“Once upon a time, in a place farther than you can imagine, there lived a young woman. We’ll call her ‘teacher.’ She wasn’t very cute, but she was better than other people: stronger, faster, smarter, more charismatic, and harder working. She built a life in pursuit of interesting things, of ideas and great works. She liked learning but developed an aversion to actually struggling in life after being called clever and bright as a child. There were probably other reasons too, but they don’t really matter. She hated failing at anything, so she learned about everything she could, but only enough to seem smart and never put in the actual effort it would take to become truly competent. That’s why she worked as a teacher!

“It’s a joke! A joke. Though, well, that doesn’t make it less true either. She wasn’t much of a dreamer either, in spite of it all. There weren’t any grand ideals she strove for, and no special vision to fuel her ambitions — she was simply never satisfied with anything; not money, not power, and not influence. There was this one thing, though. A, well, let’s call it magic. She helped fund and personally worked on researching this magic alongside many many others all across the, hmm. It wasn’t a world like this one, but it was the only one back then. Anyway, eventually they succeeded, and a way was found to make people live as long as they wanted.

“It was very difficult to produce this, err, this magic, and so at first only those who had worked on it could get it, but in time more people had access to it, though never everyone. There was some trouble because of that, in various ways. In the end, all the people who mattered left the world behind to live in the sky, and made sure all the troublemakers who’d stayed behind couldn’t ever follow. Some people’s minds can’t ever be changed and, unless you get rid of all of them, it’s best if they’re left with others who think like they do. That part’s important because, when that happens, sometimes the trouble is so big that there’s no choice but for everyone else to leave. Those were strange and difficult times, but living among the stars was better in the end anyway.

“The admittedly no longer young teacher was one of those who left, though she wasn’t a teacher anymore either at that point. She’d retired to pursue her own interests privately. Around that same time, it was noted that very few people had the, what to call it, the proper constitution to weather centuries and many of the teacher’s colleagues had opted not to continue into forever. So, while she did continue conducting research, the results weren’t what they might have been, and her name was largely forgotten as she isolated herself in study. Until someone knocked on the teacher’s door and demanded to become her student.

“That was how the teacher first met the blessed empress. Calling her that is skipping to the end a bit, but whatever. She was someone who could match the teacher one for one on subject after subject. Wit set against wit, humor against humor, and passion for passion. The teacher had never been interested in serious interpersonal company, and had retired to get away from persistent students, yet the blessed empress would take nothing for an answer other than yes. Even when she really should have. She was the single most persistent person you could ever meet, and when she set her mind to something it was as good as done. A real role model in that way, though you shouldn’t aspire to being so stubborn.

“Anyway, the two of them began working together on making the longevity magic more accessible at first, but soon found that they were remarkably compatible with one another and were bored with just iterating on old successes. So they moved on to the blessed empress’ real passion. She wanted to create a way for people to connect to one another, and to the world around them. A basis for improving people by making them more than they were before. It was a really difficult goal, and required a lot of resources, but the teacher was well positioned to acquire them by virtue of having lived long enough and having built connections with some useful people too.

“They played off one another, going further than either could have alone, and in the end found success. There were others involved, mind you, because any serious endeavor will always require countless people that you’ll never meet working together to make things possible. That’s a lesson to take to heart there. But after quite a long time, the two created something truly special and became one. Which isn’t meant metaphorically. The thing they built, they tested on themselves and it let them connect to one another so thoroughly they were one person with two bodies afterwards.

“They were more than either had ever been alone, and together they began to change things. Not that they intended to, exactly, but whether or not they wanted it, the unity they had become was like a giant in a playground of children and what followed was inevitable. The teacher utilized that period of disruption and change to place them not just at the center, but at the top. Their combined talents bent towards building the foundation for a new empire to be born, and long did they reign.

“They intervened little, and lightly when it became necessary, and mostly kept to themselves doing what they’d always done. New passions, new discoveries, and new places found for the benefit of the empire as they sailed a ship they’d built across the stars. But nothing lasts forever.

“One day, alike as any other, the teacher, for reasons good and sound and well-considered, tasked a group of ships to practice in one place rather than another.

