brood War, certainly hints that he has existed probably as long as the Overmind and possibly longer still.
      • In Heart of the Swarm it turned out that he is actually an ancient shapeshifter known as Narud who served Amon, the Overmind's creator. Legacy of the Void shows that he is a Xel'naga, and thus older than the universe.
    • Starcraft II Heart Of The Swarm introduces the Primal Zerg in general and Zurvan/The Ancient One in particular (Zurvan being older than the Overmind).
  • Ratatosk and the Centurions in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World are implied to be somewhere around 10,000 years old (the age of the original World Tree of which Ratatosk is the spirit).
  • Touhou:
    • The franchise usually settles with "merely" Really 700 Years Old characters, but there are a handful which are truly ancient. Most notable is Eirin, who routinely claims to be infinitely old (relative to everyone else anyway) and was a mentor to some of the gods who took part in the Creation Myth of Japan. Her age is most likely measured in millions of years.
    • Suwako Moriya may look like a little girl donning an unnusually Nice Hat and a cute dress covered with funny frog prints, but she is actually a native god who is 2300 years old at least, predating even Shinto's presence in her region. And for an even deeper look into the abyss we have the Mishaguji, the serpentine curse and fertility gods that ruled the Suwa region before Suwako arrived and subdued them. Though their exact age and origins are unknown, it is believed that worship of Mishaguji began at some point during the Middle to Late Joumon period, so probably about 3000-5000 years ago.
    • Yuuka Kazami is an implied example as well. She is stated to be one of the most powerful youkai in Gensoukyou by sheer virtue of being one of, if not its outright oldest resident. In Phantasmagoria of Flower View, several characters are confronted by the local judge of the dead who warns them about the sins that may end up getting them sent to hell once they die. Yuuka's sin is determined to be that she has lived too long... To put that warning into perspective; the only other people who are known to get on the Celestial Bureaucracy's bad side for living too long are hermits who have eluded death for approximately ten times their original life expectancy (that's to say, they've been around for a millenia). By contrast, youkai in general are The Ageless by nature, with a few of them having lived for well over a thousand years without getting into conflict with the Ministry of Right and Wrong... No matter how old Yuuka may be, she's likely not just merely "old", she's ancient.
  • Asgard the golem from Wild Arms 3 gets sent back in time with a extremely simple learning program and comes back via The Slow Path having developed sentience in the meantime.
  • World of Warcraft
    • Loken, a Titan-appointed guardian evokes this trope by explaining that he has held watch over Azeroth for countless millennia and seen the rise and fall of civilisations, the birth and extinction of entire species.
    • Nordrassil, the World Tree, in the Warcraft universe is at least ten thousand years old. So are some dragons and various godlike entities. Many night elves are as well, but many of them sleep through it, and the others don't have the gravitas you'd expect.
    • Many Draenei remember their homeworld Argus, from where they fled over 25,000 years ago. Since it's implied that they spent much of their trip through the Nether in suspended animation, their exact age is hard to guess...but it's known that they lived on several worlds before ending up in Azeroth, so it'll still add to a very long time. Velen, their leader, is the only one that really looks old, so it could be that he spent less time in suspended animation, or that he was old even when they lived on Argus. The Lords of the Burning Legion, being originally members of the same race, are the same age too (and they've been active for the whole 25 millennia, too).
    • Many Titan-constructed facilities can be found around Azeroth. Depending on the source the Titans either created Azeroth or shaped it into a life-supporting planet. In either case, the buildings are tends of thousands of years old at the very least, possibly several million years old. Some are very intact and still guarded by the Titan's constructs.
    • The Old Gods, who supposedly inhabited Azeroth before the Titans came along.
    • The Dragon Aspects aren't quite as old as the planet, though they aren't far from it. Nozdormu, however, lords over all of time. Until something "happens", he can also see every possible route time MIGHT take. At one point, he became trapped in time ('how long' is hard to say given the nature of the thing). Every moment of time. At once. Including all the infinite alternate routes. When Thrall finds him, he is awestruck to see his entire life at once played out with a different memory on a different single scale of the dragon's massive form.
    • Xarantaur the Witness definitely fits the spirit of this trope, if not the letter. He was a historian from before the Sundering who, at the moment of his death, was taken up by the Guardians of Time and given immortality so that he might witness (hence the name) and record all of Azerothian history. Among his duties is comparing his own records against the records of society around him, so he'll know if someone has been messing up the timestream (again.)
  • Xenogears
    • Deus is a superweapon that crashed on the planet the game takes place on 10,000 years ago. It's been trying to repair itself ever since, and created the people of the world to serve as spare parts.
    • Miang serves as Deus' physical avatar, and has been manipulating every civilization since the beginning to serve Deus' needs, although she survives through BodySurfing.
