They've left him alone in his cell.
He can't really be said to be lucid but he has very acute instincts for when there's someone and when he's alone - it's the last of his senses to depart him - and he's alone.
And then suddenly he isn't.
They've left him alone in his cell.
He can't really be said to be lucid but he has very acute instincts for when there's someone and when he's alone - it's the last of his senses to depart him - and he's alone.
And then suddenly he isn't.
Before the war, when my father was alive, they were so curious, all the time, about everything...
Yeah. And they haven't lost that, exactly, but it might never be painless again... Wish I'd found you before all this.
Yeah. And I guess I can't let it bother me too much, I wasn't even alive when this started...
Mmhmm, and I'm not that old; I'll be thirty-two this spring. We age faster than you do, I'm sure.
Mmhmm. We're adults at twelve or so and full grown in our early twenties; if I'd wanted to raise my own kids my eldest would be turning twelve this spring.
Wow. I suppose it makes sense that you'd want to make the most of time if you aren't going to have forever.
We don't have that kind of choice about it, she chuckles, but, yeah. We only live a hundred fifty, hundred sixty years at most, it wouldn't work very well if we spent a third of that as children.
Ah. We don't have anything like that - not that anyone comes back from, anyway, so if we do go somewhere, we don't know about it ahead of time.
She shrugs. It doesn't really bother me? There are plenty of things about the world that I don't know, and I don't have any reason to think that's a particularly bad one.
I would like to stop existing but I can't. But at least I know what does happen, there's a bound on how bad death can be...
She nods. Maybe it's because I'm used to a world without gods. Things can get pretty bad, here, but there's already a bound on how bad they can get; mages and hexes and monsters are scary, but there's always something we can do about them - maybe not anything good, but always something, even if we aren't very powerful. And whatever might happen to me after I die doesn't feel like it should be any different than that, or at least not worse.
That makes sense. Probably it's - just wandering houseless, like we did before Mandos. That makes the most sense.