Due to foundation repairs rendering my house nearly unlivable, I’m going to move my break week up to next week so I’m not trying to write in the middle of the noise. Next unlock will be 2/20.
§
My aunt seems to have resumed her role as my personal physician somewhere in the last three months. Once she finished examining my pulse and listening to my breath, and had the pink-haired healer lightly cast [Healing] on me in order to confirm that I had no internal injuries, she bowed and spoke cautiously to me.
“My Lady, we’ve never discussed this in our lessons, but a vampire with sufficiently advanced skills has the ability to read the aura, in the same fashion as the more mature fairies. By no means is my sense as strong as someone like your mother, but I’m sure she has explained aura reading to you in the past…”
She paused for me to confirm. I nodded and replied, “She taught me that it’s different than reading mana signatures.”
Elianora gave a return nod with a tight-lipped smile. “It is, indeed. Your mana signature relates to your physical body. Aura relates to your spiritual body. The spiritual bodies of most creatures are quite small, so only persons with advanced skills tend to sense them.”
That puzzled me, since Mother hadn’t mentioned that part.
“Spiritual body?”
“The religious types would call it your ‘soul’,” Elianora stated coldly. “Without a scientific description to go by, I can only say that it is the presence that both living beings and spirits possess, which disappears upon the death of either. Its exact character is as unique to each individual as their fingerprints, and we who can sense it term that character an ‘aura’.”
I sighed. Aunt Elianora is rigidly skeptical of priests and gods. Her motto is, ‘If it can’t be independently verified by repeatable experimentation, you must always consider it dubious.’ As a dutiful student in my temple classes, I find it a little uncomfortable when she gets this way.
To be fair, hers is probably a commendable position for a physician to take, because it should result in the clearest medical judgment, but how could she extend it to include things she could see for herself?
Knowing her, I imagine she would say, ‘Although I see something, I cannot say what it is that I am seeing without independent verification’. And she would probably go on to lecture me about something like how people in ancient times thought that the Sun and the moons revolved around Huade, just because that’s what it looked like to their eyes.
“So you can see my aura, just like Mother,” I confirmed. “Is there something of concern about it?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “Rather, I would like to check something. I will be palpating your lower abdomen in order to do so.”
“Do I need to undress?” I wondered, thinking about calling the maids to help me with all the laces, but she shook her head.
“No need. I can manage this exam through the cloth.”
I’ve encountered doctors with absolutely no hesitation about touching and feeling their patients, but Aunt Elianora is a vampire. It is normal for her to be very reluctant to touch anywhere other than the patient’s wrist or forehead. I suspect she secretly uses her [Vampire Sense] to check things that other doctors do by feel, while pretending to take the patient’s pulse.
I smiled. “It’s alright, Aunt. Please go ahead.”
Nodding, she leaned closer and gently placed her hand over the spot she had mentioned. After closing her eyes with a frown of concentration, she nodded and withdrew it.
“Everything is well,” she stated. “But do you understand what I was checking?”
Cringing internally, because I had already noticed what part of my body had been beneath her palm, I noted, “I’ve heard people mentioning babies. Is it something like that?”
The healer helping my aunt gave me a sympathetic smile. Elianora simply pursed her lips.
“Prior to losing your memory, you were already aware of this, but yes, it is exactly like that. My Lady, you are pregnant.”
Finally having it confirmed was a little jolting. Denial immediately tried to kick in. “But… How could I possibly be with child?!”
My aunt’s eyebrow arched. “The cause of pregnancy is fairly well-established.”
This is not the time for your straight-faced humor, Aunt!
“Is this why I’m suddenly to be married? And His Highness is…”
The healer looked like she was struggling mightily not to giggle. How mean!
I protested, “I couldn’t possibly share that sort of embrace with him!”
The healer, with an effort to keep the laughter out of her voice, stated, “Doctor, I think this is a private matter that Rod and I need to discuss with My Lady alone.”
