jeriendhal | RVA: Patience (Reply)

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She was only a hundred and ten years old when she'd lost Salli. Sallivera, only five years older, but never having indulged in cellular regeneration, and having suffered more than her fair share of serious injuries, died from tripping over the edge of a carpet of all things. The fall resulted in a broken rib. The subsequent lung infection from her restricted breathing brought on a battle with pneumonia that Salli had no chance to recover from. After a brief three day coma, she died, never regaining consciousness to say goodbye.

So for forty years, Alinadar went on without her. Not unhappily. Their children and grandchildren kept her distracted from the empty hole in her heart. She even took on a lover, scandalously fifty years younger than herself, who brought her joy she'd never expected to feel again. They lived together for ten years, parted amicably, and moved on with their lives. After that, there was no one else.

Ali, never happy unless she was occupied with a task, kept to her post as Adjunct to the Governor of Greenholme until her 140th birthday, when her health began to decline and even she was forced to finally retire. She died in bed, after wishing the grandchild she was visiting goodnight, a blood vessel bursting in her brain an hour after falling asleep. She would have been embarrassed, and more than a little confused, by the sheer number of mourners at her funeral.

After a period of time without real meaning, she awoke again, naked, in the snowy, Cold and Dark plain of the Mother Goddess' Hell.

"Ah!" Ali called out, pushing herself up out of the snow. There was something heavy, hard, and freezing cold hanging off her right ankle. She looked down, to find a heavy shackle welded there, an anchoring chain a hundred times as long as her tail, the metal of the links each a good two centimeters thick, hanging off it. Blood dripped from the chain, staining the white snow a deep red, and hanging from the chain were knives, pistols, rifles. All the tools of Ali's old trade, all likewise covered in blood. Her Chain of Sin, marking all of the unanswered offences Alinadar had committed against the teachings of the Mother Goddess in her mortal life.

She blinked drifting snow out of her eyes. In the distance, barely visible, was a light in a cave. Waiting there, she knew from dimly remembered teachings, would be the Mother Goddess, waiting to free her from her chain and guide her to the Fields of Green. Ali pressed her free foot into the snow, trying to push herself towards it, only to collapse, panting, having not budged a centimeter.

Are you honestly surprised? she thought to herself. She'd known her likely fate the day she committed her first murder as Bloody Margo's slave. Ali sighed, laying down in the cold snow, feeling it begin to rise above her. Soon she would feel nothing save oblivion, the fate of all whose chain was too heavy to reach the Mother Goddess' warm den.

"Ali? You mustn't sleep, Ali," a familiar voice called gently. "The Mother Goddess waits for you." A warm, gentle paw brushed the snow off her face, and Ali looked up to see Sallivera looking down on her, a smile on her wife's face.

"Salli, what are you doing here?" Ali asked, sitting up as Salli gathered her into her arms. She was as naked as Ali, her own Chain of Sin a light anklet around her leg.

"Waiting for you, of course," Salli answered.

"But you should be in the Fields of Green," Ali protested. She waved towards the light in the distance. "The Mother Goddess' den is right over there. You could reach it easily."

"I could have, yes. But that would have meant being separated from you," Salli said. "I knew your own Chain would be horribly heavy. So I waited for you to arrive, to help carry it for you."

She blinked, feeling warm tears run down her face, soaking and freezing to icicles in her fur. "But it's too heavy," she cried out. "Even with you lifting it, I'll never be able to move."

"I know," her wife replied. "That's why I brought help."

From the darkness and snow several figures emerged. Two she knew, her brother Lu and her Aunt Razi, both dying two decades ago. Three she recognized somehow, though her mortal memories did not. Her mother. Her father. Her grandmother. All murdered by the same pirates that had kidnapped Ali at the age of six, to be made their warrior and slave.

"Hello, my darling," her mother said. "We've been waiting for you."

"Time to come home," her brother Lu added. Together, all six of her most beloved family lifted the heavy chain, as Ali rose to her feet. Together, they began to move forward, towards the warm light.