    • Emperor Cain and the Gazel Ministry were the first humans created after the crash 10,000 years ago. Cain still has his body, but the Ministry uploaded their minds into a computer centuries ago.
    • Fei and Elly themselves have been continuously reincarnated since the crash. Late in the game, Fei finally regains all the memories from his previous lives.
    • And topping all of them is the Wave Existence. It created the universe. BY ACCIDENT.
  • Xenosaga
    • Wilhelm is exactly as old as the universe, as it is his job to rewind it to the beginning, along with himself, in order to prevent its eventual dissolution. Rather like a cosmic version of a Windows reinstall. By contrast, U-DO is claimed to have 'observed' multiple cycles of Wilhelm+ universe, but being in a different time stream, it's not clear whether it really qualifies as 'older'.
    • It is implied that chaos was around during the birth of Christianity, and quite possibly even before that. Xenosaga is a bit over 5000 years into the future.
  • The Supreme God Sol for the Super Robot Wars Z saga "reboots" the universe for every 12,000 years. Although the one that appears in the Grand Finale is a mere copy of the original, it's implied the cosmic cycle of destruction and rebirth has occurred at least 10,000 times.
  • Dragon Ball Xenoverse: The Supreme Kai of Time, Tokitoki and The Demon God Demigra all existed 75 million years before the show started.
  • Contra: Hard Corps has Brad Fang, a cyborg werewolf super soldier with a gun for an arm who is apparently over 100 million years old.
  • Strongly implied to be the case for Rosalina, from Super Mario Bros. While she's explicitly at least centuries old, the ending to Super Mario Galaxy has her reveal that she's overseen the death and rebirth of the universe many times in the past, meaning she is likely at least tens of billions of years old.
  • Star Control:
    • The second game has the Slylandro, gasbag aliens who live on a gas giant, both as a race and individually. They're the only ones in the entire game that ever met the Precursors, whose teachings they still use, and the one you personally speak to remembers when the Ur-Quan were still brown, rather than split into green and black, as they used to visit often back then. This split, that also caused both of them to become slavemasters and genocidal (respectively), happened over 20000 years ago.
    • Star Control: Origins has Jeff, the "god" of the Mowlings. He is an automated artificially intelligent probe sent to the Milky Way from the Triangulum Galaxy, though since his creators are long since dead and gone he's not sure what his original purpose was. He finds it amusing that you refer to the Precursors as such (they lived around 200,000 years ago), and mentions having been around long enough to witness the galaxy complete several rotations, which means he's at least several hundreds of millions of years old.
  • Aurelion Sol, the Star Forger from League of Legends is THE oldest being in Runeterra's universe. His lore confirmed as such: The being now known as Aurelion Sol was already ancient by the time stellar debris first coalesced into worlds. Born in the first breath of creation, he roamed the vast nothingness, seeking to fill a canvas of incalculable breadth with marvels whose twinkling spectra brought him considerable delight and pride.
  • Although the last remaining bud of the planet-wide fungus Mikollopria that fights as a Battleborn was spawned in 19,209 C.R., Miko's Hive Mind consciousness first gained sentience over a million years before. They are thus in a sense the oldest living being in the entire Battleborn universe having even been sentient during the time of the ancient precursor Aztanti civilization.
  • Owing to the the fact that NieR: Automata is set 8,545 years after the end of NieR, Devola, Popola and Emil qualify because they're around for the events of both games. Somewhat. Devola and Popola are not actually the same ones from the first game but they are of the same line and were also overseeing Project Gestalt elsewhere. And Emil is a clone who nonetheless has been fighting the machine lifeforms for as long as he can remember.
  • A few Winglies in The Legend of Dragoon are stated as having been alive during the Dragon Campaign, which ended over 11,000 years ago. Likewise the Divine Dragon and every surviving Virage is from that era as well. Lastly, Rose actually fought in the Dragon Campaign and has been spending the centuries since then hunting down and killing the Moon Child.
  • Fate/EXTRA: The Moon Cell, an unbelievably powerful supercomputer in orbit around Earth (aka the Moon), has apparently existed before the Earth itself had even finished forming. Who built the thing is entirely unknown, though most believe it has to be aliens, since it pre-dates all life on Earth, and even pre-dates the gods.
  • The Secret World:
    • Khalid, the mysterious hermit roaming the dunes of Egypt, claims to be one of the original members of the Four-And-Sixty - a group which predates the Big Three (all of which are several thousand years old).
    • Another hermit mage, namely Cucuvea, is believed by the Illuminati to be one of the oldest living creatures in the entire world. True, they haven't been able to pinpoint her precise age, but it's up there alright. It's hinted that she's actually a sister to Lilith herself, and has been tracking her down through all the previous Ages of the Earth.
