Flash Fiction

Dispersed

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This post was originally published through Patreon on September 26, 2018.

She closes her eyes, then opens them again, just to be sure they’re telling her the truth. She beholds the sun above her head, clear and bright, and finally weeps.

When they imprisoned her, they said it was for good. “A menace to the world,” they warned. “She can never be free again.” So they bound her—in water and stone, in wind and earth, in fire and sky. They scattered her essence to the four corners of the world, confident that once she was dispersed, she would never be whole again.

But millennia passed, her captors long since dead, and like a thick and unctuous vapor, she started to condense. The vapor became drops. The drops became pools. The pools became an ocean. With every passing century, she became a little more whole, a little more complete. Now, at last, she can open her eyes to a clear blue sky and know for sure that she’s beaten them.

She’ll walk the Earth once more, and this time, there will be no one who can stop her.

In the past, she allowed humans some degree of autonomy. But she underestimated them, and when they came for her, they almost destroyed her. She won’t make the same mistake again.

She sits, feeling the Old Magic rekindle in her ancient veins, and plots her return.

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Why?

Quick Shot/Shutterstock.com

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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