FADE RIFT [INBOX]

[shri]

ＬＡＤＹ ＬＡＫＳＨＭＩ
( Lady Lakshmi, Bai Saheba, Rani Lakshmibai )

ＶＯＩＣＥ | ＡＣＴＩＯＮ | ＮＯＴＥＳ

Unavaliable To All:

• 30mins around dawn
  
  Only to Voice:
  
• Hour training morning and evening
  
• Any time she's gone riding.
  
• When she's in the field.
  
  Only to Book:
  
• When she's otherwise in a meeting, leave a message.
  
• Very late at night or early in the morning.
  
  Other:
  
• She usually takes her morning meals in the mess hall with everyone else.
  
• Her days are usually spent in Kirkwall seeing to either her personal business or Inquisition tasks.
  
• She has a bath twice a day, every day.
  

Comments

crystal.

[ipseite]

( petrana had not answered lakshmi's crystal message, that very extensive public debate on procreation, but that isn't the same as not having been aware of it, or listening, or thinking on it. it is days, even weeks later, that eventually— )

Forgive me if I'm forward; you left children behind, in coming here?

[shri]

[ There is a creak when she speaks, a faint cough. ]

I did. Not forward at all.

[ipseite]

It is difficult.

( how like petrana to confide only so obliquely. )

[shri]

It is. Like a part of yourself cut off.

[ipseite]

My eldest daughter—my only daughter, when I first came through these rifts—passed very young. But I have...it is something that happens, sometimes, here. Our lives continue without us, after the point at which we diverge into Thedas, and we sometimes may share the memories of those other lives.

I had a second. The woman I was who never left her home had a second child. And she lives, to my knowledge. It is...

( she struggles with her words for a moment. she isn't sure what the point of this was, or what she intends to say, or if now that she comes to do it it's actually such a grand idea, but who else could she say it to? that might understand? )

I have never held her, I know, no more than I have ever died, but I know both as intimately as I should know anything. I have naught to do but set it aside, but I do think on it, on my Thaïs.

[shri]

[ Lakshmi goes quiet, goes, painfully, emptily quiet. Or rather, not at all, her breath is laboured. Whether it is from grief or the more physical pain of old wounds, it could not be told the difference of. The soul cannot be harmed. she tells herself often, in a way that is more than faith, it is hope, hope of seeing her children. Seeing her husband. Seeing them whole and happy and -

- it doesn't matter. Then like now, death is how she will know them again, but then, here, trapped in some other world, what good was even that hope right now?

The silence goes on and on by measures. That catch of some used tone in her throat. What good was grieving? It had never served her. There was always something else to be done, and right now, like this, she realises she has no idea how to express it. Not so open and so vulnerable. Her aged body pulling down on her body. ]

Forgive me, I cannot -

[ Speak of it, dwell on it, hang too long in her misery like this. And with it, she cuts the communication suddenly with no more to it than that. ]

[ipseite]

( petrana sits alone with her crystal and her regret for a long time. )