    • Yet another mysterious hermit, the nature spirit Mosul, claims to be older than the mountains of Transylvania.
    • The infamous Humanoid Abomination Lilith has been around since the Host first created the Earth: she was one of the very first humans in existence, created some of the planet's most terrifying monsters, was responsible for a massive number of atrocities throughout history, and has lived through every single Age of the world. In other worlds, she's lived through three consecutive reboots of the universe - which could put her age well into the billions.
    • Naturally, this label applies to the Host and their creations, including the Jinn and Gaia... and of course, the Dreamers who might very well predate the universe and all its Ages, having been used to create it in the first place.
  • ADOM
    • Mist elves in general. A Player Character mist elf's biography describes their infancy as taking decades, childhood centuries, and youth millennia. The Player Character will start the game as a novice adventurer at around 7,000 or 8,000 years of age, and their maximum life span is around 60,000 or 70,000 years.
    • Rolf, a forefather of the dwarven race, and other characters associated with him. His description gives his age as "probably hundreds of millennia."

    Webcomics 
  • Sarda (and to a lesser extent, Lich), in 8-Bit Theater. Sarda was present at the birth of the universe, and due to the presence of White Mage was forced to wait several billion years for planetary formation to give him a reasonably pleasant place to live. By the time of the comic, he is quite mad (in every sense of the word). Lich notes at one point the shortsightedness of living races by the fact that they "build [their] cities right where glaciers will come screaming through in 200,000 years".
  • In Bird Boy, Bali stumbles on evidence of long, long, long ago. Mythic time, in fact.
  • In the Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire universe, it's said that the Winslow has existed since the Big Bang, and will continue to exist long after the universe ends. It's also said that there are other objects like the Winslow, leftovers from previous universes that have somehow become eternal and indestructible. The Winslow is special by being the only sentient one, however.
  • Several members of the cast of Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures: Even though most Cubi "only" live about three thousand years, clan leaders live much longer, with Cyra the youngest at about 7,000, Fa'lina 9,288, and the oldest about 75,000. The Fae and Dragons are even older, with a (now-deleted) secret cast page putting Mab at over 400,000 and the Dragon exemplar from the Demonology page listed as over 57,000 and said to be "fairly young." To many of these people, Being civilization seems like something of an ephemeral fad. Fa'lina, in particular, seems completely unchanged since a sidestory set in the seventeenth century, in contrast to the much younger Kria, Aaryanna, and Abel; even Mink, whose age is unknown, seems to have become obsessed with 20th-century technology in the interim.
  • Immortals in El Goonish Shive are only sort of this. Despite the name, they actually have to periodically reset which is a form of death. To be done right, it takes preparation. They gather their power and prepare their memories for their next incarnation. The memories are more in the form of a diary the previous incarnation leaves, so there's no emotional connection to them. They are inexperienced with their powers. They are bound by promises their previous incarnation made, however. If an Immortal fails to prepare properly, they may lack information and power.
  • Gunnerkrigg Court: It is eventually revealed that Jones, a.k.a. Wandering Eye, has existed, immortal, indestructible, unchanging, and mostly alone, for more than 4.5 billion years. She has wandered the Earth ever since its creation. She claims that she isn't even alive, and even she doesn't know what she is. Annie's reaction to this revelation is appropriate, all things considered. It also puts a lot more weight on something she said earlier in the comic:
    Jones: I've never seen something like this before.
    Headmaster Llanwellyn: Coming from you, that disturbs me greatly.
  • Homestuck
    • The First Guardians are described as "nearly as old as their [respective] planets". Becquerel, Jade's pet Guardian, arrived on Earth from a meteor in the Devonian period, 413 million years ago.
      (From Homestuck Book Two) Long enough ago that a bunch of ocean used to not be there. Oh, and dinosaurs? They hadn't even been BORN yet.
    • Lord English, who exists outside of time and has lived through every universe, ever.
    • Age of ghosts, who exist in the Furthest Ring, can be very difficult to judge, since time as a concept doesn't make a lot of sense out there, and is completely disconnected from the timeline of any individual universe. In any case, Aranea has been dead for so long time has lost meaning to her.
  • Anything having to do with the dragon or Nemesite civilizations in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!.
    Princess Voluptua: "I'm heir to the throne of an empire that has owned your world since your antecedents were fish."
  • Cthulhu in Irregular Webcomic!, since he's been sent back to the beginning of time and forced to sit through the first 15 billion years of the universe's development twice.
  • Kill Six Billion Demons: 2 Michael casually says he guarded Throne for "thirty kalpa" before humans arrived (which itself was millennia ago). A kalpa is a real unit of measurement, and going by Hindu estimations, thirty kalpa is 130 billion years. No wonder he is completely unconcerned with human lives.
