Markandeya

Tradition holds Markandeya was destined to die at sixteen, but his unbroken devotion to Shiva moved the god to intervene against Yama himself, granting the boy, and sage thereafter, perpetual youth — chiranjivi, one of a handful of figures in the tradition said to remain alive across ages.

The Markandeya Purana, one of the eighteen major Puranas, bears his name and contains the Devi Mahatmya, the core scripture recited during Durga Puja and Navratri. In the Mahabharata, he narrates a vision of pralaya, the dissolution of the universe, witnessed while briefly swallowed and later released by the infant form of Vishnu.