Vasilia linked her hands limply in her lap. "If that is death, then why continue? Why suffer a dozen new instances knowing that the last is coming? Why struggle, why postpone?"

Why pride oneself on fifty decades when at the end was that ending--what use a legacy?

She had stumbled into the same morass that another woman had--it would have comforted her very little to know that Gladia Solaria too had realized this, had found herself seeing her years as only a long, meaningless diversion as she awaited the unknown.