The last bonus chapter dedicated to a Patreon supporter for today; this one is for twilight, with thanks for your continued support. I hope you're still enjoying the story!

"Don't do that again," Violet cautioned. "You're still young. Your body can't cope with the amount of power flowing through you. Especially not holding Jack's spirit for that long."

Amber groaned, and picked herself up from the floor of the dream chamber.

"Did we get it?"

"You did," Arnie nodded, "I can't believe you used me as a distraction."

"I thought you could do it. Maybe the sword wasn't..." and then she vanished.

"Where did she go? Is she awake?" Arnie and Jack snapped at almost the same time

"I don't know," Violet answered slowly, walking over to Amber's usual seat at the table, and running a hand over the smooth crystals there.

* * *

"Is he awake?" the voice seemed to come out of nowhere.

"He should be," the second voice was deeper, from someone very nervous. Like he thought he could be executed if he didn't do his job well enough.

"That's not what I asked. Leave us, I'll brief him."

Running footsteps, and a door slamming. The subject of their discussion assumed he was awake now, though it was hard to be sure. Two drifting voices in the darkness had quickly become a room, with its own little echoes, and an angry-but-worried silhouette standing over him. He tried to place the voice, but couldn't remember anything.

"Who are you?" he eventually croaked, and found that he could open his eyes. The angry man was huge and muscular, hair piled up in a complex style that seemed to make him even taller. He was wearing a robe secured with metal plates around his shoulders, and a mixture of furs and fabrics that had to mean he was rich and powerful. But it was impossible even to...

"Wait," he interrupted himself, "who am I? I can't remember my own name!" The man lying on the bed tried to gather his thoughts, but it was like trying to gather water with his hands. He didn't know this man standing over him, and he didn't know how he had got here. He couldn't remember what he looked like, or his family. He couldn't recall anything about the land he found himself in, whether he had been born here or had travelled, and he couldn't even remember background trivia like the name of their ruler. He knew that some people had kings or commanders, but he had no idea what the rules were here.

"Don't worry," the big guy answered, "We thought this might happen. You've only recently been born, and it looks like reincarnation isn't as simple as it used to be."

"Reincarnation? I don't understand," he answered, but he noticed that his voice still had the reedy tones of a child. He couldn't remember being a grown man, but then he couldn't remember anything. And the voice of a boy coming out of his mouth seemed strange.

"We've been reborn," the big man answered, "Souls condemned to be born again and again, repeating the same struggles until the Princess's desires can be satisfied. Even the extinction of our race couldn't break the cycle. We were born again as soon as some hairless apes on another world, as soon as they had evolved sufficiently to play host to our spirits. But it seems that their brains are different, and we can't always access the full memories of our former lives. The memories are there in your mind, you understand. It just takes some effort to access them."

"Will I be able to remember?"

"Yes. We have confirmed the identity of your ancestral spirit. I have accelerated your natural growth, so that you have the physiology of a six year old child. But during the month of your infancy, it seems some of your former memories were still overwritten by newly formed imprints of your current body. Therefore I have used our impression backups to restore what we can from the external recollections in your journal. It is a complex process, but I assure you that as soon as some thought or event reminds you of a past memory, the thoughts will spread like a firework in your mind, a chain reaction of recollection. I can attempt to provide some reminders to jog your mind, if you feel you are ready. But I warn you, the process may be painful."

"I'm ready," he answered almost instantly. The tone of the older man's voice, that disdain for an explanation he must have endlessly repeated, were starting to stir some faint glimmer of recollection. They seemed familiar, like it only needed a tiny hint more to let... the boy remember. The boy who still couldn't place his own name or station.

"Very well. I will introduce myself first, as I suspect I am present in your strongest memories. I am known as Lord Cyradin Belmadir on this world. I am Royal Master of Technologies and as such your fellow on the Council of the Rainbow of the Soul. I am responsible for elevating the scientific and cultural enlightenment of the apes around us, such that they may make some pretense of a useful civilisation. You are Omun Orsertro, or so you have been dubbed. We determined in our first cycle of life on this world that the human vocal organs are incapable of uttering your true name, and this one is the closest we have been able to determine. You are also within the council, as Royal Master of the City of Atlantis. This city, in fact, which you shaped from the minerals of the great ocean to serve as a permanent home for us, apart from the worldly concerns of our subjects."

Orsertro was already screaming, but the Master of Technologies continued talking. Each event or duty he described triggered a hundred recollections, and every person Orsertro saw in his mind's eye brought forth a whole flood of history. The neural pathways of his brain were burned raw by the flood of information from his soul, not yet adapted to the thoughts and understandings that he was heir to. Some things he remembered just as Madir told him, and others he could bring back images of deception, of details he had been unwilling to share even with his fellow lords. But every memory prompted a thousand more, and he was unable to think while he was battered by wave after wave of recollections. Some of them might have been happy memories, things he would be glad to learn, but the whole series flashing through his mind in an instant, it was so intense that he couldn't focus on a single image, a single moment, even a single one of his past lives was too much to ask for.

As he remembered, he knew that Madir was speaking the truth. They had been born on a different world, innumerable generations before, and had seen the rise of a civilisation that had reached the stars before falling again, victims of their own pride. The memories he saw now were peopled with human figures, but that was only the effects of his human brain, his perceptions filtered by the things his current body was capable of perceiving. Even conversations from a million years before were translated into a new language, so that they could be understood and repeated by men in human bodies. And...

"I'm a man?" he whimpered, as the first flood of memories started to die down. "Male, I mean. For some people I don't remember..."

"You will never remember the sex of people you knew on our own world," Cyra's face twitched, an expression that might just be a smile. "The question did not arise there. The closest analogue would be the castes by which members of our kind might develop different external organs as needed for their destined role in society. But there is no direct analogue, as there is not for many things that you might struggle to recall. We have been changed by our ordeal, all of us. But there are things that the human body and brain may accomplish that our own could not."

"I have to..."

"You're still weak. And it will take days of recollection before you can truly understand the content of all the memories you have recently recovered. Do not push yourself, Orsertro."

"How is... she?"

"The Princess?" this time he was certain that Madir was laughing. "She was worried by your unscheduled demise, that is certain. But she will be able to tell you herself once you have finished your screaming and whimpering. Do not worry. The Council of the Eight still sits in command over this world, and we will guide this savage world into civilisation with Her Immaculate Excellency as our leader. Nothing, not even your little experiment, will be allowed to threaten that."

Orsertro wheezed, trying to push the inferno inside his skull aside so that he could draw breath to speak. Even opening his mouth seemed a titanic effort right now, and in a way he was glad that the Princess was not here to see him so helpless to protect her.

"Something else you wish to say? Something vital enough that you cannot wait for the synaptic storm to subside?"

"I..." he gasped, and then tried again, pushing himself harder. "Thank you, Cyra."

Cyradin Belmadir smiled and bowed deeply, before turning to leave the sickroom. Orsertro closed his eyes again, hoping that with no input from his present senses he might be more able to understand the memories of the past as they flooded through his consciousness. But seconds later he was asleep, his dreams working to sort and understand memories that his waking mind never would.