At first, I don’t recognize which life I’m looking at. I’m floating in the air behind myself, hiking up a small mountain. It’s still dark out, but the sky is turning gray, and I seem to be rushing for some reason. My clothing doesn’t spark any particular memories, since it’s fairly nondescript. It’s style is definitely from some lost primitive civilization, but I was a part of so many of those that even with my accursedly good memory, I can’t tell which one.
I can’t move my point of view either, so instead, I just do my best to enjoy the ride. The mountain I’m climbing seems to be the shortest one in an enormous mountain range. All around are snow-capped peaks illuminated by the light of a full moon, sparkling in the distance. The trees are all some kind of pine, though their trunks are thicker than any I’ve seen on Earth recently. Probably an ancient, now-extinct species. This is definitely a very early life.
The sky starts to turn orange in the distance, and the me of the past increases her pace. I must have promised to meet someone at the top of this mountain at sunset. A delivery of some kind, maybe? I have a very full bag on my back. That would make sense. It’s definitely something I’ve done before, though I can’t remember this particular instance.
After a few minutes, I reach the top of the mountain. The peak itself is fairly small, and has a single tree growing near the top. It’s flat and grassy, and when the past me gets there, she simply stops and stands, breathing heavily from the exertion. Seconds later, a sliver of sun peeks out from behind one of the further mountains, bathing the entire valley in orange light.
“Beautiful,” says the other me.
She slowly spins around, taking in her surroundings, and allowing me to finally get a good look at her/my face. For a moment, I’m frozen, unable to even think. I look happy. Not content, or serene, or satisfied, or relaxed. Happy. Truly happy. There’s only one life this can be: my second. My first rebirth.
Upon realizing this, I start to remember exactly what I was doing. In this life, I was carefree, and spent my time seeking out interesting things to see or do. This sunrise must have been one of them.
After a few minutes of simply basking in the sunlight, the other me goes for her bag, and starts pulling things out from it. First is a simple wooden board, then a stack of parchment, then a small wooden case filled with charcoal sticks. I liked to draw in this life. I knew I wouldn’t have time to come back to everywhere I visited, so I wanted to capture them as best I could. I wasn’t very good, and my tools were limited, but I was able to make passable renditions.
She sits down, leaning against the trunk of the tall tree and starts sifting through the parchment. Most of the sheets are used, filled with drawings of other places I had been. I cringe a bit at my lack of organization, mixing used and unused sheets together without separation. I don’t know what I was thinking, or how they even got like that.
She flips past a drawing of a river, then a mountain range, then a deep chasm, then an island out on the ocean, then a desert, then she reaches one that makes both of us pause. It’s a dense forest, with mountains rising up far in the distance, and in the center is a thick black line reaching up to the top of the page where it disappears behind a wall of clouds. There’s no mistaking what it is. It’s one of the pillars that appeared on Earth and brought people into the Tower.
The past me frowns, then flips past it going a few pages further until she finds a blank one. She pulls it out, setting it on the wooden board which is on her lap, then puts the rest away as she starts attempting to draw the sunrise over the mountaintops. Whatever confusion or concern she had about the drawing of the pillar is gone, and she is humming mindlessly as she draws, but I can’t get my mind off the other image.
What was that doing there? I don’t remember drawing that at all. It’s possible that it’s just dream shenanigans, but that doesn’t feel right. Everything else about the dream is so authentic, and I feel completely lucid right now. Or maybe I just think I’m lucid. Maybe I’m dreaming about lucid dreaming? That’s confusing.
Regardless, it’s odd, especially since the dream is still going. Usually, when something modern inserts itself into a dream of the past, the whole thing starts to collapse into nonsense, but this dream is remaining constant. I can see every line the past me draws. I can look closer at myself and count the strands of her hair. I can listen to the birds calling from the trees below and watch the wind rustle the grass. Everything feels so real… and yet it doesn’t make sense.
I try to force myself awake, but nothing happens. I try to pinch myself, but I don’t seem to have a body. I try to shout, but no sound comes out. I simply have to wait and watch myself draw until I finish. Fortunately, I don’t have to wait that long, since with only crude charcoal sticks, there’s a limit on how detailed a drawing can be. The final product is passable, and the other me made a valiant attempt to depict the sun despite not having any colors.The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
She stands up and stretches, then puts her drawing tools away. As she files the new drawing away, she once again lingers on the drawing of the black pillar. This time, I notice something strange about it. This drawing looks older than the others. Or at least, the parchment does. The style is also slightly different. In this one the quality is higher and the detail greater, and the way the clouds were handled was much better than how the other me just did it.
