Book II - Part 2. Before

"Anyway," Amber shrugged off the clash of egos around the table, "Reports! I had a dream last night. Nothing new, I think. I was crafting a new ballista array, defending the colonies in Golmercia from demon attacks. The part of Pangea that would become South Africa, I think. I only saw the campaign map for a moment."


"They attacked everywhere," Jack shrugged. "Anything useful?"


"Roudi had a theory," Amber glanced to her left for a moment, and saw Violet's face light up. She was technically older than Amber, and she even looked older. She'd been fourteen when she died, but she didn't act more mature now. Any hint of a story starring her past incarnation got her so excited, no matter who was telling it. "About the demons. Said they might have been from Mimas."


"Mimas is dead," Alex shook her head, "The surface purged so completely nothing could survive there. It's more like the moon than a planet."


"Well, that's what Roudi said. In the war up there, whatever this last weapon was, they tried to physically push people into the spirit realm to create super-soldiers. And then when all life was extinct, they were kind of stuck there until we reincarnated as humans. Roudi thought the connection of our spirits... she used a fancy word, I don't really remember... but when we became human, it could have let them follow us to Earth."


"In some generations, we really wanted to blame ourselves for everything," Alex spoke quietly. "Was this in an era where we had most of our scientific knowledge, or was Pangea in decline?"


"I think it was the second generation. I remember hearing some of the soldiers talking about Urdia. How she was female this time, and they were worried she wouldn't be so good at tactics any more. So it wasn't the first generation, we were all men then. And I think by the third, it wasn't quite a new thing, and even the humans knew that we weren't really the same as them. They were too scared of us to say anything about stuff that happened between us. But then..."


"Something wrong?" Arnie whispered. She wasn't so concerned with hearing about herself in stories; she was waiting for some of her own memories from that period to come back before she formed a real opinion about whether it mattered being the first to discover how much gender meant to a human mind. She was more worried that Amber was nervous, maybe even uncomfortable about her experience. "Anything we can do to make it any easier?"


"No," Amber shook her head, "I'm sorry. It's just, I know you'll get the wrong idea. See, Ammadrine was there too. Running out in front of the army, swinging this huge hammer with both hands. Wrecked a demon single handed, supposed to be protecting us while we work, but I couldn't keep my eyes off him. The way he moved, it was so elegant. It was amazing."


"Not that much of a surprise," Jack shrugged. They very rarely came across Ammadrine in their memories of their early lives, and it still wasn't entirely clear who was who. The strongest knight wore red armour, made of solid diamond and ruby plates, and they hadn't seen him even take his mask off in any of their memories. And none of them could remember being Ammadrine. Which meant that either he had reincarnated as Alex, who still hadn't found her own ancient memories, and his armour didn't actually match the blue of his spectral aura. Or what they were almost sure, that Ammadrine had gone on to betray them, becoming the Enemy they now had to defeat.


"And then back at the forts..." Amber tried to ignore the interruption. She was the only one who wasn't certain Ammadrine was a villain. She had good enough reason to think he was evil, after a man carrying a crimson ancestral spirit had tried to abduct her from school, but in her memories of the ancient past she just couldn't imagine him betraying them. "I'd raised a fort, you know? Like a little castle, crystal floors and walls inside a trilithon frame, barracks for a hundred or so troops? Anyway, when I got back, Amma was there already. He didn't say anything, just leaning with his back against the wall, looking at the landscape. Still in full armour. And I was sure that as we came back, he was watching me. Like, staring at me, not at any of the others. I don't know how I could tell, his helmet stayed pointing forward, but I imagined his eyes were turning. And I told you, and you were like... 'You know what that means.' Like it was something you were expecting, and I just nodded, so I was expecting it too."


"Maybe he liked you?"


"Yeah, but I was definitely a guy that time. Like, really tall, red hair, beard you could hide a ferret in?"


"Maybe he was your rival then. Amma seems to have been a man of few words, even before he... You know."


"Yeah. And later on, I saw him watching again. Still in armour, and nobody said anything. It's like, we know he always wears the armour, and nobody at the time thinks that's weird. We all knew why, but now we don't remember because we didn't discuss it. I hate that I can't understand."


"True facts, anyway," Mel said, almost as an afterthought. When dreams were obscure and symbolic, or came from lives a century before, they might need him to tell them if they meant anything at all. But none of them had experienced a dream from the days of the Pangean Empire that didn't turn out to be a part of their real history, carried back to them by Belmadir's psychic computer system.


"We'll get to the bottom of it," Alex reassured her, "Every time, we learn a little bit more. Sooner or later we'll understand why we're really here. Why we have to keep on fighting, when we were together against the demons so long ago."


"Umm..." Mel whispered, not quite sure he wanted to say what he'd been planning to. But he pushed on: "I kind of had one too. Third or fourth generation, murals of fish everywhere in case that's any use putting your calendar together. Think it was winter. Belmadir was working on his machine, as always. But he said something different this time. Maybe it was another use for it, or a different machine. He said that it could change the cycle of reincarnations, and get Amma back under control. In the memory, I understood what he was talking about, it all made sense to me, so I didn't need to ask."


"And you approved of that?"


"Yeah. I mean, I didn't like developing a weapon to use against one of us. But even Madir, he's always so formal, he didn't say 'Lord Ammadrine' or anything. It was just 'Amma', and he glances both ways before he says it. Like the guy's actual name is a dirty word that we're not supposed to be saying. And I nodded, just the same."


"Okay, that's new. Maybe related to how he ended up... not reincarnating any more? Madir got in trouble with the Princess?"


"We know Nico and Madir did something, some kind of scheme," Alex looked across at Mel as she spoke. She didn't want to upset him, it was already cutting him up enough to think that he could have been a traitor in a previous life. "Ammadrine said that you two ended up causing a load of friction between the Lords. Could this be what he was talking about?"


"Yeah, well. I argued a little, said we were going too far, but my heart wasn't in it. And then one of the humans runs in. Like, one of the senior ones that I should have known the name of. And he says that you-know-who is in Lord Orsertro's room. Madir's looking at me like this 'told you so' stare, and then we're both running halfway across the city. Like it's a real panic, something we'd been worrying about for ages but never thought it would actually happen. I don't know where the tension came from between you two, but somehow it seemed obvious that it would be you. We were scared for you, and angry, and it was like we'd let you down. I don't know what happened there, but I can say we tried to do the right thing, and we let the Enemy get to you right under our noses."


"I think we know enough to be sure now," Jack said, daring anyone to disagree. None of them did. The others still all had questions to ask about the new memories, Alex most of all as she tried to piece together a complete history of a prehistoric Empire from the fragments they had. But there were no other big things to learn, and there was nothing they could do until the Enemy showed himself. The living members of the group had to go back to their bodies, and they all needed to see if the long-forgotten computers in orbit around Saturn had any more memories of ancient lives for them to live through again.

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