Back Across the Rubicon: Eight From the Land of No Return

What if one day, you discovered you had lived a past life as a witch or sorcerer-or even Merlin! and that you still had all of your powers? And what if you then remembered just a little more than you bargained for?

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Long ago, eight of us, eight souls bound together by Fate, or God, I know not which, died together under phenomenal circumstances, far from the planet where we now live. But that initial death as it turned out was only the beginning of a new life, or series of lives. This much I begin to remember at the end of the journey through each new existence, each time that I die. Yes, then at last I remember the first time that I lived. My first life, my first identity, and the one that will haunt me throughout all of the others. I remember my first life as though I have woken from an odd dream and gladly found myself again.

But now, as I, a bare naked but trapped and powerless soul, am about to take form in this next new life, compelled as I am to do so by powers I do not understand, I wonder if this is the one, the one in which all of the players of an original drama that took place long before the earliest days of human civilization, will be reassembled once more. Will I remember anything about it, though, once I live again? Will the others? How I wish we could remember, but it is no use. Even the strength of my will at present cannot compel whatever power governs this world, this reality, to take pity on me and allow us to remember ourselves. My strength of will--I--have never been strong enough to surpass the force of oblivion waiting beyond this transition.

No one can know the regret I now feel, knowing that soon my memories will be nothing again, that I will not even know myself in but a brief moment's time. And I fear that my reawakening on the Earth may never come. Because throughout the unending reincarnations, I have only snatched at flashes of the dream that haunts my existence, the dream of who I really am and once was. But unless we remember, unless all eight of us remember ourselves, each other, and what happened in the past, none of us can ever leave this planet. Earth. We will be trapped in this earthly hell forever, paying for crimes we never even knew we have committed.

How far this Earth is to Kaliemer! As I make the transition from each spent life back into the dark void, before my soul grasps on to another material identity, I see and remember Kaliemer. That thirty-three souls escaped from the death of that world, a world so beautiful that it lies indescribably beyond any pale earthly concept of paradise. Then the flight of its refugees, my subsequent life on an Atlantic isle long since lost to the sea, my rebirth there as a seer among humankind-our first incarnation on the Earth-everything is lost to me. I realize that it was lost to us all. We are now the Earth's creatures, and entirely in her power.

Yet from this life to the next crimes must be paid for, even crimes long forgotten by their perpetrators. The tally against us is never forgotten. A cruel game it is, life. Beloved faces of the distant past, of a past far from this reality and space and time... how much longer will I be able to see them, to savor their memory?