Cohost Exodus

Reincarnation Sickness

“Reincarnation Sickness”, as it’s known in popular culture, is actually two interrelated syndromes. From Lethe Toxicity comes the classic symptoms associated with difficulty forming new memories (forgetfulness, inability to form emotional bonds, difficulty learning new skills), while from the second and more controversial syndrome—so controversial, in fact, that its name is unsafe to write or speak—come symptoms related to the soul’s difficulties anchoring itself. Hallucinations, “wandering Ka” and “wandering Sa”, and the attraction of various metaphysical predators to the unprotected Sekhem.

Vignettes from an End

The sun is dripping again, a cracked yolk running down the sky to pool along the crumbling horizon. Burning yellow mingles with chilly red clouds, and magenta steam bubbles up from the boiling ocean. It smells like burnt fish and salty rot, so I close my window and turn the air purifier up. Can’t risk getting vomit on the rug again.

I read on the news that this is normal. It’s part of a cycle. For the world to be renewed, first it must die, but only the parts that don’t matter. The unimportant parts. But the news said that I was in one of the important parts, a part that will become a seed to fill the new world with new life, so that’s probably okay.

Time Should Heal

Every night your restless dreams lead you back there again, and every night the wound is renewed. It’s been decades since your body walked in that hallowed place, the labyrinth carved and filled; decades since your skin felt the dripping heat and your stomach clenched at the smell of the dead saints and the stars wheeled above.

Time should heal wounds. The therapists certainly think so; they think you’re unhealthily obsessed, unwilling to let go, unwilling to let yourself grow beyond the memory. They blame you. They don’t understand. Each night the memory is made anew, each night you are once again the things which were done to you and the things which you did—the things you were made to do, they’d say. A small rephrasing. A lie.

Dedicate Your Death To Me

“Dedicate your death to me,” the necromancer whispers. “Be mine to move and use, now and forever.”

She pauses to listen for an answer. Corpses don’t speak, of course, but she hears their answer in the slow flux of fungal rot and the chewing maggots, and so her army grows.

Thick, slimy marrow drips down from spongy calcium. The corpse is long past needing it, and the dirt is always hungry, and so it must be purged of life’s unnecessary remains.

Next Deal

This is the deal that you will make with the endless void in the moment of your death: you will fill it with the fruit of your soul, and when you have nothing more to give you will be part of it.

The void is as large as the world and as small as a teaspoon, and at first it does not seem like such a hard thing to fill it. Perhaps you will last longer than your predecessor.

Nothing Awaits Beyond

When the generation ship Seeker arrived at the galaxy’s edge, it found a marble stela half-buried in the void’s velvety fabric. The ship’s crystal-mind anchored itself there while it began to wake the carbon-minds who formed its crew: the technicians and choice-makers and void-watchers and reconcilers who did all the things which it could not, and who were set to be awakened anyway to celebrate the start of the ship’s true voyage—to look out upon the radiation-scoured emptiness which divided them from the Sculptor’s luminous beacon, twelve million light years away and nearly as ancient.