"Dying...and returning as something else?" The notion wasn't new, but certainly not something he'd pondered on very long.

"I don't know, Collette. For all I know...life will endure somehow." The hand closest to her moved, settling on her leg in awareness of the little aches it was giving her. "I woke here and discovered I had lived years of life somewhere else...somewhere with love and wonders different than anywhere else."

Would it be that way here? Closing his eyes to this world, opening them in another, still walking forward to an end that might be pretense?

"If not life," he murmured, "then memory..."