3 Eternities Apart

"It...really is a tragedy."

It always brought a heavy pain upon her heart whenever she saw it on her left ring finger, no longer reminding her of the happiness she had once felt. It had once been luminous and a hopeful light, but it had turned a dull and coarse black, drained of everything.

"If only things could have been different."

Those days, those full and vivid days. How long had it been? Ten years? A millennium? Where she was, there was no time. No telling of time, either.

And the one that was with her every step of the way, who brought her the joy that she was now eternally deprived of, was also the one to snatch her happiness away from her. She hated him for that, would do anything at all to painfully scrape his tainted soul off the face of the planet she had left so long ago…

But only a part of him was as such, and to take that part away she'd have to take him away.

"Yes...it is a tragedy…"

In a flurry of stars and galactic fog, she kept going back in time, back to how this started, to at least give herself a clue as to who exactly she had to eliminate.

It was a boy. A child. Tied up, bound to the wooden chair on which he sat. The cell was dark and dank, the stone floors caked with grime. He was the only one inside the room, gagged and broken like an animal. She looked on with grief.

"It can't be…"

She just wanted to be able to pull his limp body into an embrace again, to let him know he was alright, that she was with him, to look into those beautiful eyes of his that she had once known...those clever eyes…

...those scarlet eyes.

Gasping, she had suddenly found herself in the same haze of cosmic mist that she had dwelled in ever since that day. The need she felt to save the child quickly died out. It wasn't worth it.

He had to be eliminated.