My eyes grew wide. This girl was using a nickname for a prince of Orestania? And she felt she was part of the conversation? Just who exactly was she?
My aunt cleared her voice, then nodded. “Very well.”
§
“Oh that poor child…” I sighed with a shake of my head.
“She’s you, you know,” Rhea noted, eyes twinkling again.
“That’s! Why!” I retorted. “I know exactly how shocked she must be feeling right now. Look how she speaks! ‘That sort of embrace’, ‘being with child’. She called herself ‘yet a maiden’ instead of saying she still had her virginity! I know the Goddess of Fertility might not understand this, but…”
Rhea erupted with merry laughter, ending my outburst, then she gave me the same sympathetic eyes that Mireia had given real-world Tiana.
“Senior,” Fan Li asked cautiously. “Can you tell us which incarnation you intend to involve, at least?”
“Rather, that I have already involved,” Rhea stated. “She’s arrived.”
The goddess looked past my shoulder and said, “Come over here, child. Don’t be afraid.”
I twisted in my chair to look behind and saw a brunette wearing a peplos, a garment of Ancient Greece. I had the sense that this was a high-status version of the outfit; the cloth and dyes were a little primitive by the manufacturing standards of modern Earth, but even so, this was by no means shoddy or cheap clothing, and she wore a variety of accessories on her arms and neck and in her plaited hair that looked quite opulent.
But she looked very daunted by the scene in front of her, and I couldn’t blame her. The pavilion was full of ghosts, after all. However, eventually she summoned up her courage and made it across, to occupy the fourth chair.
Indicating her with an upward facing hand, the goddess told us, “This is Lydia.”
Turning back to her, Rhea stated, “Child, I’ve spoken to you in your dreams, but this is our first meeting awake. I apologize for suddenly summoning you here, but these two must also make your acquaintance.”
Still wary, the woman looked from Fan Li to me and back to Rhea. Then she bowed her head and spoke meekly.
“I confess that I do not entirely understand the situation, but I remember your voice. You are the one called ‘Rhea’ who called out to me, yes?”
Rhea gave her a gentle smile. “That’s correct. I am Rhea.”
“I feel as though I have awakened from a very long dream. And ever since waking, I have suspected that my memories of dying are real. The appearance of this place seems to confirm it. Are we indeed in the domain of Hades?”
The goddess’s smile broadened. “In Robert Stewart’s memories, I saw that those of your profession were known as talented and well-educated women. It seems you are gifted with a keen mind, so his information must be correct.”
Fan Li cleared her throat, then noted, “Senior, that is not to say she is correct in her analysis.”
Rhea chuckled. “That’s true, but her people did not have a belief in reincarnation, nor was it well-known as a foreign concept for them, so explaining is going to be a bit tricky.”
“‘Those of her profession’?” I wondered.
“In life, Lydia was a hetaira,” Rhea explained. “Unfortunately, she died quite young, at the hand of a jealous patron.”
After a moment, the definition of the term came to me from Robert’s studies of classical literature. Hetairai were the upper class entertaining women of Ancient Greece. Rather than common prostitutes, they were something like the geisha of Japan. They would play music, consort with guests at the symposia, the parties of the Greek upper class and might or might not have slept with their most favored patrons. There’s an entertaining debate between Socrates and a hetaira named Theodote, who had a side gig as an artist’s model, in one of his discourses.
“In fact, Lydia’s life overlapped with his,” Rhea told me. “Although not precisely enough for her to have known him. She was an inhabitant of Athens, but he was still quite young when she died.”
I blinked. This girl was an actual, real-life Ancient Athenian?
One of the ghostly servers appeared and attempted to serve tea to the girl, but Rhea waved it off.
“Take that away. Her homeland doesn’t know tea.”
The server retreated. I had the distinct impression it was a bit miffed, though.
“Tea…?” the girl wondered.
