Page 95 of Aïdes the Unseen
I tumbled sideways, time slipping away to a concert hall in Berlin. It was 1889.
My name wasLouisa. I was a pianist, prodigy, and adored. Tonight, however, my fingers shook. As I looked over the crowd,I saw a shape at the back. A silhouette, still in the most unnatural of ways.
When my hands struck the wrong chord, the whole world shivered. Children in the audience began to cry. No one there knew why. I did, but I couldn’t tell them. They would never understand. Abandoning the bench, I ran. Not from fear, but recognition. I didn’t know his name.
I don’t think I’d ever known it. But I had seen him before. So many times had I seen him. Every life. Every time. His arrival meant…
The world slid sideways to Delphi. I was Selene, a healer. The people came to me for herbs, for prophecy. I served daily in the temple; it was my whole life.
My mother, or at least this life’s version of my mother, was cruel. In public, she was gentle and dignified, honored by all who knew her. In private, however, when it was just us she was full of iron and her will was immutable. Despite knowing what I had seen and that I walked too often under moonlight and even spoke in my dreams, she was unforgiving.
“You don’t know what you’re giving up,” she says. Her voice cut through lifetimes, a dagger in warm fruit.
“I do,” I answered her and even as I spoke, I could hear myself. I was both there and not.
“You think you love him,” my mother hissed. “But you don’t even know whatheis.”
“I know whatIam,” I said, tired in my bones and in my blood. We’d had this argument before. So many times. I’dseenhim. I knew where I was supposed to be. Yet, we had to argueagain. In so many lives, different bodies. “You’ve never liked that, have you?”
Mother raised her hand?—
A flicker, the blink of an eye and I was somewhere else, someone else before it fell. I stood in the snow with tall pinesswaying around me. A cabin smokes in the distance and my name in this time comes to me slowly.
Magda.
Russia or maybe it’s Finland? Either way, the landscape is unforgiving. The war was over, but not for me. I’d buried three men. One of them had been far too young. Now, I lived alone. A wolf visits in the evenings. Sometimes, I thought it was also lonely. Maybe it lost everyone it loved too. Did it want release? Did I?
While I had no real answers, the wolf had human eyes. They were unmistakable. It spoke to me only once though, probably just as well. I was already mad, after all.
“You are not what they buried,” it told me. The voice was low and familiar. I reached for it—for him—but everything faded before I could.
Time sundered, ripping through.
A thousand lives crashed into me at once, they raced through me. Flickers of light on a movie reel or the flap of pages blinking past.
A slave in Giza.
A cartographer in Mali.
A thief in Lisbon.
A nun in Kraków.
A child left in the Temple of Fire.
A woman who walked into the sea and came back with pearls in her mouth.
Each version of whispered fragments. Warnings? Memories? Both?
“Don’t let him speak your name.”
“The flowers are always red when he’s near.”
“He never stops looking.”
“You promised us a different end.”
“Remember.”
