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Save Point: Cutting Your Losses

Terrowne comes home to bad news at the end of a long journey.

Cleo has visibly been crying, the fur matted down the sides of her muzzle, and she immediately throws herself forward into his arms.

"Grunter died," is all she says.

Grunter has been her kitty companion for longer than the age of some civilizations. It's like losing a child. She isn't really sure how to cope after something like this.

"Did you know this might happen?" she asks quietly, as he rubs her shoulders.

"It's been an outlier for a couple of centuries now," he tells her regretfully. "I didn't want to worry you, so I did my best to tweak his nanotech a little, and tried to avoid timelines where he might be placed under the sort of stress that would trigger it. But there were just too many factors. It was always going to happen eventually."

"But what happened to him. Could this happen to us?" she snarls in grief, grabbing at his collar. "Is this going to happen to me too? Would you tell me if it was going to?"

"Everything has a timer. Even us," he sighs. It's not reassuring but that would probably be entirely the wrong path here. It may not be possible to reassure her. "That stuff we have, they tested it out to ten kiloyears or so in simulation. It has much better built-in controls, adaptive learning, all that good stuff. And of course if we start to feel unwell we can do something about it. But the stuff they used for most of the animals? No, it wasn't as good or tested as much. About two to five kiloyears, mostly, and I doubt they had much choice in what they used."

Cleo takes this in silence. It's an explanation, but that doesn't help to fix things.

They don't talk about death much, but it's there. When you're immortal in a world of tangible and fragile things, people die, but to lose a companion who is one of their own is something different. You start to rely on the few individuals who are always there continuing to be there.

Wordlessly, she takes him by the hand and leads him out the back.

~*~

Where there was once a pleasant grove, out beyond the small field, it becomes apparent she has annihilated several trees. An entire copse has been brutally split, felled and stacked, to create an open circular space amongst the remaining trees. Fresh white wood is exposed beneath the bark, yet to dry or discolor in the weather, and the cracked pieces laid out roughly near where they fell around the perimeter.

The Axe of Dagon, a trinket they picked up on their last adventure, stands to one side embedded in a section of heartwood, with triangular chips and divots shattered out along the cracked blade, and the damaged edges of the metal burred backward and out of line. Fresh sap lies sticky all over the handle. It was never meant to be used as a simple wood-axe.

"I... see you chopped some wood," Terrowne observes, as neutrally as he can manage.

"I had to do something," says Cleo, wiping at her eyes. Some of the sap has become stuck to her downcast ears and eyebrows, along with a few of the finer wood-shavings. "He deserves a proper pyre. Like a hero. He fought more bandits and bad sorts than any cheap hero."

"It's a shame we don't have his blanket anymore."

"He would've loved to have that blanket."

~*~

They spend a couple of hours moving all the wood into position, stacking it carefully into a wide central dais that will fall through when it burns, but won't escape into the remaining trees. Then they confront the less than enviable task of moving Grunters body into place.

He's laid out near where he fell, although Cleo has made some effort to clean him up with buckets of water, removing the kitty scat and wiping him his fur with a towel. Nonetheless, he's still lying in that peculiar posture that dead cats assume, a sort of stretched out running snarl with the legs drawn back and a rictus grin as things dry out.

You can't make that look any better, save to say that he's not here anymore to look on it and be all dismayed by how much licking would be required to clean up this mess.

Despite the tidying, there's a faint smell of semen not quite masked by feline, and Grunters cock is further out of its sheath than might be expected from the general relaxation of death.

"He got one last bit of action, huh?" offers Terrowne, unaware of the exact circumstances because he does not care to look. He's assuming kitty tongue soothed kitty-cock one last time, possibly out in the warm sun on a peaceful day, with unexpected consequences.

"Yeah. Yeah, he really did."

The nanites which are still in the body, performing their functions despite having failed to act as a team and being well beyond restoring life, have at least kept Grunter fresh. His fur feels the same as it always did but the skin underneath is cold.

Terrowne takes most of the load, expressing dragon sinews to cope, and relieved that he got back before she could try something crazy like trying to move her friend all by herself. Cleo is twice as heavy as an equivalent human being but no less graceful, yet Grunter is the size of a large horse and still weighs accordingly, at somewhere between three quarters and a ton.

Moving something like that normally requires dragging straps and a full team and pair. Terrowne looks around carefully to make sure there are no unwanted witnesses before positioning the poor animals forelegs over his shoulders, black scales tracing pathways down his skin, and rising to his feet in a manner that should literally be impossible for a human.