  • When they first appeared in Mindmistress, the Sisters of Twilight were witnessing the birth of the Elder Gods. And they were already really old in those days.
  • The characters of Nebula are at least four or five billion years old at the time the comic takes place, what with being sentient planets; for a hint of how big a timescale they're working with, the age gap between them and Sun is around a hundred million years or so, and he's considered to be barely older than them.
  • In The Order of the Stick, the gods are extremely old. A sealed-off astral graveyard contains gravestones marking all the worlds that the gods have created and were subsequently destroyed by the Snarl. Even the first worlds lasted several years, and the gods have only been improving their craft with each iteration. And the gravestones are still numerous enough to blot out the sky.
  • In The Sanity Circus, both the Scarecrows and the Instrumen appear like young adults. Posey Morris, a Scarecrow, looks like a sweet young girl. Regardless, when she gets into a fight with Luther the cello, he cheerfully says 'Oh well! Let's not bring up centuries-old grudges.'
  • Schlock Mercenary:
    • The Bradicor tend to be... rather long lived.
      Fobottr Tenant: Are you claiming that your people have been on the surface for over ten million years?
      Rod: Oh, my people have been down there for much longer than that. No, I was just talking about me, personally.
    • One member of the race, while talking to a human, notes that he's having some trouble understanding their perspective on mortality (in particular, celebrating the death of an enemy) because he is personally so old that just the 1% margin of error when converting his age between the two calendars is older than humanity as a species.
    • It was said that Carbosilicate Amorphs, the species of the titular Schlock, are naturally evolved from the incredibly durable data storage mediums the Bradicor store their brains in. This means that Schlock and his kin are effectively immortal, and gives you an idea of just how long the Bradicor have been around.
    • Eina-Afa, or "Synthetic Wind", is the mind of a space station with enough open air inside to house planets. After spending a few million years alone, she renamed herself T'kkkuts-Afa ("Broken Wind") and created storms in her otherwise paradisiacal sky in order to create evolutionary pressure for intelligent life to develop. Yes, she's old (and lonely) enough that she was willing to wait for animals to achieve sentience just so she would have someone to talk to.
  • Sonic the Comic – Online! has Tikal The Echidna who was sealed with Chaos, Vichama the God of Death and the reason Knuckles The Echidna is immortal as well as a weapon by the Drakon Empire called Shadow The Hedgehog and the advanced Guardian Robot called the Gizoid.
  • No matter how far you go back in the Talse Uzer Stories, the Tower from Tower of God was always there. It has been stated that it was conquered and civilized 5000 years ago, though.
  • Unsounded: According to scripture, the Senet Beasts were created directly by the Gods in the legendary First World, whereas humans arose in the Second World through guided evolution. As such, they're literally older than Time, although The Fog of Ages has obscured almost all the details.
  • Jin of Wapsi Square seems to qualify. Not only does she predate most of Earth's known civilizations, but she has lived even longer than it seems due to a "Groundhog Day" Loop. The 1450 years before 2012 have repeated 56 times, and she is the only one that remembers. It is starting to get to her.
    • The Demons qualify and then some. They travel from mortal host to mortal host, moving to others when individuals die, civilizations die, species die, universes die, and new ones arise. They are literally trillions of years old. They're so static that the ability to change- even to gain a lifespan- is considered a holy grail for many of them.

    Web Original 
  • Chuck Norris Facts: When God said "Let there be light", Chuck Norris said "Say please".
  • Cro-Marmot from Happy Tree Friends is over 1,000,000 years old. Justified, since he is frozen in a block of ice.
  • By the end of Fine Structure, Anne Poole has lived for over 20,000 years. Mitch technically gets that far as well, through tricks like Brain Uploading and Body Surfing, but Anne takes The Slow Path and experiences the entire time — including over a century spent buried alive.
  • On the online speculative evolution project A Scientific Fantasy, the dinosauroids (species normally don't count, but since the whole species is also a civilization, it counts) fired a laser to blow up the asteroid that caused the K-T extinction and had already been around for 10 million years.
  • Whateley Universe
    • One of the Mystic Arts teachers at Whateley Academy is Circe, and it has been confirmed that she is the same Circe one who transformed Odysseus' crew into pigs. She is by no means alone, nor is she the oldest around: early in the Gen 1 stories, she recognizes the New Olympians as being the same Greco-Roman Gods whom she was raised to worship, stuffed into mortal frames after escaping from being imprisoned by a mysterious being known as The Foreigner.
    • Aunghadhail is a Sidhe queen so old she remembers the Earth before humans populated it. She and her family may have created the dinosaurs.
    • In the latest Tennyo story, we learn the Star Stalker is eight billion years old and was constructed by one of the first civilizations in the universe.
