This thread's song lyrics shamelessly ganked from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 6, from the song Where do we go from here?

The body is a biological machine.

Death is the end of biological function.

Could there be more? What is the intangible essence, the spirit that guides this locomotion? Is the fuel in the food we eat, and the water we drink?

Or is it something... else?

Do we, as living beings, exist on will alone? Are we cognizant, perhaps, of our own desire to live? Do we cling to life, or do we flee death; afraid of the unknown of what lies thereafter? Afraid to cease functioning?

Perhaps that is what we are so afraid of. Is it even possible to define who we are, in terms of living life? Do we need a reason to live?

A drive, a goal, a passion that will not let us rest?

Can we not simply... be?

Maybe that was always his problem. Maybe Jodiah had always strived too hard to have a purpose. Maybe he clung to passions and drives too firmly, and forgot what it meant to live.

To be.

Perhaps that was the lesson he had to learn.

Could one that had lived in such a way for so long, one who believed that life for the sake of life to be meaningless, ever change?

Could one simply be after having spent more time and energy than any mortal was meant to have, directed at his goals, and priorities, and missions, and quests, and causes?

The fire felt cold. Everything was cold.

The cold night.

The cold air.

The cold bed.

The cold lick of candlelight.

It was burning in his room, and Jodiah Ayreg touched the dancing flame with his hard, calloused finger. Somewhere inside him, he could feel the sensation register with him. Hot? His skin should be cracked and peeling, but he barely felt it. Was his hand so calloused now as to make it immune to such a little flame?

He turned and walked away, moving across the floor of Room Three. It had been the third time he's been out of bed in a week, but the events keep rolling through his mind as he tries to call up the memory of what had happened.

Could it even be forgotten, or changed, or muted? Old habits die hard, they say.

So does Jodiah Ayreg. A flicker of awareness; those who would know... felt. The link. It was fading. Sid felt it; Jack felt it; Ultrinnan felt it.

She had saved him that night. The soft embers of life had been breathed upon when Jodiah Ayreg finally learned how to surrender, and Sid was there to rip away the ribbons and pour herself into him. He was alive enough to heal ? barely ? but enough nonetheless.

And she did.

She joined with Jack Scot and poured herself into Jodiah Ayreg, closing his wounds and mending his tormented, agonized body. She had caught him, as the old man in the hooded cloak said she would.

Or, rather, implied she would.

Not that it helped him out much at the time. With a body in trauma and a mind in shock, Ayreg blacked out seconds after the healing had started. But he was alive. Sweet, precious human life restored to the world once more. So easy to repair, these bodies.

But the mind? The spirit?

Where do we go from here?

When he finally did wake up, Ayreg had been ordering food from the kitchens to be brought up to him almost nonstop. He felt as if his belly were going to eat a hole out through his spine. How long had it been since he's eaten? He put away roasted chicken and beef like it were drinking water; three whole chickens in one meal, with two cuts of dried cheese and a quarter-cut of bread, and another quarter-cut of broiled beef.

That kept him satisfied for a few hours, at least, until he felt his stomach gnawing at him again.

The battle's done, and we.. kind-of won, so we sound our victory cheer

The Oracle had been delivered up to him. Garen Corlagon was dead. Ayreg could only be satisfied with this news, unhappy as he was that he himself did not get to deliver the killer blow. He was too slow. He wasn't good enough. Perhaps Corlagon was right, and Ayreg was a weak, foolish old man now? Perhaps the once-mighty Jodiah Ayreg had best retire from the life of a fighting man, and live out his days in quiet anonymity in the Dragon's Breath Forge?

Why is the path unclear?

The events surrounding the last half-year play over in his head again. He had come a long way since waking up in his sealed tomb in the gutted remnants of Doomhammer Keep, put there by Tiari and her White Dragon's Vengence. Now what?

He started down the path of the Scourge of Worlds again. It felt the most natural. Renna of the Dark became Lucretia, Dreadlord of the Nihil became Renna the Betrayer became... a worthless corpse.

He started down the path of the Guardian again. Am'thyst revitalized his feelings; she taught him to smile. She taught him to laugh. She taught him all of the things in the world that were green and good were, yes, still green and good. No shadows fell where she walked. She might not have been wholly innocent or pure, but she was... radiant. Luminous.

And dead now.

He shook his head in disgust. Corlagon and his schemes. Damn him. Damn that man. Damn the Nihil.

Understand we'll go hand in hand, but we'll walk alone in fear..

The Nihil.

Jodiah Ayreg couldn't feel them anymore. At all. Period. Not a bit. They weren't even hovering around the edges of his perception, like they so often did. Whispering to him. They were... gone.

Balefire

His Nihillian runeblade was a melted pile of slag on the ground. It seemed the place was left pretty much exactly as it was the night he died. The blaster marks on the walls had gone away, though; there was no holding back that enchantment. The Red Dragon Inn would be eternal, that way. It would be here long after every other living being was extinct.

When does the end appear?

He felt cold. Everything had been cold since he woke up. The floor, the air. His clothes. His blankets. Maybe another body would warm him, but that was so far out of the reaches of his mind at the moment that he didn't even bother to consider them.

Jodiah Ayreg had stared death in the face, put one foot into his home, kissed the old chap on the nose and then turned around and got pulled out. Why?

Because he couldn't defeat Corlagon.

Why?

He was weak.

Why?

He was... old.

Jodiah Ayreg frowned. He had never felt old. He still doesn't. Oh, he's into his middle years now, no question at all about that, but he felt... spry. Jaunty, even. He was able to run half-way across the Iron City of Stygia, in the mortal reflection of the Shadowlands almost nonstop. Granted, his heart wanted to break his chest... but still. He made it.

He was old. And that made him slower, weaker, and more prone to damage. Bouts of healing and rest were growing more protracted lately, he had discovered. But what could be done?

Mortals grow old. They die. It's part of what makes them mortal.

But... perhaps...

Sitting down at his desk unsteadily, Jodiah Ayreg takes a weak hand to lift the quill and dip it into the inkwell. The blaster sitting on his nightstand was an oddity. Jodiah was anachronistic. He preferred the old ways. Swords. Armor. Horses. So many in Rhy'Din, though, had become influenced by another train of thought. One of gears and metal and weapons that sounded of thunder, iron horses and steel carriages.

He started to write.