past lives

I remember now, so many lifetimes, like dreams that hang in the back of my mind in a haze.

Once upon a time, just after Helios was sealed away, I was one of the last dragons that walked the earth. My best friend was a living entity of dreams and nightmares. We made an agreement with Gaia herself to bring this mess to an end, no matter how long it took.

Sometime later on, I was one of the only White Howlers not to enter the Wyrm’s lair. I was the last of them, the poor bastard who made way to the Fianna to deliver the news, and I died my last breath, the last of the real ones, in their caerns.

Many centuries later, I was embraced by a fledgeling Tzimisce bloodline, and shepherded around by a man with a god complex bigger than any god complex my lifetimes have ever seen. Yes, I was one of those sired by Tremere himself, and I was the reason for the mandatory blood bond. I betrayed him when he committed a grave sin: he consumed the soul of Saulot the Healer. I couldn’t abide by it, and I stood with the hurting Salubri, following their path to Golconda and forsaking the Wyrm, until the moment I was put to death.

Deep in the Dark Ages, I was a founding member of the Order of Reason, a counteracting force to the sheer madness of the Order of Hermes. We founded the Order of Reason to put a stop to their cruel displays and experiments, but at first, we still knew we were Mages. It was only after I died that the Weaver sunk her fangs into those left, and the slow transformation into the Technocracy began.

Just before the Black Plague struck, I was a Changeling, an ancient member of the Black Apple Legate, who deal with True Fae. I witnessed the start of the Shattering, which trapped innumerable Fae on our side of the veil, to wither away into real and true sanity. Their souls incarnate like mine have all these years, in this world of Autumn and cold, and once-alien beings became true incarnations of imagination and dreams. We hated them and distrusted them, because at any moment they could become the Gentry once more. That death was quiet. I rose to power as the Autumn Queen, and there I stayed until I died.

Sometime, around the conquest of the Americas, I was Bound. I was of native blood, and the whites tried to kill me with their foreign disease. They failed, and I found myself crowned a shaman for baring with me the spirit of a great Thunderbird. I was one of just many, enough to cause the third Great Maelstrom, and feed the Wyrm the destruction it craved. I was vengeful, a plague on their colonies, as they plagued my tribe, to my very last breath.

The Imbued were rare for a long time after the middle ages, and the majority of the Messengers withdrew, because their mortal hosts had gone mad with the power of the few who sought an unerring army, and from then on only imbued when they were needed. In one small Georgian town – sorry, it would have been the Ottoman Empire at that time – I was one of those very few. There were enough of us for a cell, during that time. Maybe they were preparing for what would come, I’m not sure. I was a younger Visionary, who followed an old woman named Natela. She was graceful even in her old age, and taught us peace between the sharded factions. She taught us hope, even when things seemed hopeless. When she died, we all felt it. Her wife grew cold and receded into seclusion, and her best friend became a monster, because they couldn’t save her. They devastated the mortals of that town, because they were ruled by a frothing rage. I, and that whole cell, died trying to stop them.

The Industrial Revolution was an incredible time for the tribe that, at that time, wore the name Iron Riders. In those days, I was a kinfolk, an engineer for the Pacific Union Railroad, in the southwest United States. But though it was a wonderful time for my tribe, the Weaver grew to be more of a threat than she ever had been before in history. I witnessed the rise of Pattern Spiders as foe, saw Garou calcified by her stronger spirits, and witnessed the destruction of nature around me for industry and pollution. But it wasn’t the Weaver who ended me. No, it was the Uktena, because wars over territory were still frequent in those days. What got back up as I lay there injured wasn’t me, but the vessel of a biblical demon. It’s possible that that body still walks this earth.

Both world wars were great, terrible events, full of atrocities and death. Many died and rose again, many other dying souls were saved as vampires or stitched together as prometheans, and many more found traumatic awakenings as mages and werewolves. This was not the supernatural’s war, the atrocities that caused it were solely human. But there was one strain that none of the others knew. A strain that saw a resurgence at the time of that war. I was a British soldier, who witnessed more war crimes than I could count on both hands. The trauma of it all broke my mind in twain, and it was stitched back together by a haze of bullets, gangrenous limbs laden with trench rot and mustard gas. That being was me, and I was it. My quest from then on was to reconcile what I saw in the war, to bring myself Catharsis. I didn’t make it. I claimed my own life in a fit of despair.

There have been many lifetimes between those that were much more quiet. With me, always, were a best friend, and a twin sibling, and two lovers. Sometimes, those lifetimes came and went quietly, though I never left without making some mark on the world.

Sometimes, they were snuffed out too early, and my sibling was ever-horrified at the thought. She is a maker of Lineages, from my flesh and blood. Once, from the line of Galatea, because she wanted to exemplify my beauty. Once, I was buried like the Golem of Jewish myth. Once, she found a way to invoke the other side to take me, and spit me back out torn asunder and rebuilt. Once, I was laid in the river, missing a piece, as Osiris once was.

But maybe the most poignant was that of my last incarnation. I was brought up in the wrong body. It wracked at me, but the most I could do was indulge in the colorful culture of those like me, because all we had was each other. In that time, I made friends with a young Cajun man. The both of us contracted AIDS at the same time. He was lucky to be found by a vampire. I died on the steps of the White House, protesting Reagan’s ignorance to my last breath, and my sibling again couldn’t handle it. She cut me apart, removed the organs that were withered away and replaced them with others. She didn’t care if she caught it too. She took me apart and gave me the parts I had always felt were rightfully mine, harvested from the other bodies on those steps. What came back wasn’t me, but she didn’t have the time to grow to hate the young Frankenstein, as many mortal creators do. She died within a year of contracting the disease.

That was in October of 1980. The very next day, an idiot of a Silent Strider charmed an unknowing woman at a bar in Seattle.

I’ve chosen to learn about my past lives from an outside perspective. Anything else, and I think I would go mad from thousands of years. Everything I’ve done turned out to lead up to this, the precipice of Apocalypse. Now I know my destiny. I’m not sure I know who I am anymore, after learning this. But I know what I have to do. There’s no crying till the end.