"I understand that I will die," Seraphi Abraxus said, gravely. She had lived nearly 10,000 years. It was odd that the thought of her own death could still cause her grief, even though she'd more than lived her life.
"Your majesty could live forever if she chose," Nirsala did not ask a question but her tone suggested she dearly wanted to know. Nirsala was Seraphi's primary assistant. She oversaw the servants that acted as generals in keeping the Abraxas households and personal matters running smoothly. They had known each other for thousands of years and Seraphi knew Nirsala would suffer for the loss of her Queen.
"I have a purpose. I am old and set in my ways, as abhorrent as my ways are," Seraphi said, with wry humor, "I know myself. The situation must change. Change will come after my death, but my death must come before the change can happen."
Seraphi had planned for the outcome of choosing her own mortality. She had planted the seeds for her own reincarnation. She had not lived ten thousand years, nearly all of them as the matriarch of Abraxas Industries, to leave money and politics to chance.
She had seeded a planet she loved with the high probability of her exact genetic blueprints appearing again within a thousand years of her death, and the inevitability that those blueprints would appear within two thousand years of her death. Earth would not be ready to meet its end before a recurrence could be born. She had ensured that in her next life she would be reborn on her beloved Earth. The pieces were all in place and the game was set. For a woman who had ruled nearly ten thousand years as the head of a wealthy, if blood thirsty dynasty, the few years it would take for her body to age naturally meant little to her.
Seraphi didn't know that those short years would be robbed of her or that she would die in pain and afraid.