“It’s hot, like hippocras, but it’s not wine,” Rhea explained. “Here.”
The goddess waved her hand and a small goblet appeared where the tea had been. “Wine for you. Watered properly, the way you expect it to be served.”
Her eyes once again filled with superstitious anxiety, and she hesitated to touch the goblet. Well, having something like that just blink into existence in front of you would be a bit daunting.
“May I ask for one as well?” I requested.
Understanding my reasoning, Rhea complied, and my tea became wine. I picked up the goblet and gave it a sip.
“It’s perfectly safe,” I assured her, then tipped my head. “And not bad, actually.”
“You expect a goddess to serve bad wine?” Rhea retorted, giggling.
“Goddess?” Lydia exclaimed, just as she was about to take the goblet. She was now frozen again, with her eyes on Rhea like a small herbivore caught in the gaze of a wolf.
“It’s a matter of perspective, dear,” Rhea told her gently. “But I suppose that I am technically the goddess whose name you’ve heard. It’s a bit complicated, though. Enjoy your drink while we talk about the job you must do.”
The woman looked around the table, her eyes still haunted. “Does it have to do with the strange dream I’ve been having?”
Rhea smiled and looked around at us as well. “I forcibly inserted her awareness into your principal’s spiritual vessel. It was similar to how the Afterlife Organization inserted your prior life memories into Tiana’s brain when they inserted your soul into her body.”
What she wasn’t mentioning was that Lydia was an incarnation even earlier than Daq R’mion, the earliest incarnation I had met thus far. But she didn’t need to. Now that I had met her, the memories were beginning to connect.
But I gave her a puzzled stare for several seconds, until it was clear she was going to make me voice the question bothering me.
“Why? What was the point of doing something like that?”
“When I saw what was happening to your principal’s mind, I realized that the active connection between this vessel and your soul would be broken unless at least one incarnation were present in both. This vessel would revert to the disconnected state it suffered during Robert Stewart’s life until she somehow relearned spiritual arts. With no memories from Senhion or others to serve as triggers, who knows how many centuries that would take?”
“But she obviously knows nothing! Have you even explained to her what is going on?”
Rhea shrugged. “We’re still working on that. Up until now, she thought she was dreaming.”
Fan Li nodded. “Understandable. For most of the time since the backlash, Tiana has indeed been dreaming, and that’s what this child would have seen. It was probably quite confusing.”
The goddess chuckled. “That’s true, isn’t it? Anyhow, she doesn’t actually need to do anything for now. Simply by existing in your spiritual vessel, she keeps it sufficiently active. Later, recovering her memories, and those of the other lives before Daq, will be important for your growth, so you ought to start acquainting yourself with more of them. As things stand, you’ve only recalled those who achieved significant spiritual growth.”
So there were more previous incarnations beyond Lydia? Well, between the slightly over two thousand years of the lives I knew and the death of Senhion lay a gap of about eight thousand years, less however many years I spent in Samsara between lives. I apparently spent the earlier part as a series of pre-sentient and semi-sentient animals from the Human Clade evolutionary path, but it sounded like I didn’t go straight from some lemur-like critter to Lydia.
But as I frowned due to the part Rhea was completely failing to explain, Fan Li beat me to asking the obvious follow-up question.
“If you had the ability to insert someone into the spiritual vessel, why not insert one of us? Why a child who knows nothing about what’s going on?”
“Because that’s what I needed,” Rhea stated primly. “Somebody with absolutely no relationship to the memories which are currently in your brain. Your principal’s mental state will be extremely tricky in the near term. The last thing we need is the presence of someone with a connection to those memories randomly triggering them for her.”
I felt somehow less stupid when I saw Fan Li didn’t entirely understand either. We looked at each other while thinking, Why would that be a problem? Don’t we want Real World Tiana to remember things as quickly as possible?
Poor Lydia was also completely mystified, but her problem was that she still had no idea what we were talking about. She would probably be in that state for some time to come.
