Dragoncrest Cliffs ii. it's the moments we relive, it's the moments like this.

there were precious few moments in life.

even fewer for val, whose last seconds now unspooled like dwindling yarn. thinning, thinning, as the sea that had always been his home flew to meet him.

* * *

they say each of us walk our own path in death and it is what we believe that greets us in the afterlife. for one who had never given death much thought, val froze as he felt the fibers constructing who he was slowly unbind.

lives, countless, shutter past.

he is an orca, in a pod ten hundred strong. he lives and breathes the sea and the sea is a song around him. he is young and strong, then middle aged -- surrounded by family -- and then, geriatric. alone and adrift at sea. his world grown ever shallower. the songs fading to silence.

drowning.

now some great winged bird, his path around the earth endless. the days unwind without distinction. long nights, short summers. he is on a cliff with his mate when it comes - a stone unleashed that drags him down to the gurgling depths.

a seal. gregarious. perhaps his best life, spent fast and easy among the waves. sharks come and his blood boils in the churning water; red and red and red and then at last

black.

a wolf. born to sapphique's nascent motherpack rusalka. growing alongside strong, proud women. blessed. comforted. knowing great evil existed in the world, but somehow he was always safe. fighting for his home was the same as fighting for his life, and he did so with great selflessness. lover of only one - mireille. father to many, each beautiful souls that he saw so much of the woman he admired within them. tousaint, thibault, chantale, sobeille. shadess, lucette, lafayette, jadou. brother to chacal, nephew of svalinn.

friend to all of sapphique.

now plunging, plunging, and gone --

many other lives, many other times. in each of them a common theme that binds them. the sea, always, the closing curtain call of his thousand ends.

* * *

so much potential in each of these lives. so many paths untrod and doors unopened. if his soul was to be asked one question it would be 'what did you want most out of life?'

to which val would answer without shame: to be a grandfather.

to grow old alongside his daughters and sons. to laugh as they laughed, cry when they cried. to hold them up in their triumphs, and prevent their fallings in their failures. to watch them as they too approached mid-life, crowsfeet around their aging faces. to smile quietly to himself when he saw so much of his own children in his grandchildren: the glint of erzulie's eye, rosalyn's laugh. mireille's fierce courage. sapphiqian pride.

a glimpse of a future his, if only --

he would be the first to tell you: not in this life.

some other life, perhaps.

* * *

the sea did not keep all of her treasures. this body she rolled around in the roof of her mouth, bashed between teeth of tall stone, and then spat out along the blackened strand of the sound. yet with her rough handling, she smoothed out all things -- val looked as if he were simply sleeping as snow blanketed his slackened shoulders.

in a life so embittered by early strife, at last val knew peace.