Shara turns away and walks to the stern of the ship with the canister under her arm. She watches the churning ocean behind them and the wake of their passage. The stripe of curiously smooth water stretches out for miles: after that, the rise and bob of the waves devour it until it is gone.
She stares at the sea for a long time. The wind caresses her hair and her coat. Her glasses are bedecked with crystalline jewels of sea spray. The air alternates between a pleasant warmth and a pleasant coolness.
“It has been a very long journey, hasn’t it, Vo?” she says to the ceramic canister. “But looking back, it seems like it was all over in only a moment.”
A gull dips low and calls to her, perhaps asking for something.
They did not want to cremate him, of course: cremation was heretical on the Continent. But she refused to let him be buried in the Votrov tomb, to lie among the people who had made his life a hell, so she took him with her, the contents of his self baked and boiled down and funneled into a little canister, freed of all pain, of all memory, of all the tortures his country and his god had put him through.
She will not cry. She has decided this. There is nothing to cry over: there is simply what happened.
“Birthing pains,” she says aloud. “That’s what our lives were, weren’t they? The wheels of time shift and clank against one another, and birth a new age.”
Cold wind slaps against her cheeks.
“But there are pains before, violent contractions. Unfortunate that it had to be us, but …”
The captain calls that they are near, or near enough.
“… a butterfly must emerge from its chrysalis sometime …”
She begins to unscrew the top of the canister. Her heart beats faster.
“… and forget it ever was a caterpillar.”
Another plaintive cry from the gulls.
She turns over the canister; a cloud of delicate ash comes twisting out, twirling through the winds to settle over the stripe of calm seas behind the ship.
She drops the canister overboard. It sinks almost instantly beneath the dark waves.
She watches the waves, wondering what they know, what they remember.
Time renders all people and all things silent, she thinks. But I will speak of you, of all of you, for all the time I have.
Then she turns and walks to the bow of the ship, to look ahead into the sun and the wind and the bright new waves, and to wait for sight of home.