Waking Moments Alternate Ending/Epilogue

The end of the line always comes after suffering.

                Upon a heavily frosted hilltop sat an old, withered Chaste with long strands of white silk blowing across her face and swollen, arthritic fingers brushing over frozen blades of graze, warming them and leaving in its place a dewy sheen. Around her, beside her, was a patchwork of crumbled buildings and entire civilizations long extinct. Her eyes lay on the horizon as slowly the sun fell, casting shadows across the large expanse of unaltered land before her and shooting glimmering rays into the darkening sky above, where the first few stars began to pepper the firmament.

                For centuries now she had rested there, on the ruins of her first and last battle, staring unseeingly into the distance and watching as eras rose and fell around her in a blur. On her lap rested and equally worn leather-bound book, which had its title written in an elegant golden calligraphy that read Hamlet: William Shakespeare. With the wind catching the flimsy cover of the novel and pushing it open, it fell upon a creased page, drawing her eyes to the line she had grown used to pondering.

 

“In this sleep called death what dreams may come…”

 

                She had always wanted to meet Shakespeare, but seeing as her guilt had doomed herself to this battlefield, she had never done so, thought she’d seen him through aged,  milky, cataract-ridden eyes and understood how revered and intelligent he was: A man before his time indeed. She wondered if perhaps her story would continue on when she died or if there would be not but a void. Closing her eyes, she knew but feared they never again would open, and so they did not, until the day they came…

 

End of Book One

Author's Note

This came as an afterthought inspired by Michael Scott's, "The Enchantress."