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k_a_webb“What do you see when you look into my eyes?” Sini asked. Even though she’d known before about Meriwether’s previous lives it wasn’t something they’d talked about much, because she’d never been interested before. “When I look into my eyes I don’t see anything unusual.”
“That’s because you don’t know what to look for.” Meriwether smiled, before sobering. “Are you sure you want me to answer the question, Sini? What I tell you is something that can’t be unlearnt and not everyone is ready to know about the lives they lived before.”
Sini knew that Meriwether was asking because he was worried about her, so she really thought about her answer before she replied. If it was that important he’d want something more than she could give if she just went with the first thing that came to mind. Fortunately, she hoped, her final answer was the same as the first one that came to mind.
“I’m sure, Meri. Maybe, if I learn more about myself, I’ll be more comfortable with who I am, especially as I have powers that could easily be seen as dangerous in the hands of the wrong person.” Like some of Sini’s family had been. “Right now… I don’t feel like I should have them and if I had past lives it might explain why I have them.”
Meriwether nodded. “Not every old soul choses to live more difficult lives than they’ve lived before, but the older a soul gets the more it feels it can take on certain challenges and one of those challenges might be learning to deal with having magics that could be seen as dangerous. On Beshaki a number of older souls chose to be born in the twilight third, because twilight magic is seen as the most dangerous magic on that world.” He looked at Sini and it really did feel to her like he was seeing inside her. “When we first met I knew you’d lived at least four lives before. As you opened up to me more and your abilities bloomed… Sini, I honestly think it’s possible you’ve lived difficult lives on other worlds before choosing Quiar as your home. Some souls do that because they’ve finally found a world they feel they really connect with, while others are still journeying, still trying to find their world, and are just stopping off somewhere to learn more about the world for whatever reason.”
“How many lives?”
“Until you start exploring your lives for yourself that’s not a question I can answer, but I would guess somewhere between fifteen and twenty. Some of your lives would be longer than others, depending on which race you decided to incarnate as, and it’s possible to learn during the time you live as a spirit too. You may have spent hundreds of years in spirit form before choosing who to be in your next life, because you were learning lessons in that form that you wouldn’t have learnt during your a life.”
“Is there any form of afterlife for us?” Lucille asked.
“Not yet. The worlds are still too young for that.” Meriwether rubbed his antler. “Athare was a young world when we first stepped onto it, which is probably why it had enough magic to house us and why it accepted the Web. Other worlds wouldn’t.” He smiled. “Of course if it hadn’t we would have blamed the world creators rather than the world, because it’s easier than accepting the possibility of a sentient world, especially as I’ve found out since then that Athare made little changes to the Web and how it worked to help us survive.”
“Do you think you deserved Athare’s help?” Sini could hear the anger in Bertram’s voice, but she hoped that Meriwether couldn’t. “You did come here after destroying your old world with your selfishness and to me the Web is another sign of it.”
“Bertram, I admit that the choices I made when I was fae were selfish. All I wanted to do was survive because I’d seen hundreds of people die and knew it could easily be me next.” Meriwether’s voice was full of remembered fear and pain. “The Web was the only thing we could think of that might work at such short notice, so we did what we believed we needed to do in order to survive, even though we didn’t stop to think what it might be like for the races we were creating.” He sighed. “Riordan was never happy with the decision, which was why he fought so hard to help the Moonjumpers when he first met Tegan, and we felt we had no choice but to go along with what was happening as it was what our elders had told us to do.”
“The elders then were much younger than they’d ever been,” Lucille said, “due to what happened on Kalinia, and, along with living through the pain, their age meant they were more open to experimenting with the abilities they had in order to make certain the race would survive. As far as I know all of the elders became a part of the World Creation Council and it wasn’t until the first fae were lost that anyone really started to have any worries about the choice that they’d made.”
“Before then, Bertram,” Meriwether explained, “we weren’t in any danger. It didn’t even bother us when the races we’d placed on the other continents travelled back to the main continent, which we still hadn’t named by that point, because we believed we were better than them. We’d given them their abilities, we knew what to expect from them, and we assumed that they’d be grateful to us for giving them a chance of life.” He shrugged. “When the first fae were lost on a world we’d created everything changed. Fear of what we’d done caused the majority of the fae to say they were no longer in agreement with what we were doing and they chose to hide themselves away in settlements where they could pretend that life was the same as it was on Kalinia.”
“The families lived apart before they travelled to Athare,” Lucille explained. “It wasn’t that way when the thirteen families first split off from the rest of the fae, but soon it became obvious that they weren’t all going to get on. Once the choice was made for the families to have their own territory they would only come together for market day or an election.”
“Generally the market was the best way for the candidates in the election to tell the other families what their plans were for their time as Queen.” Meriwether sighed. “When the thirteen families split again they decided there was no need for a Queen, so that all came to an end when Mab abdicated and left Athare behind. Now…” He shook his head. “It’s impossible to know what’s going on in those warded settlements.”
“I think they still have plenty of arguments.” Lucille smiled. “According to the council member I was talking to at the last meeting it isn’t unusual for the fae representatives to change regularly and I have a feeling it’s because one family doesn’t trust another to share all the information they have. So they’ll send someone else to the next meeting in order to make that family feel happier, even though it means that very little now gets done at those meetings, as we have to brief them on the decisions that had been make at the previous meeting. That will lead to another debate, so that they can feel like they did something useful, and the Weavers are getting really annoyed with it all. As far as they’re concerned it’s just another way of the fae trying to control everything, even though they have no real understanding of the Web.”
“Control is something the fae always tried to cling to.” Meriwether rubbed his antler, looking uncomfortable. “On Kalinia it became impossible to have any control over anything, so coming to Athare meant we finally had a chance to control our futures. We had no idea how much magic the world held, because we had no way of measuring it, and the most logical answer to the problem seemed to be to find a way to create more magic.” He shook his head. “I don’t remember exactly how we came to the conclusion that creating worlds was the best way to do things, but it was our first day on Kalinia and we had another new elder. Her elder brother had died on Athare, so he became one of the first bodies we buried here, and I knew she wanted to make sure that she lost no more family members. Luckily I wasn’t a part of the elder’s bloodline, instead I was a member of one of the lesser bloodlines created by marriage, so I hadn’t lost as many people as she had, but I know she only had two brothers and a sister left out of twenty-five siblings. Having lived through all that I can understand why she felt the way she did.”
Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.