Cleo takes the back legs, propping them likewise. That her muzzle is almost up under a dead cats tail, and she catches a lethal whiff of putrescence every time their movements disturb his innards, is almost nothing compared to her grief. Her eyes are already wet with tears and it's nowhere she hasn't put her face before, after all.

Grunters head keeps flopping from side to side and Terrowne is hard-pressed to balance the load, but eventually they manage to push his body up onto the pyre. It seems expedient to arrange him sort of curled up into a ball, the way he used to sleep, so that seen from the sky he is a spiral, or a symbol of mystic balance of some kind. They can't conceal that he's dead but it's possible to make it look more like he's resting in peace.

It's getting late in the afternoon by the time they're finished. Terrowne finds himself concerned for Cleo, who despite her general awesomeness in all fields must have spent pretty much all of the day yesterday and this morning just sobbing and murdering trees with an axe to take out her pain on her surroundings. She has to be more than a little dehydrated and exhausted.

He talks her into taking a quick break, ostensibly to pull out the basins and washcloths and clean themselves up while they wait for sunset, which is the only appropriate moment to light it up. She drinks water quietly under his watchful gaze, then uses the rest to dab at fur mussed with sap and pale cat hair that isn't her own, and who knows what other indescribable things.

When the time is ripe and they both agree it's not too late or too early, they head back out to the pyre site. Shadowy birds scatter in in an explosion of wings as they approach, still working up the courage to start pecking at eyes and anus before being caught short.

Terrowne does the honors because Cleo can't bear to, reaching over and laying one hand on a still flank, then opening the configuration menu for Grunters nanotech to initialize the clean and burn routine. It's the same thing Cleo used to have when she was with the Azatlani Defense Force, a set of instructions designed to consume the body and destroy all evidence.

They each locked it down with a set of phrases unknown to the other, thousands of years before, and such was their love for Grunter that they have never shared them. Cleo whispers the words so he can enter them, and he says his own aloud to match her faith and trust. Only a single tear spills down her muzzle as she watches him bypass all the lockouts.

Grunter's remains are slowly enveloped in the peculiar destructive burning that is produced by nanotech efficiently consuming itself in the most organized and optimal way, configuring itself to ignite as completely as it can before the out-of-control heat shuts it down and destroys it. Instead of roaring outward and out of control, it's slow burn, like a book being consumed by fire in layers of individual leaves, the flames spreading across each one at a time.

Unwilling to watch, Cleo walks around the pyre in a circle with her eyes turned away and brushes her hand across the wood, which ignites in a more conventional manner at her touch, leaping up to conceal the anatomization of the destructive process, which follows the hidden lines of muscle fiber and bone. It's almost like Grunter is running in his sleep, paws moving as the competing fire seeks its own grasp on his huddled form.

They sit back on one of the remaining chunks and watch the cremation funeral of the person who came closest in all the world to being their son, never mind that he was a quadruped. Cleo levers the Axe of Dagon out of the damp wood next to her, and after contemplating its ruination, tosses it haft-first into the fire as well, somewhere between where Grunters paws were.

"Warrior's gotta be buried with a weapon," is what she says.

~*~

When the surprisingly vast blaze finally dies down into the slower burn of a steady fire and stars are coming out overhead, despite the smoke, Terrowne finds that he's reminded of something out of where and when they first met, and that has happened only a few times since.

"Do you remember how, after we first met, and I showed you what I was," he asks her, "how I got some dragon-blood and put it in your eyes, so you could see what I see?"

"I thought you said that was dangerous," she replies, still holding his hand. "That it does strange things to you. You wouldn't let me try it again after that, and I've always respected that, because I still remember some of what I saw."

"You can also use it to look backward and forward," he explains wretchedly. "We could do it now, if you want. You could look back and see him just one last time, not just the things you remember but also the things that might have been. I don't want to. I've seen enough."

There is a pause, and she realizes that he's asking her permission. Putting a burden on someone else because he can't do it himself. It's very much anything other than what he normally does.

She considers it carefully, weary with her grief. She's already cried too much and her sinuses hurt and she has a faint headache. But how often does anyone get to see a loved one that one last time? The more general risk to life and sanity is trivial in comparison.

"Do it," she suggests, daring the world to stop her in this profanity against the natural order. This is a new and original sin she has little experience with, and she wants to get some.

~*~

The next few years are kind of quiet. Neither of them are really in the mood.