Note: I thought about setting this to music (Loggins' 'Forever' was the front runner), but then decided the best way you should read this...is in silence. It carries a profound music of its own.

The blood mage had gone, and for once, things were quiet again in the house, and it appeared that even Timkin had settled down into some sort of quiet pasttime. Thora had finished her bickering with Jason over Sue, and was now off apparently preparing to go hunt. A single idle thought crept through his mind, wondering that even the crickets seem to be silent. It only lasted long enough to mark itself as significant before being banished from his mind.

In the not-so-infamous words of the Great American Hero...white paper, white paper, white paper...

The feel of cold sea air...

...a windy day. The small group of people they found had not done well lately, and some of the men had deigns on what they thought was an easy claim for a woman. He could hear lecherous grunts ahead, then the surprised scream of a man that has been reminded there are some things you don't toy with, and a pissed off Pict was one of them. Didn't really matter what gender it was.

He stopped, and looked down. Sandy earth, wind whipping hair past his ears. These were not thoughts being told to him, these were thoughts he was reclaiming. He closed his eyes for a moment, and spread his fingers. The feel of the wind. The wind chilling his skin. Skin warmed by blood still coursing through his body. That was what he couldn't place.

/You've grown so used to being cold, you've forgotten what it feels to be alive again. That is what makes you different. You accept the cold life you have, and choose to do well at it and survive. Saeme does not. She strives to ascend, and that alone makes her, Thora, and Magnus different from you. They reach for the divine, and embrace it. They live./

The weight of the little bit he was beginning to understand weighed heavy on his shoulders for a moment, and he cast his face down, knowing he had been wrong.

/She is the center of what I am. She has learned in over a thousand years things I don't even know exist to be understood. But she is my wife, my goddess.../

He lifted his head and opened his eyes to see the scene before him. Saeme, clothing mussed from the scuffle, held a spear a bit large for her in her arms, and challenged him with a look that spoke volumes, two men at her feet to prove the unspoken words were not idle. The wind was at her face, and the chill in the air colored her face just enough to add an etherial look to her features.

/You do not belong on this earth. You belong above it, with the shining Valkyrie that you must have stumbled from./

"Hold. Leave her be. She will decide for herself who she goes with."

/Perhaps you know the depths to which I love you now, and loved you then. So strongly that even asleep, I found you still. The divine have awakened me to grant a gift...to spend eternity with the one I thought I had been taken away from./

Watching her face fade from his sight, as he slowly lost grasp of his life, and his body grew cold.

The image before him faded.

The next room, a sound, a harpsichord began playing. Magnus.

He opened his eyes, and gazed upon the silent, sleeping, beruned face before him. He had done this, she had not understood, and he now knew that she would not rejoin him until she had. He very quietly placed his hands on her arm and placed his head on them, letting his body slump as he threw the bonds that held him to flesh aside.

/Saeme. Hear me. Your husband calls out to you. Come back to me, I beg of you. I understand, at least a small part, and I have so much to tell you./

Blackness enveloped him and allowed him one last thought as he reached out for his wife.

/I love you. And I live again to tell you so./