Character name meanings

Éternité: Eternity in French

Kamal: Perfection in Arabic كمال

Jama: Council, assembly or congregation in Arabic جَمَاعَة

Abadia: Forever in Arabic أبدية

Imani: Belief in Hausa and Swahili, from Arabic

Khalud: eternity in Arabic خلود

Éternité's Star

Short stiff limbs take Éternité back to her conjured beach chair facing the expanse of water that went on forever, a still rink all dawn that only now begins to wave as winds pick up.

Breeze Point is Éternité's favorite part of Soliara and this is her favorite view.

Legs bend around sticky, cracky knees. She settles her behind down, and after a moment's peace gazing at roll after roll of white tumblers, she picks up a paper to read. The black and white of the airpage she sets against the clear blue sky and the obsolete crimson bridge motos soar high above and over, and she feels the present moment collide with the past and sweep off into a dream of future.

The children always expected Éternité to get grouchy about change, like she would be moaning about flying cars breaking the peace of the sky. Almost seemed to apologize to Grandma for the noises of modernity, the chaos of swooping vehicles and soaring businesses advertising themselves with dance music and pops of lightchromo fireworks. Didn't occur to them that nothing pleased her more than the three millennia of life she had seen roll by and all its pops, blasts, crashes and flashes. The revolutions of wonder tickled her pink. Always had.

The newspaper cracks and crinkles, pulling taut and folding. Block words fill her consciousness. Crisis. Crisis, the headline cracks at her. Pulling it taut again with a snap, she stretches it wide between crinkled fists.

The aged paperwhite skin doesn't bother her. Every few birthdays one of her daughters or granddaughters or nieces will offer to treat her to an eternal youth spell, to which she would reply, "I'm not a child; you won't catch me walking around in one of those childish bodies." This year the eternal youth treatment offered by Kamal, her eldest, came with a twinge of fear flashing in nervous eyes and a pleading voice.

"Mama," Kamal said, "You're making a target of yourself."

Target. Crisis. An age of threatening headlines and fearful words.

Beyond the newspaper, the waves of the bay hushed onto the sand and rocks as forcefully as ever. The crises Éternité had lived through were never termed as such; back in her day, someone in charge tried to calm the people down when society came to one of its many breaking points; back in her day, the whole populace agreed to whisper about shortages and loss, tragedies they all agreed not to talk about out loud.

Silence and mitigating terms smothered the fear of any crisis.

Leaders soundproofed the world against fear-mongering and outrage. The children today didn't know how lucky they were that they could scream at the top of their lungs; they didn't know they could be silenced, didn't know what silence was.

The children today hadn't seen hungry palms held out on corners, hadn't seen the true fear of unknown sounds and booms and crashes in the city night down some alley a block away you would never know the source of, hadn't seen what an age of true disparity looked like when a glance could tell who had and who had not.

Éternité's eyes had seen history take the lives of the loser only after the body shrank to skin and bones, wrinkled to an ancient unlivable specter, and that in a time of the peak of prosperity when to fade away to nothing was so . . . unnecessary. Éternité's gray green eyes had seen it all, and she wasn't giving up those eyes — nor the wrinkles at the corners of them.

Another airpage is clasped in the right fist pulling the newspaper open. A short square airpage she isn't looking at.

In between the lines of reporting on a shortage of immortal animae, how no new babes would be allowed to come into the world as long as there wasn't enough eternal life force to go around, in between those lines she heard not the words of the short square letter in her right hand, but the words of her youngest daughter, Jama. "A death threat?"

"It's only a joke, child," Éternité had said. Calling Jama child still. The age difference between Éternité and her daughter Jama now was completely negligible. The child she gave birth to at thirty-four, her baby, her youngest, her child, her third, her last — now going on three thousand, too. Old companions, calling her 'child' had become an inside joke an eternity ago.

Éternité had three before immortality was invented and sold to them, and she grew old before immortality was invented, and had her three daughters before any of them bought immortality, and her three daughters grew old and had their first children before all of them, the whole family clan, were put under an eternal life spell.

All three daughters had eternal youth spells cast on them. All three looked like little children, and so Éternité could call them the young ones, the children, the kids these days.

So dramatic, Jama had let her voice waver and her lip quiver when she said, "Yuma, I don't think it's a joke." The way her neck craned out of control to project the glare of her eyes into her yuma's face like she was trying her force her fear into Éternité's bosom.