“One day, alike as any other, the teacher, for reasons sentimental and pure and caring, steered their ship to a place of great beauty and deep mystery.

“One day, alike as any other, the teacher, for reasons practical and immediate and earnest, asked the blessed empress to step beyond the ship on a simple errand.

“She was then struck, viciously, grievously, and mortally.

“In panic, and haste, and fear that both could taste back and forth across their unity, the blessed empress suffered while the teacher did nothing. It was too fast, too unexpected, too much, and while the blessed empress choked on the emptiness between stars and her own blood, the last words on her lips were of love.

“But in her mind, in that last eternity, something else came. A thought, a suspicion, a certainty. In their unity the teacher saw it, knew it, felt it too. The blessed empress came to believe that her death was the teacher’s plan. The teacher’s careful doing. Anxious fear warped, became bitterest acrimony. Became the certain knowledge of deepest betrayal. Became regret for every single thing that had passed between them, for everything they’d ever been. A complete rejection of a lifetime together.

“Then there was nothing but the taste of ash.

“The body was retrieved. The teacher spent resources without limit to understand the how and the why and, most importantly, who could be blamed. The strike itself, that was a result of the army she’d moved, a stray shot. The course plotted to put the ship where it had been when the blessed empress had been struck, that had been done by the teacher’s own hand, a passing fancy. The task itself that had planted the blessed empress in danger, that had been by the person’s request and direction, a whim.

“Then came the ultimate question: the blessed empress, in her final moments, could she have been saved? The answer brought a damnation that could only come from truth, because yes. By method after method, easy and hard and simple and complex, she could have been saved. Had something been done, had anything been done, she could have been saved.

“Innocent accident, or betrayal. The teacher herself wasn’t sure. Couldn’t be. Too much had been shared between them that was lost when the blessed empress died, too much bound up in her that could not be gotten back. Not ever.

“In twisted and unbalanced disorientation, the teacher marshalled resources. She first found a way to immortalize the blessed empress’ body and repair the damage. Ready to be reanimated, when, not if but when, the method to do so was discovered. The empire they had built listed and began to sink; a hole poked in it that bled into an insane hope. In time, too long a time, a method was found. But the blessed empress was ineligible. The process by which she had been kept safe and her flesh made immortal had left the body impossible to revive by any method. The teacher refused to stop, and tried again in a new way. She would build a simulacrum, a golem, a perfect doll, and give it life.

“The empire stumbled, crumbled, the bleeding stronger and stronger as that project ate everything. Memories of the blessed empress were found, hoarded, fed into the doll until there was no way to distinguish it from the woman herself, but for the eyes. The teacher looked into those eyes and saw only what she had put there herself, and nothing more. There was no fault in the doll, but there was no grace, no salvation, no forgiveness. Only ashes. The teacher built a great vault, a thing that would last until all that was, until all there would ever be, had ceased entirely. Then she buried the doll next to the blessed empress and walked away. She left the empire, left everything, and vanished.

“The people of the empire hated the teacher, as well they should. As well you should because, full disclosure, she was a monster. A truly evil monster, for all that she’d done. For what she had stolen to fix what might truly have been only an accident. But the people did not hate the blessed empress, and blessed they called her. The saint that kept the demon in check, the hero that leashed the monster and made her useful.

“Some long, long while later, a person returned to what had been the empire. Or what seemed like a person, but had become something other and less. Someone very like the teacher, but not the same. This person brought an idea, a new thought, another magic to research. A way to look beyond what was into other places, and to reach out, to go there. To make real what were once dreams, and to travel between the stars in an instant. The person took a small and quiet position on a team seeking to bring that magic forth into the world. A thing noble and good and edifying, as the teacher and the blessed empress had once done in times before.

“In the course of that great work, when the completion of it had drawn very close indeed, there was an accident. A great explosion. In the grand scheme of things, it was a footnote — though a joyous one. The accident would bring the project everything it needed to conclude with greater success than they could have predicted. But in that footnote, there was a small shadow.

“A strange person, who had worked hard and kept to herself, had been the only one there when the accident happened. She must have perished then, unknown, unneeded, unmourned, and leaving nothing behind but ashes.”