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Chapter One

Chapter One

E

very story has an ending. No matter how long or twisting or winding, or if you go in reverse, or up or down, or if you cross over your previous path a couple of times and then circle back around again, the end of the line is still inevitable.

Circles aren’t immune. The curved paths still abide the properties of existence. They have a starting point and a stopping one. Though it might be harder to decipher the beginning and end, those points are still there. There is still a boundary line that’s inescapable.

Every life is a line. There is a set point that enters the planet, strikes the pavement, or marks the parchment. And there is a terminal point where all traces of the individual, the impression, the imprint cease.

All things come to an end. And that included my life. I was immortal, but I had never truly believed I’d live forever. The math wasn’t on my side.

Here’s my point: if this was the end, why hadn’t I ceased to be?

Thoughts zigged and zagged in my mind. The shape of my mind wasn’t closed like a circle. It felt boundless, open. There were no lines, no corners, no curves. All of this would’ve perplexed my friend Euclid, who was credited with having systematized the mathematical concepts of geometry.

The wiry old man with a long, white beard in two parallel lines that draped from his chin was fond of saying that

a line is length without breadth.

I remembered the day he’d said it. The Alexandrian sun kissed my skin as I sat on the white stone steps outside the Library of Alexandria.

My memories of five hundred years ago weren’t this vivid. This particular memory was more than two millennia old, but it was clear and detailed, from the spice of the eucalyptus trees and the spice of cardamom. And those weren’t the only things I remembered.

I remembered, well, everything. Was this death? Swimming in the mire of the crystal-clear memories of my life?

Three thousand years of memories swirled around in my head like a galaxy. Each specific memory was a starry point of light. I only had to reach out and touch. I reached for one of the farthest ones.

In the memory that I caught hold of, I was bent over a slab of clay. Men and women surrounded me as I etched wedged shapes on the tablet with a blunt reed. The shapes were pictures. More like pictograms. More exactly like cuneiform.

Oh? Would you look at that? I’d taught humanity one of its earliest forms of the written language.

I reached for another bright point in my memory, further back. This time I had a spade in my hand. I was digging. No surprise there. What surprised me was what I found in the dirt.

It was a giant skull with huge, vacant eye sockets, a long snout, and pointed teeth that were each the size of a man’s hand. The people around me shouted and shrieked about giants, ogres, griffins, monsters. But I knew better.

I knew exactly what the bone was and what animal it belonged to. I’d seen this great reptile before, walking over the earth, flying through the sky, breathing light so bright it singed the treetops. But at that moment, I hadn’t been able to remember the name of the magnificent creature. I knew it now: dragon.

I cleaned the dirt off the dragon’s skull carefully, still unable to call it by its name in that time. Wrapping it up, I brought it back to the light to inspect it. I wracked my brain for all the information I had inside but couldn’t come up with an answer. Instead of upsetting me, it thrilled me to know there were things that I didn’t know.

I reached beyond that bright point of light and captured another memory. This one warmed my heart. The first time my heart had skipped a beat. See, there was a boy.

A boy with dark hair and soulful eyes. He was recreating life on parchment. He painted in wondrous color with such detail, it was hard to believe the rendition wasn’t the real thing.

I marveled at his work. When he turned to me, the look on his face took my breath away. With just a glance, the connection was instant, complete, absolute, as if he’d touched me with his gaze. A light within him had shone on me, through me, and enveloped me. I knew in the bottom of my very being, of whatever I was, that the connection would be forever.

Only one other bright spot remained before that soul-altering one, and I reached for it. It was my first memory. My starting point, the moment I came into existence.

I remembered being swaddled, but not by cloth. By something soft and warm and spongy. It was red and pulsing. I couldn’t move much, but didn’t feel the need to.

I was safe. I was protected. I was loved. But then one day, that world turned me upside down. It pushed me out.

I was remembering my birth.

Red gave way to darkness and then a light so blinding that I cried out. A face peered down at me. The expression was inscrutable. Even as an infant at the start of this new life, I knew to be quiet while held in this enigmatic person’s gaze.

My cry broke, abruptly as a pencil scratching off the end of a paper. The face didn’t change in expression, but my silence felt like the right thing. The shimmer of approval pleased me. And then the face was gone.

Arms reached down and pulled me onto warm skin. That skin was toasty-brown and warm. Her face was clearly readable. Pink lips stretched wide, and my heart kicked into gear. I sighed as she cradled me next to a heart that matched the beating of mine.

The moment was perfect. I thought it would go on forever. It did not.

I’m certain it was a long moment, many years, decades even. But after some time, those arms fell away from my mature body. My mother had come to the end of her line, the acquittal of her imprint, the absolution of her impression, the annulment of her self as an individual.

My mother.

I’d had a mother. But she was gone. And now, so was I.

My eyes blinked open. Just as with my birth, a bright light blinded me. I squinted, but the light wasn’t so harsh that it harmed me. Instead, it overwhelmed me.

It took a moment to get used to the glare, and then a face appeared. It wasn’t my mother’s face. It was the inscrutable face, the enigmatic face, the first face I ever remember seeing after leaving my mother’s womb.

That face stared at me again. I gasped, sucking in air, but I didn’t cry out. Still, somehow, I instinctively knew that any type of histrionics would not be appreciated, that it would displease this being. And I didn’t want her displeasure.

Her. Yes, this being was female.

Her features were soft and rounded like a woman’s. But

woman

seemed the wrong word. Female, feminine, those were right. Because I knew that, though female, she was not human.

She stood nude, peering down at me. Her body approximated female humanity, but there were things missing. Like breasts, for one.

She had a chest with bumps that could barely pass for an A cup. There were no nipples. Her hips were rounded and her abdomen flat. She had no belly button. Her limbs were long and toned. There were no muscles, but something told me she was stronger than she looked.

Her eyes were wide, abnormally so, but perfectly symmetrical. They covered a third of her face in a half moon-shaped crescent with no eyelids or lashes. She didn’t blink, she only stared. It was a blinding, pupil-less stare with eyes the color of the sun that radiated the same heat.

There was no hair atop her head. Instead, there were raised nodes in a swirling pattern, much like the meditating Buddha statues decorating the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

I lay there in the pool of light as we stared at each other. She studied me, like a specimen in a lab. I tried to move, but my limbs wouldn’t budge. Something invisible held me down to the lab table.

“Hold still,” the female said, “or this will hurt.”

She held up the index finger of one hand. Using the other hand, she peeled the skin from her finger. Just like in the kid’s movie of an alien trying to phone home, her finger lit up. I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. I tore open my lips and screamed.

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