“Count Vorkosigan, sir?”

I once heard a line that really stuck with me: You humans choose the oddest things to invest your emotions in. Animals. Inanimate objects. Fictional characters. We get attached to these things, even though they might not feel anything or even exist outside of the pages of a book. It can be wonderful to get attached to these people, feel like we know them better than ourselves. But it can be horrible to have them ripped away from us. For anyone who reads the Vorkosigan Universe and hasn’t finished CryoBurn, stop reading now. I recently finished a book in which one of my favorite characters dies. It was astonishing to me because he was one of those people who seems indestructible. He will be missed greatly. It is a weird type of loss. Until that final page, he continues to exist and live and thrive. I can always go back to other books and spend time with him. But I will always know that in the end, he dies. In a way, it’s an interesting microcosm for life. In the end, we all die. But until then, we live breathe and thrive. The difference is that fictional character exist for eternity. They face a different type of death.

Sorry, this got kind of morbid. The point is: it sucks when a character that you love dies, but you can always go back and relive moments with them over and over again.