  • After Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, they sublet an apartment from Frank Lautenberg before finding a place of their own, according to his Jew Or Not Jew profile.
  • The Drylon in Beyond the Impossible: since they’ve disappeared five billion years ago, everything they’ve built is at least older than Earth including the Nexus inside Noriko’s head. The gods are also incredibly long-lived: Vesta is a million years old, Hekate is a hundred times older, and Gaea was around at the formation of Earth.
  • Two of them live in RWBY: Salem, the Big Bad, and Professor Ozpin, the Big Good. Salem was cursed by the God of Light with Complete Immortality, for her attempts to resurrect her love. Ozpin, meanwhile, continuously reincarnates, sharing a body and soul with a new person each time, keeping his memories and magic powers across reincarnations. Both are older than the world of Remnant in its current form, and even remember the world that Remnant actually is a remnant of.
  • Red vs. Blue: The Shisno Paradox introduces the Cosmic Powers, who are (essentially) gods that have been in existence since the beginning of time. Their creator, the Titan Chrovos is even older than them thanks to a Stable Time Loop making them at least twice as old as the current universe.
    • Furthermore, after Red vs. Blue: Singularity, due to them being sucked into black holes and getting spat out at the beginning of the universe, both Lopez and Huggins are technically several eons old. It's downplayed with Huggins, though, since as an sentient light beam, she can travel near the speed of light so time doesn't effect her like it does other lifeforms.
  • DSBT InsaniT: Killer Monster is over 10,000 years old.
  • Dreamscape: In her "The Reason You Suck" Speech Keedran gives to Melissa in 'Confronting the Dark', she reveals she's dealt with the judgment of humanity for thousands of lifetimes.
    • Megalania has been alive for millions of years. Megalanias are a prehistoric species, after all.
  • Invoked by youtuber Spumwack with his Universe Death Clock, a device built entirely in Minecraft that is expected to run for the next Googolnote  years, long after the universe has ended. Not the game's universe, but our universe.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time:
    • Strongly implied to be the case for The Lich. While already known to date back to the Mushroom War a thousand years ago, the events of "Evergreen" heavily imply he was the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs, which would make him at least 65 million years old. "Gold Stars" implies he's either older than the physical universe, or at least old enough to have learned what was there before the universe came to be.
      The Lich: "Before there was time... before there was anything... there was nothing. And before there was nothing... there were monsters."
    • Later we meet Orgalorg, one of the monsters that the Lich spoke of, and who is better known to viewers as the penguin Gunther. He apparently managed to survive the creation of our Universe, then terrorized and destroyed entire planets before the King of Mars ordered Glob to defeat Orgalorg. Orgalorg was defeated and landed on Earth, where he has been living as an Amnesiac God since prehistoric times. (A series of flashbacks he has when he begins to remember his true nature includes a shot of him fending off what seems like a saber tooth tiger, then later participating in Egyptian, Ancient Greek, and Roman societies.)
  • In The Amazing World of Gumball, Miss Simian has apparently been teaching since the Stone Age, and is at least 2 million years old. Her father's skeleton is on display in a natural history museum.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • The Avatar Spirit. It's the spirit of the Earth, after all, so it existed even before it started manifesting itself as Avatars. The Legend Of Korra reveals that the Avatar Spirit is in fact a spirit of Light and Peace named Raava. Given she is Vaatu's (see below) counterpart, she's almost certainly just as old.
    • Tui and La, the Moon and Ocean spirits, crossed to the mortal realm "very near the beginning" according to Koh, who is himself an example as he's the only spirit old enough to remember it. The canon comic series has the Gaang meet Koh's mother, the spirit who first gave humans the concept of identity.
    • The Lion Turtle. It's All There in the Manual that he and his species are as old as the earth itself, and therefore, as old as the Avatar Spirit. Unfortunately, he's the Last of His Kind.
  • Beetlejuice: In "Ship of Ghouls", the ghost pirate Jean LeFoot and his crew of the Flying Dutchman have been trapped inside the Bermuda Shorts Triangle for two eternities.
  • While Professor Paradox of Ben 10: Alien Force is a time traveler, he's also countless billionsnote  of years old, independent of time travel. When time travel is taken into account, Paradox has most likely existed forever, despite originally being an ordinary human.
  • Captain Planet and the Planeteers: If Zarm's words from "Summit to Save Earth, Part 2" are to be believed, Gaia is about the Earth's age... or older.
    Linka: What have you done to Gaia?!
    Zarm: Gaia is simply starting to show her true age. (mockingly:) What is it, Gaia? Five, six billion years old?
    • Considering that a century-long sleep is "a little nap" for her, he might have told the truth, though.
  • The German short film Das Rad (The Wheel) focuses on the lives of two anthropomorphic stone heaps. They witness the (exponential) rise of mankind and its sudden fall. In ten minutes.
