In the future

She would not die...

She knew early enough she would live to be old. Her mother, timeless immortal, would never show the passing years on her face. But her father had been temporal, ephemeral. And she was also his daughter. The span of her years would have an end. Further away than most, but it would end.

But she had connected too often. She had ridden the currents of the oldest being alive: Earth. She had been a symbiotic part of the Old Mother too often; the blood had wakened and now nothing would stop the transformation. She could only delay and make light of it.

Already, her skin was becoming impenetrable. Odin had confirmed her doubts. She was the Elemental. She would live as long as there was earth and green life for she was the ground and the trees and all that was primal and rock and stone. She could hear them sing in her sleep.

So, anguished she tried not to be. Thoughts of life and death, mundane things such as friends, love, family, she had never given them much care. She had built a world of reason, logic and science around herself. She had surrounded herself with answers or the means to obtain them. But although her mind was filled with questions without end; although she was quite sure she would forever uncover new wonders in the world, living or dying was not something she pondered on. It was too abstract.

In fact, she was horribly terrified of death. It went against all that she defined herself with and yet, it was also an essential part of what her being was about. In all existence, life and death were a looping circle, Ouroboros eating its own tail. Without one, the other did not exist. When she felt inclined to ponder it, it was ironic that both the thought of living forever and the idea of death frightened her.

But now, after two years on the run, after watching as the world fell apart, literally, and feeling the tear and being confronted by this timelessness that was her glory and her doom, she felt a sinking of her spirit. She had made friends, for the first time in her life, she had intimately connected with other sentient beings other than mentors, over-stuffed diplomats and prospective fund-providing rich men and women.

She had come to care for many beings that were both very much mortals and whose life-spans were decidedly shorter than her own, regardless.



And what of love?

She saw how Darya was with her husband. How Sayako hovered on Ein's emotional radar. Even more scandalous - she loved the sound of that word and it was a subjective term she rarely used - how scandalous then how that tall tall big man looked at Darya when she turned away.

But all these things implied a special bond be forged. She would not delude herself with irrational ideas of affections, she was not wired for it. But furthermore, what kind of partner could she find that would live as long as she? What kind of being would she not have to watch die, broken-hearted and live on without? For there was no doubt in her mind, she needed just look at her mother. Once her father had died, there had been no other man, no close friend. Only a slow retreat within her mind, something she had witnessed enough to understand. A few years back, she would not even have blinked at the notion. She was far away from such troubles. Now, she was not so certain of her resolve.

And it gnawed at her. She felt something amiss, an empty space in herself that demanded such a thing come to exist. But she was very much afraid of it as well. What if he was mortal? What if he died? She would endure but just seeing how others coped with these painful separations, she did not think she could bear the pain. Her tolerance to physical pain had steadily increased in the past years due to her transformation. But emotional anguish she knew nothing about. She had shut away all irrational feelings years and years ago.

Perhaps she would lock that gnawing emptiness away as well. But she did not know how.

-Saphira-


Aaridys
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love. Henry B. Stendhal


Humeur: Spirited
Musique: Barbara Streisand "Someday, my prince will come"