It wasn’t anything particularly important, heroic, or tragic that killed me. I wasn’t hit by a car trying to rescue someone, I wasn’t killed in a war, and I definitely didn’t kill myself. Intentionally at least. It was a simple act of forgetfulness. I forgot my epipen at home, and died with my throat swollen closed.
Then came the darkness. I had no idea how long it lasted. It could’ve been seconds or centuries. There was this odd sense of timelessness to it, but eventually, it ended.
When I could see, could feel, could exist again, everything had changed. Knowledge I simply hadn’t had before now existed, and it felt like it took precedence over what made me, me. I was still me, still John, the plain college student, but at the same time, I was less John than I was Sen Suyun, a young child who’d recently had his fifth birthday. I knew what was happening, it was part of the new information that was suddenly there, I had just awakened.
I collapsed to my knees, dropping the training sword that I had been swinging until a second ago… But no, I had been dying just a second ago.
I just sat there in confusion, trying to sort out my thoughts that were me but not me. My parents were your average suburbia parents, Samantha and Jason, but at the same time, they were Tyr and Odessa, part of the main branch of the clan… my clan…
I could see the instructor pointing to me, giving some sort of lesson to the other kids, but I couldn’t seem to hear anything coming out of his mouth. I knew he was named Sylt, and he was a bit past strict, leaning towards cruel.
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It was at this point my frame of mind cracked even further, I hadn’t been thinking in english. My first instinct wasn’t even to speak in english any more, it was to speak in Alvarian. I knew how to read and write in it, how to speak it, and it felt more fluent than my english which I had been speaking for right around two decades.
The memories of Sen, of me, just seemed to be more recent, though I’d only died what could have been a second ago. The five winters I had been through, wait, winters? Not years? And was it truly me that had been through those winters or Sen?
I knew what the answer was supposed to be, it was buried between my other new memories, my soul was suppressed until the body became old enough to handle the stress of my grown soul, but I couldn’t help but doubt that it was me. Had I just taken over a body? Or was I really Sen all along like the teachers had claimed? I wasn’t completely naive, but everyone here went through this rite, so I couldn’t help but hope that it was the case, as otherwise an entire species would be dying and replaced by other souls when they were children.
I decided to shelve the matter and accepted the story given to me, if only for my mental health. I tried to figure out, or rather compartmentalize a bit more of my confusion. I accepted that I am both John and Sen for now, though I know that they want me to cast away my previous life as much as possible, as they want us bound to the clan.
When it came to my parents... Well it seems in neither life was I close to my father, though in this one I wasn’t even particularly cared for by my mother. All the youths here were taught in communal groups rather than cared for by our parents. I chuckled, my mouth feeling terribly dry. I was closer to some of the teachers than I was to my parents in this world.
When it came to language, there was no reason for me to go back to using English, so I just continued with Alvarian. Everything else, I could figure out later. I took a deep breath and stood up, only to be asked what I was expecting.
“How many?”
I held in a sigh as I gave an answer that would drop me to the bottom of the barrel in everything in this world.
“It’s my first reincarnation sir.”