This post was originally published through Patreon on September 19, 2018.
Not an ending, thought Samantha as she lay on the sidewalk, bleeding into the concrete. Not an ending, but another beginning.
She spasmed.
Choked.
Died.
Alone, suspended in the dark, the part of her that was still aware wondered if she might be granted a release—if she might, after countless lives, succumb at last to the Great Void and the mysteries that lay beyond. Then came the all too familiar tug, as if she were a yo-yo at the end of its string that was about to be pulled back.
No, please. I don’t want to go.
But the choice was not hers to make, and it seemed the universe had other plans. Her essence—or her soul, according to what her parents had taught her in her previous life—plummeted through an endless expanse of empty space, where it condensed, coalesced around a nascent core of matter and energy that would, in time, become her next body.
Her awareness, now tethered to an embryo that was not yet capable of rational thought, began to dim. But before the dark enveloped her completely, a single thought bubbled out, a desperate plea cast into the infinite and beyond, addressed to whoever or whatever might be there to listen.
“Why?”
And then, surprisingly, an answer came, one she didn’t expect.
“Because there is more I have to teach you.”
Then, like a guttering flame, the last vestiges of conscious thought disappeared, and Samantha passed into a dreamless sleep where she waited to be born again.
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