  • Played for laughs in Earthworm Jim. Evil the Cat claims he "existed before the dawn of time and will continue to exist past its end!" Jim and Peter escape from him as he tries to explain the logic.
  • Cosmo and Wanda from The Fairly OddParents! have been married for nearly 10,000 years and physically seem to be in their 30s. Cosmo's mother is still alive and well and doesn't appear to be past middle age.
  • Futurama:
    • The Nibblonians were already seventeen years old by the time of the Big Bang, while their nemeses, the Brainspawn, came to existence a few milliseconds after it.
      "In the time it would take to pronounce one letter of my true name, a trillion cosmoses would flare into existence and sink into eternal night."
    • Bender became this in "Bender's Big Score." The scammer aliens, after brainwashing him, got him to go back in time to steal them every valuable item in history. Keep in mind that the time travel he's using is one-way, Bender is searching for them one at a time, and is perfectly happy waiting it out with previous versions of himself. It's unclear how much time it took for him, but given the hundreds of Benders we see at the end, his minimum age would be a million years. And given the What If? Holiday special showed he could last half a billion years, Bender's life has just begun.
      • Bender already made a step toward becoming this in "Roswell That Ends Well". The Planet Express crew travels back to 1947, and as they return to the 31st century, Bender's head falls out the ship, being buried for a thousand years.
    • Yivo from "The Beast with a Billion Backs". For a trillion years, shkle was satisfied with shkler life as the lone being of another universe, but when shkle looked across immensity, shkle saw the Big Bang and said, "Whoa. Who's that?".
  • Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls claims in "Weirdmageddon" to have been trapped in the Nightmare Realm for one trillion years. At the very least, it would make him more than seventy times older than our universe, which is about 14 billion years old.
  • The ending of it's such a beautiful day has the main character, Bill, outlive the Universe itself. This could all very well have been a delusion, but it's never made clear.
  • The Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness episode "A Stitch In Time" introduced The Shuyong Tree. A sentient tree that existed before time began and will continue to exist after it ends.
  • The Legend of Korra: The spirit Vaatu claimed to have lived 10,000 lifetimes before humans appeared. Since each Harmonic Convergence counts as a lifetime and each one is 10,000 years apart, he was at least 100,000,000 years old when humans first showed up.
  • In Miraculous Ladybug, the Kwamis are known to be centuries old, having empowered similar heroes in past eras. Tikki casually mentions having been around longer than Marinette's ancient Egyptian predecessor, having been around "since the beginning." We don't really come to get what that means until two moments in season two: In "Sandboy," there's a day on which the other Kwamis can try to contact Nooroo: the Kwami version of a birthday. His 3500th cycle is coming, and a cycle is "several hundred" years. If we say that's 300 (as that's the lowest number a person would likely call "several" hundred) that it'd put him at 1,050,000 years old, at least. We learn that they very much are intended to be that old and more in "Style Queen" when the end of the dinosaurs is revealed to have been Plagg's fault. A tie-in comic explains that the Kwamis each came into being at the same time as the concept they are the Anthropomorphic Personification of, making them unimaginably ancient. Tikki, as the Kwami of creation, is the oldest of them, 'born' alongside the universe itself.
  • My Little Pony:
    • Spike from the My Little Pony G3 claimed that being over a thousand years old he was still "young", and that his pony friends should wait until he's at least a million years old before they start calling him "old". This was immediately after waking up from a thousand year nap.
    • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
      • Discord was sealed in stone more than a thousand years ago, and offhandedly mentions being around for several "eons". As the Anthropomorphic Personification of chaos and disharmony, he could be as old as the universe itself.
      • Princess Celestia and Princess Luna are both somewhere over one thousand one hundred years of age — exact dates aren't given, but in "Horse Play" it's stated that the first time Celestia raised the sun was one thousand, one hundred and eleven years ago exactly. While she herself is likely older than that, the fact that raising the sun is her special talent and that ponies discover these around puberty implies that she is not much older than that figure. With season premiere-class threats, Celestia is usually telling the protagonists about what was going on because it was so long ago that history books contain nothing on it. Every detail of history and magic that was ever written, Twilight knows. Every detail that was never written, totally unknown or thought of as only legend, the princesses alone can explain because they were there.
      • Dragons in general have extremely long life expectancies, enough so that century-long hibernations qualify as naps for them. Torch, the Dragon Lord at the start of the series, is older than even Celestia and Luna: in "Campfire Tales", which describes events that took place when Equestria was new and the Princesses were fillies, he's portrayed as already being a massive, fully grown adult dragon.
      • Grogar, the final season's Arc Villain, is so ancient that Tirek, himself implied to be thousands of years old, thought he was a myth.
