A sickly girl died atop a bed, the place she had lived most of her life. On her last breath, a voice echoed into her mind.
"If you could have the perfect next life, what would it be?"
Her eyes closing, she thought. 'I want a life where I am free...
As the last beeping of the monitor rang in her ears, she recognized that she was dying.
It was a rather odd thing. She felt calmer than she thought she would have. Even as the faint memories of her stagnant life ran through her mind, she was calm. After all, nothing had changed. Though there was a desire for more, her life began attached to a machine and now, 13 years later, it would end the same way.
"If you could have the perfect next life, what would it be?"
At that moment, that indistinguishable voice resounded in her mind.
She was momentarily taken aback, but her weak body had been through far too much for any act of surprise or tension. Much less a skip in her heartbeat at the suddenness of the voice, her lethargy forced any hope of resistance out of her.
'Whatever I want. . .?' The girl thought blearily, mostly disbelieving.
"Indeed," That voice spoke once more inside her mind. She could not tell whether it was male or female. She could not tell whether it was old or young. Perhaps, that was due to her nearing death. Far too weak to distinguish even voices. Perhaps, it was simply the natural state of the voice. "Whatever you so desire in your next life, I shall fulfill."
The girl remunerated over those words. Rolling them in her thoughts until the natural tiredness of her current state caught up to her spinning mind. In the end, she mentally sighed.
'I want a life where I am free. . .' She thought, 'I want to be in a world like the novels I enjoyed.'
It was her true desire. She had lived a life stuck upon a bed in an unchanging room so, naturally, stories had become her escape from reality. Those novels where people could fly or wield magic, where they could do anything they wished, were her ideals of truly living.
If she had a next life, she wished it would be as fantastical as those tales she had cherished.
"Is that all you truly want?" The voice asked.
As her consciousness began to drift away, lured by the sweet embrace of a painless death, she felt the hands of her parents grip hers and their tears fall onto her skin. Those two individuals who had worked so hard for her throughout her life's entirety. A mother who was always there morning through night, taking care of her person, and a father who read to her before bed, falling asleep on his chair as she too drifted off.
She was now too weak to even thank them with her voice.
'As well. . .'
A soft smile rested upon her lips.
'I want to meet people as kind and loving as my parents.'
The beeping ringing in the air steadied into one long, monotonous note.
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