"Maybe that is not the right word. Prank, then. Who would want me dead?"

She comes out here to think, some days. To read, some days. To watch the young play, or the gulls light on the surface of the sea, or the motos fly wingless into upside down loops.

Now Éternité's form sits alone on her summoned chair on her favorite stoney ledge, but that day the girls had come, each with one daughter and each daughter with one, to make three, picnicking and running kites along the strand in the ideal climb of Breeze Point. A few nieces and cousins tagged along, Éternité's sisters' children. These days no one has siblings, no one buys more than one animus for an immortal babe, but in her day Éternité had two sisters, Imani and Khalud; Imani had a baby, Rose, a century after the first animus crisis and bought an animus for Rose; Khalud had come to motherhood before that, after the inception of immortality but before an animus could be bought and transferred to a newborn, and so Khalud's immortal life force had passed to the child, named Abadia, and Khalud had grown old rapidly and passed on.

Next to Éternité that day, standing over her in her conjured beach chair, Jama had clammed up, and faded back, to sit on the rocky ledge behind, shifting where she made her seat because it was rock hard. Jama saved solidae by not casting a spell. She'd never been the straight talker of the family; that was Gayatri, the middle daughter.

Gayatri had stood sentinel over Éternité on her other shoulder, and said, looming, "Times are changing. Everyone's angry. Not content to be grateful for all they have; if a family has one starborn and sees another family with two, now they want two. Those with no children, well . . . A lot of people are unhappy. They figure people like you have lived long enough."

Lived long enough.

Well, maybe she had. The words bound around her head until she can't focus on reading. The right hand crumples the "death threat," snaring it in all five fingers and crushing it, and scrunching the newspaper along with it. Next to her chair she had summoned a side table to hold her iced coffee and, under an airweave paperweight, one more document. A notice from Constellation.

Cancellation of magic license due to renewal examination missed deadline. Effective first of the month.

Missed deadline? A license renewal examination is required every quarter century like clockwork, and she never missed a deadline. A link to customer service led to a useless call with a woman who wouldn't forward her to anyone who knew anything and didn't have anything sensical to say herself.

Fine. Who needed magic? After this month, she wouldn't need her own license; her daughters and granddaughters still had theirs. Plenty of girls to take care of her.

And Éternité knew the routine, the drill — she knew just what to do when the powers that be show their true face. Go to the media. These days the journalists are always looking for a breaking outrage. Is Constellation discriminating against the visibly elderly? Pushing them out, revoking their services, making room for the young? Cutting Éternité off to sell magic to another customer, perhaps at a higher price, or someone with more needs than her, who will buy more? Is she being erased, replaced? The funniest part was Éternité was paid up for the decade. No month to month for her, she was a good steady client, pre-paid, direct transfer, and her magic subscription had years paid in advance.

How could they take her solidae and cancel her service? What's next?

Take her eternal life away?

A sweet sip of cold caffe wakes her up and the memories of footsteps in the pebble beach remind her everything she loves about this life. The breeze off the body of water hits her in the face, and she loves that too.

The letter crumples in her fingertips, and now the words she memorized play in her head. "You need to die so we can live. You've had enough life. Lived long enough. Give the rest of us a chance. Make some room."

Perhaps that was right, she couldn't help but think. She had turned it over and over in her mind. Gaze sweeping horizon to horizon, the city behind her and its cliff climbing little villa houses in affluent Breeze Point, the burning crimson old bridge, the pebble shore, the windshocked bay water, she wondered, had she lived long enough?

Yet she loves it, and she will always love it, the same day over and over again, the same peace, the same smack of breeze, she will love it forever. Tomorrow she'll be back with the grandchildren.

No need to decide anything right now.

Trigger note: The story ends with a small sense that this character is contemplating ending her immortality, and so I want to make a note to reach out and acknowledge the feeling. I don't like to write overtly triggering fiction on the theme of taking one's own life, and I will always avoid doing so; personally I feel it's not a trigger ever worth coming close to, not that others shouldn't write about ideation of taking one's own life, but I usually don't feel it's right for me.

In this story, I felt the right ending is for her to contemplate such a thing, because she's compassionate and weighs the happiness of others against her own. I left it open ended, but I want the feeling of hope to linger, not hopelessness. There's so much of this life to hold on to, so much love, it would be a lot to give up, all this beauty. If you, reader, ever experience despair, send me a message, because even a total stranger telling you that you deserve to be cared for can help on a bad day. <3