I cannot recall this painting at all, and its anachronistic nature seems to confuse the past me as well, but not enough for her to dwell on it. She soon puts it back and pulls tight the strings on the bag, then sits back against the tree, enjoying the view. For a full half an hour, nothing happens. Then, she starts to yawn, and her head starts to droop, and soon, she’s fallen asleep. As soon as her head falls to her chest, I wake up.
I’m back in my bed in the first Floor dormitory. My body is still in immense pain, though it’s better than last night. Having even a weak ki flow allowed my natural healing to accelerate, drastically improving my condition. Now, I only feel like I’ve been beaten within an inch of my life, rather than beaten to death and brought back. It still hurts like hell, but I can also tell that it’s getting better on its own.
Still, I’m not ready to move. It’s going to hurt even more, and I don’t want that. I start to circulate my ki– gently so as not to further damage my meridians– and let my mind wander back to the dream. I dream of past lives semi-frequently, but I’ve never had a dream quite like that one before. It must be due to the Tower, though whether its from the Tower itself, or from something within me that the Tower awakened, I have no way of knowing.
It’s possible that the dream was 100% authentic, and I really was just watching a scene from the past. In that case, it raises the question of what that drawing was doing there. I have no recollection of drawing it, meaning that either I have somehow forgotten, or I didn’t draw it. And if I wasn’t the one who drew it, then how did I get it, and why was I carrying it around?
One possibility is that it was something I drew in my first life that my second self somehow found. I don’t actually remember much from my first life. It’s strange, considering how perfect my memory is for all my other lives, but I always just assumed that’s because I lived that life before I was cursed. Seeing that drawing though, maybe there was something else going on.
Of course, there’s still the chance that this was all just one weird dream where I inserted my recent memory of the pillar into a memory of the past. The dream was already oddly vivid even before that drawing appeared, so maybe it was never a real scene. Maybe something about the ki in the Tower is just making things weird. I can’t rule that out, since the Tower is clearly something beyond my comprehension. The way it called to me back on Earth, and what I’ve seen so far from within prove that this is more than just a structure.
Whatever the case is though, it’s not like I’ll be able to figure it out right now. I can’t really ask anyone either. I can gather basic information, but I doubt anyone has answers about my dreams of my past lives. There’s no point in worrying about it right now. Besides, now that last night’s ordeal is over, I am starving.
I’m still lying facedown where I landed after exiting the shower last night, so I brace myself for pain, and with a mighty heave, I stand up. My entire body feels like it’s on fire, and my vision goes white for a few seconds, but I stay standing. There are two windows above my bed both with translucent curtains letting in light from outside. Based on the color, it looks like it’s probably not long after sunrise. I’d love to go look outside to verify, but there is no way that I’m moving any more than I have to.
I take a few deep breaths, then start hobbling over toward the closet. Thankfully, the room seems to have at least some kind of automatic air filtration system, so the steam is all gone, and there’s no chance of me tripping over something because I couldn’t see.
Inside the closet, the robes are all lined up just as they were before, and the steam doesn’t seem to have affected them. I reach for a black one, but even just doing that sends pain shooting up my arm, and I can barely lift it off the shelf. I manage to get it though, and then I realize that I am in a bit of a predicament. I will have to raise my arms to put this robe on. I currently cannot raise my arms. Well, I can, but it would really hurt and I really don’t want to do it. Plus, the underwear is in a drawer much lower down. I don’t want to bend over to get that either.
There is a solution though. Vanessa exists. I can get her to help. Except I have no way to contact her from here. I would have to go knock on her door, and I can’t leave my room without clothes on.
Thankfully, as I’m contemplating how bad it would actually be for the others to see me naked, I hear a knock on the door. It’s probably Vanessa, and if it’s not, I can ask them to go get Vanessa.
I start shuffling toward the bedroom door as the knocking comes again, this time accompanied by a voice.
“Bella?”
It’s Vanessa, thank the heavens.
“Coming!” I shout back. “Just a minute.”
I make it out of the bedroom, ready to keep going all the way to the main door, but there’s something in the living room that forces me to stop. The cat is back, and so is Jinlan’s corpse.