Tag: The Afterlife
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Chapter XIV: The Final Decision
Without rising from our seated positions, the medieval English countryside began to fade, only to be replaced by the quickly approaching train depot. It rushes toward us, situating stone benches under our bums, before we even have the chance to appreciate the thrill of the ride. “Well, that was something,” I breathe, reorienting myself with…
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Chapter XIII: Veins of Death
“Tell me about the Red,” My brother insists. We’re sitting now, on a knoll of untamed grass laced through with wild flowers. In the distance, a sparsely spotted village, where peasants toil the land and till the seeds that will grow their crops come autumn. It’s a shared past life. One that I hadn’t realized…
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Chapter XII: The Long Way Home
The concept of time could have crumbled off the edges of the heavens and into the abysmal seas of Tartarus, and we never would have known. Given that it didn’t exist here, it is not entirely untrue to say that we may have walked for half a millennium. Only now, each step bled both of…
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Chapter XI: My Companion Revealed
In the mere blink of an eye, the depot is replaced by an all-too familiar landscape. Asphalt and dirt paths duck under trees throwing their darker, dead foliage all over the brilliant, green grass where rows of stone wait to be remembered. Everything inside of me instantly shrivels, tries to shrink away from that which…
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Chapter X: Choices
I want to explore more of this In Between place, but know that I cannot yet. The trains aren’t really trains, merely a manifestation of the choices that lie before me. I can see them now, beneath their iridescent glow, they are different colors. The faint bronze of my past lives leaves the platform and…
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Chapter IX: Higher Education
“That’s interesting,” My companion notes. We’d returned to the piazza at the train depot, and now peered up at an acropolis of Universities, Academies and Elementary schools. Maxfield Parrish comes to mind, as I follow the Juniper covered crags up to where all of the structures stand like sentry above the constant to-and-fro of passenger…
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Chapter VIII: A Kind of Recovery
“Can you see more clearly now, how easily our existence could have been the labor of another’s imaginings?” My companion asks, after an endless stretch of silent introspection. We had left my personal Siberia long ago; the canvas soaking up my memories with every step just like before. It was too absorbent to keep them…
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Chapter VII: Vestiges
There is no need, and yet we began to walk. It seems appropriate after such a heavy debate, to move while the mind tries to resettle. Only, for each step that I take, the canvas around us fills with those echoes of my past lives, painted in bleeding watercolors that fade quickly in our wake. …
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Chapter VI: A Matter of Existence
“Your frustration is natural.” I turn away from him. Turn my back on the metallic hues of the depot and a faint, disturbing fragrance of warm, summer grass. We approach a hexagonal fountain in the center of the square. “There is a truth in all things, you know. No matter how grand or how miniscule,”…
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Chapter V: Destiny in the Details
There was some audible note. The density of silence beyond the border of my creative space had thickened momentarily, like an active shrug of confirmation to my statement. I had to decide… eventually. I couldn’t stop my mind from turning inward again. Another wayward journey down webbed corridors of veined, gray matter. Nanobots scattering like…
A.C. Melody 