They all seemed so… tasteless, did they not? Just so insipid and vapid and boorish. She had only lived a little over a hundred years, but she remembered her past lives, and she remembered every little detail of them, at that. So much memory was not a good thing, contrary to what most people think; there’s an inescapability to it, a sense of being shackled to it, to the past, where every smell, every bit of sensory stimuli set off a concatenation of events and emotions that could go on in a retro-fed loop indeterminately unless she put a conscious stop to it. Stopping it, after all this time, was no longer an easy task. There was no “off” switch to memory and a mind that had become her own worst enemy.
People don’t realize what a luxury it is to be able to forget, to have memories grow fuzzy and distorted with time until they disappear completely, relegated to some archival corner of the mind, never to be brought to the fore of conscious thought again.
Lilith didn’t realize she was now wading into the scrying pool. How long had she been walking aimlessly, ambling like a fool lorn in an opium dream? Time was a funny thing, especially when you were an old witch on the brink of senility. Or was she already well in the throes of it? Was she now in its arms, being carried aloft to some aerie height where the mind need not be in the present any longer?
The bad thing about magic power was that, no matter how useful it was in the most practical matters, in the end it couldn’t save the mind, and it certainly couldn’t fix a life. It couldn’t change the way things were. It couldn’t change the way other people felt, not really, and it couldn’t alter strings of fate. That was truly tragic, she thought wistfully. How many had gone before her, of those she had loved – still loved, because that, for her, simply doesn’t change – and those who had shared with her some of their lives? It was impossible to tell.
Her bargain with the devil, figuratively speaking, had been struck a very long time ago, in a place the sands had now covered and would likely never give up again. She wondered how many more life cycles she would have to endure, how many more forays into the metempsychosis of demi-mortal existence… how many?
She was so tired. She was so confused. She just wanted to rest.
A.M. Coverston 