  • Used for laughs in The Simpsons with Mr. Burns, who reveals his birthplace to be Pangaea.note  Of course, this is just another example of the show's Negative Continuity.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Force-wielders/Ones have been living in isolation for so long that the newest Jedi distress code they knew had not been used for over two millennia, and there's little doubt they're way older than that. Star Wars Legends put their ages to well over a hundred thousand years.
  • In Steven Universe, the youngest of the (non-hybrid) Crystal Gems is at least six thousand years old, and the others are old enough to consider that young. They casually mention things that happened centuries ago, and one of the Gems mentioned that she could remember when humans were still hunter-gatherers.
  • General Immortus of Teen Titans was a highly skilled military general - who had been around for nearly every single battle in recorded history. At one point he quotes Sun Tzu, then mentions that he was an excellent pupil. He's described as knowing every tactic used in every battle in every war in history because he was there personally. (His comic counterpart is "merely" pushing a thousand.)
  • Most incarnations of The Transformers count, since Transformers tend to have lifespans that are millions of years long, but Kup from The Transformers cartoon is probably the best example. He's been fighting wars for somewhere around 9-12 million years and has Seen It All. Except for Unicron, he's never seen anything like that before.
  • Qilby of Wakfu, being one of the original Eliatropes, has gone through an endless cycle of death and rebirth for thousands of years. But unlike the others, he also retains the memories of his past lives.
  • In the first season finale of Young Justice, Vandal Savage begins his Motive Rant with a casual reference to having lived for over fifty thousand years - and in all that time, nothing disturbed him more than the foundation of the Justice League.

    Real Life 
  • Living things:
    • In a way, life itself is a time abyss. The cells we are made of were split off from our parents' cells, and their cells came from their parents, and so on and so forth, back to the formation of life, 3.8 billion years ago. Gene sequences exist in every one of our cells that have remained unchanged since the earliest common ancestor to all life. The purest example of this is the common amoeba, which splits itself to reproduce rather than dying of old age. It changes over time, and obviously is composed of different individual molecules, but in a very real sense that first amoeba is still alive and wriggling two billion-odd years later. A new branch of SETI, Biological SETI, is currently examining our DNA for traces of messages left for us by aliens, on the assumption that, with its ability to self-replicate and self-repair, DNA is the only substance on which a message could be transcribed that could be preserved for millions, even billions, of years.
    • The oldest known living thing on Earth is a single, giant patch of ''Posidonia Oceanic'' seagrass in the Mediterranean Sea. Studies show that it is most likely at least 100,000 years old.
    • Many species of plants and microorganisms have extremely long or unlimited lifespans; possibly the most famous example is the bristlecone pine tree, individual specimens of which are presently alive in spite of having sprouted nearly five millennia ago. One of them was found to be 4,844 years old when cut down in 1964. (John Muir once commented that a shorter-lived Sequoia tree was "already centuries old when Jesus walked the Earth.") There are also some trees that live in clonal colonies; the stems are continually renewed while the root system endures. One such colony of Quaking Aspens has roots that are at least 80,000 years old.note 
    • The immortal jellyfish is another example, using a kind of reverse aging. Hydras have a similar mechanism.
    • The oldest known non-clonal organism is a bristlecone pine which was dendrochronologically dated in 2013 to be 5,067 years old. To put that into perspective, this tree was already about 494 years old when construction of the pyramids of Giza began.
  • The objective of the Clock of the Long Now, a clock that when finished is intended to last for 10,000 years keeping (nearly) perfect time.
  • Many of the stone circles in Britain fit this trope, being almost/over five thousand years old, as does the Great Pyramid of Giza, which was constructed in ~2560 BC and incidentally held the record for the tallest man-made structure until Lincoln Cathedral was built in 1311- 3870 years later.
  • Ancient Egypt: Egyptian history from the earliest extensive records in the 31st century BC to the Macedonian Conquest in 332 BC spans 2700 years. Consider this: To Jesus or Julius Caesar, the first Pharaohs were 1000 years more ancient than either of them is to us; to the builders of the Pantheon in Rome, the Great Pyramid was older than the Pantheon is to the designers of today's skyscrapers. Even the Ancient Egyptian "golden age" of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties was as far removed from them as the Early Middle Ages are to us—the world of Ramses II was as far back for Augustus as Charlemagne is to Barack Obama. Almost any trope recorded in Ancient Egypt is therefore by definition Older Than Dirt.
  • If anything human-built counts, some sites (including a few cities surviving to the present day) in the Middle East are leading contenders.
    • Göbekli Tepe is a pre-Neolithic religious complex in Turkey that dates from roughly 9600 BCE and was built by people who had not yet developed metal tools, pottery, the wheel, or agriculture. It is believed that the location's use as a religious centre goes even further back; all the way to 11,000 BCE.
