A Tale of My People

As the spirits of my ancestors and the witch by my side tore through the soft, pathetic bodies of the bandits and horse thieves, my thoughts drifted away from that pathetic excuse for a battle and went instead to the stories of my people.
 
My mind first drifted to the story of Ilshaan and Laeila.
 
Ilshaan was a king that ruled over a land far to the east. Laeila was his beloved wife and partner. Before his ascent to the throne, they traveled together from oasis to oasis throughout the desert, making a name for themselves as formidable warriors. Their love was a strong as strong as stone and as eternal as the sky itself.
 
When Ilshaan finally accepted his birthright and returned to his homeland to rule over his people, he and Laeila quickly became two of the most beloved rulers in the history of the kingdom. All was peaceful, until the famine.
 
Their Kingdom was struck by a sandstorm so powerful and so long lasting that all the crops between the two rivers died. It was as if the gods themselves had forsaken the land and its people. Ilshaan knew that the only way to save his people and his beloved Laeila was to travel far out into the desert to the forgotten shrines of the gods themselves. There he would learn what the gods required in order to save his people. But to do, he would traverse sandstorms that never end and ever shifting sands. None that ventured into those sands had ever returned.
 
Laeila pleaded with her husband to find another way, for she knew the fate that could befall him. But Ilshaan knew that there was no other way to save her and the kingdom.
 
And so he left, venturing out in the desert in search of the gods themselves. Laeila stood upon the walls and watched until he slowly faded out of sight.
 
Weeks passed and many people died as the famine wrought its destruction upon the land. Until one day, as if by magic, the sands stopped churning and the crops began to grow. Ilshaan, it seems, had done the impossible, he had reached the temple of the gods.
 
Laeila waited on the walls night after night hoping for his return. But he never came; for the gods demanded his life in exchange for those of his people and his queen. A price that Ilshaan was happy to accept.
 
She waited every night for over a year. The gods heard her desperate prayers for his return over and over until even they were stricken with grief.
 
One night, as Laeila drifted off to sleep, the God of dreams himself came to her, he created an apparition with the soul of Ilshaan so that she may have one final night with the man that she loved. They held one and another that night and spoke such words of love that even the God himself could not bear to take Ilshaan away from her again.
 
So Laeila entered an eternal sleep. Locked forever in a dream with the ghost of the only man she ever loved. Her people tended to her for the rest of her days as she lay in state.
 
Then, many years later when death finally took her, the people saw a mated pair of eagles flying together across the eternity of the sky.
 
Their souls were finally together again.
 
Is this the fate that my mortality holds for Inara? Is she bound to linger in grief when my soul goes back to the sky from whence it came?