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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ankh-Morpork Guard" data-source="post: 3211320" data-attributes="member: 10079">Wellll, I couldn't stop myself from writing anymore...and I might as well post it now, too. We'll continue here since that seems to be what you guys would prefer. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> My other reason for another thread was stylistic reasons, but methinks it'll survive just fine as is.BAH, why can't I stop posting long enough to let a cliffhanger really, really HANG? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Part VIChapter 417: Meant to BeLabels like names will tell you nothing about me beyond, perhaps, the hopes of my parents. We cling to them for ease of identification, but divert too much meaning to something that is, in the end, simply a word like any other...and one that is rarely unique to the person claiming it to be their’s.    That aside, I expect you know my name well enough by now, despite having used more than one in my lifetime. Not only that, but you know very well who I am. Or at least, who I have become through the years.    I cannot argue that a great deal about me has changed. When I look at the faces of my children I see clearly just how much really has changed. Their very existence speaks it all. But even to this day, so many years later, I find myself feeling that I have stepped into a path that was not my own. Not one that I would have ever approached if not for the young human who called himself Akan when I met him, and Jyren not longer before we grew close. Perhaps it is that closeness that is what has altered where I am going.    It was not something I should have ever been a part of. As the eldest daughter of the Empress, I was expected to be married for political reasons...as a Tam’Day’U, a Cursed One, I was expected to be dead before I came anywhere close to adulthood and the need for such a political move...as an exile from my people and my home, I was alone and ignored by all but the seediest of creatures among the rest of the galaxy....and then...    There always seems to be an ‘and then’. It makes tracing the point at where things went so strange for me very difficult. Was it the fact that the clone that escaped from the Imperial facility on Coruscant who somehow befriended that young human that altered it all? Do I really see myself as so different from her, despite knowing that she is here inside me, a part of me? Was her decision to bind him to herself something I, too, would have made? If not, then why, when I merged with the clone, did I not cast the human aside?    Once, on one of our wanderings through the forests of Alraxia, Jyren asked me a strange question. Did I love him because we were linked together, or did I bring us together as one because I loved him then?    I still do not have an answer for that.    The Force has a way of making things that should happen, happen. It has a way of coercing events to occur as they should. It is the closest thing to an answer I have...and perhaps that, in itself, answers everything else. It was all meant to be the way it ended up.    Why, then, do I look out at the view in front of me, seeing the eruption of flames a great distance away, and wonder if I could have stopped it from happening? Wonder if I could have stopped him....or rather, knowing that a single word could have stopped him. Why didn’t I?    It was in that short moment that I truly understood the choice my mother had made that ended her life. The choice for the greater good. A choice that seemed so irrational, and yet no one would step in and stop it from happening because it was meant to be.    So I watch the scene in front of me, hearing the sobs of a young boy to my side in a seat that should very well have been empty instead, and try to accept this truth as I have come to accept so many through the years.    It was meant to be.</blockquote>

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