    • The city of Jericho is also a pre-Neolithic settlement first inhabited around 10,000 BCE, and inhabitednote  for all 12,000 years. To give an idea, the ice age ended around 10,000 years ago.
    • Damascus was first settled at least 8000 — possibly even 11,000 — years ago during early Neolithic times, and has been in continuous use ever since. It is older than any modern or ancient civilization. Mark Twain referred to it as "a form of immortality."
  • Speaking of remains made by human beings, the hand axes found in Olduvai, a region in Tanzania, date back 1.8 million years. That is incomprehensible. Not to mention possibly the oldest use of fire by human beings dates back to 1 million years, in a place in South Africa. Note however this isn't Homo sapiens, this is Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, an early human species.
  • Otzi the Iceman could be considered to qualify as this trope. The oldest mostly intact human body ever discovered, he lived and died over five thousand years ago, with the entirity of recorded history, plus a chunk of pre-history, having passed since then. When the first stone was laid for the first pyramid in Giza Otzi had already been under the ice for about a millennium.
  • A show about the simple disappearance of all humans predicted that the last traces of human existence would be the man-made objects on the moon (lunar landers, US flag, etc.). Unless some outside force or object intervenes, they would remain on the moon forever. And the only human whose name will be left there (well, on the plaque on the Moon, anyway) is Richard Nixon. There's something ironic there.
    • It was also predicted that if humans disappeared from Earth today, Mount Rushmore would still be intact millions of years later, waiting to be seen by the next intelligent species to evolve.
  • Protons. According to one theory, they are ultimately stable, that is, live absolutely forever. According to another, they have a half-life that makes Brahma seem like a mayfly.
    • Radioactive material, while not lasting forever, can last an incredibly long time. The two commonly found forms of uranium, uranium-235 and uranium-238, have a half-life of 703.8 million years and 4.468 billion years respectively. By the time a kilogram block of uranium-238 ceases to exist, the universe may as well have ended. And there are isotopes with longer half lives than that; bismuth-209 has a half-life of around 19,000,000,000,000,000,000 years (that's well over a billion times the commonly accepted value for the current age of the Universe) and is the current record holder for radioactive isotope with the longest known half-life. (If protons actually do decay, then all elements are "radioactive", but experiments have set a lower limit of at least 59,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for the half-life of hydrogen-1).
      • Of course, radioactive material by definition doesn't last anywhere near as long as it would were it not radioactive. Consider protons again.
      • Even after all the material in the Universe has decayed to its final state, the subatomic particles of which matter was once composed last effectively forever. It's recommended to take a look at this Timeline of the far future in The Other Wiki. You Cannot Grasp the True Form does not even start to define it: "Although listed in years for convenience, the numbers beyond this point are so vast that their digits would remain unchanged regardless of which conventional units they were listed in, be they nanoseconds or star lifespans."
      • On the same line, the very first moments of the Universe after the Big Bang fall into this trope (see The Other Wiki). While those times from our perspective look tiny and meaningless, not so much if one notes the proportions between those epochs and compares them to the future ages of the Universenote 
  • Black Holes, once formed won't actually exist forever, as they release energy through a process called Hawking radiation. While the actual time it would take for a Black Hole to fully evaporate though is believed to vary depending on its size, its estimated to be somewhere between 8,6 × 10^70 years (that's 70 zeroes!) to 1,3 × 10^99 years.
  • HD 140283 "Methuselah" is a star initially calculated to be older than the universe, literally older than time. It was later recalculated to be 14.4 billion years old, ±0.8 billion years, which is only slightly better. Even if on the sprightly side of that range, it's very old.
    • Perhaps surpassed by SM0313 Note that age calculations for very old stars have a large percentage of uncertainty as they are based on theoretical models of stellar evolution, so it's far more likely they formed after the Big Bang and not before it.
  • On the same subject, PSR B1620-26 b, aka Methuselah is an exoplanet roughly 2.5 times the size of Jupiter, which is believed to have outlived its original star. It's currently in orbit of a binary system consisting of a Neutron star and a white dwarf, the later believed to have once been an sun-like star and the planet's original host before booth was captured by the Neutron star ages ago, said neutron star also preventing the other star from going supernova and destroying the planet when it died. While the actual age of the planet is impossible to tell, its location would imply it was formed around 12.7 billion years ago, making it the oldest exoplanet ever discovered.
  • Deep Time
  • The non-fiction history book Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray starts with a chapter intended to evoke the Time Abyss, by tracing back human society in 400-year chunks.
  • While 32-bit Unix systems will run into serious trouble in the year 2038, users of 64-bit ones will not have to worry about that issue until the year 292,277,026,596note .

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