As I closed my eyes for what I assumed would be the final time, two sounds resonated within my mind. One was the voice of the gods, a booming call augmented with a hauntingly familiar harmony. Die. The other was the familiar voice in my head, tinged with anger and resignation: “So that’s what it was.”

My next memory was waking, screaming in a high-pitched voice that I was not used to, coated in a viscous, chunky fluid I couldn’t quite place.

My second life was much like my first, albeit with more of an… edge to it. Again, I was male. Again, I grew up fairly healthy, fairly poor. My new… family, though I was never fully comfortable calling them that, were accepting of my oddities. At first, I was scared. I pretended to develop slowly, acted like a child for years. It was one of the duller experiences of my lives.

But colors… they were brighter, different. My senses were stronger. I could do more than I could in my past life. When I performed labor, the muscles in my arms would stand out taut underneath the skin, and I remained thin no matter how much I ate. The language was different from the one I knew, smoother, slower. My skin was far lighter, almost frighteningly pale, to the point where I could casually see veins in my arms. When I had grown enough for it to not be strange, I looked at the small selection of maps in the village I now resided in. None had anything recognizable.

Dying was freeing, I eventually decided. I could take risks that I had never dreamed of before. Why not? What was there left that the gods could take from me? (I would come to regret this thoughtless belief in years and lives to come.) I relished my opportunity to start again, to do things differently than I had. I apprenticed a blacksmith, a scribe, a storyteller, absorbing what I could from each, then moving on to the next opportunity.

And yet, after a fresh slate of experiences only marginally different from the ones I had had before, as I laid dying I hoped that the Command would ring yet again. It did, heralding the darkness yet again, to give way to new light at the end of the… tunnel.

When I awoke yet again? I had no resignation, only determination to explore, to see and do and feel and sense, to not waste the strange Command the gods had given me; the imperative that was at once a gift and a curse. Each life had taken me further from my first life. It was impossible to look back, so I moved ever forward. I was excited.

So proceeded the first cluster of my lives, what I would later come to think of as my childhood, as the dawning of my world.

My tenth life was the harbinger of a change. The ones before it had begun to blend together, though I relished each difference, every new opportunity as it came along (the first time I was female was absolutely wild, let me tell you. They deal with some real shit.) The tenth was normal, at first, but a few weeks after my fifth naming day, I was visited by a strange, willowy creature. Tall, and too thin, limbs too long, eyes canted until they were nearly vertical. For the first few days, it remained alone on the outskirts of town, feeding itself from the plants around it, notating with a strange implement on sheets of dry fabric. It harmed nobody, and only spoke when spoken to — which was rarely. The villagers were too frightened of its strange appearance, of its odd movements and habits, its strange accent.

When I saw that nobody would go to the odd being I decided to visit on my own. I was not yet accustomed to my swiftly-growing body, and locomotion was difficult. Words, though, were easy. Every language I had learned had bits and pieces that were familiar, that related to previous ones. As a result, I began to speak earlier and earlier each lifetime. By the fourth, I had given up on the pretense of normal youth, much to the surprise of the parental figures I had had. A child of two years teaching their father to read is — was — quite the odd sight, but I had not the energy to care.

As I approached the thin being, it dawned on me just how much taller than me it stood. Even resting on its haunches on the ground, it was several arms-lengths above my head.

“I am Taren,” I said. Though the parents to this body had given it a different name, I still called myself by the name of my first life. Eventually, the parents caved in. “Who are you?”

“I am First Moonlight Striking Sunless Seas,” the thin being replied, with an unrecognizable accent. “Satisfaction has seen fit to send envoys to these new lands, so that we may learn of everything. What impels you to speak to me, human-child, when the rest are frightened? Do you not fear what you do not know?”

I smiled ruefully, aware of how out-of-place the expression was on the innocent face wearing it.

“If I feared all I do not know, I would never learn. Besides, isn’t facing one’s fears part of growing?” The conversation was enthralling. Here I had lived through nine prior lives. I had thought I had seen everything there was to see, experienced all there was to experience. It seemed the gods had more in store for the world.

The creature smiled, not unkindly. “A wise opinion from a young one such as yourself. Wise enough, perhaps, to show that you have room to grow. My party leaves for the Dappled Bloom within the day. I’m sure the presence of a youth could be missed, were that someone to be engaged in studiousness as we traveled.”

I looked back at the village with the name I hadn’t bothered to try to remember. The parents of this body had been frightened by his early speaking, by my thoughts and actions. No, they wouldn’t miss me here.

“Before I join you,” I asked, “what are you? Not human, I don’t think.”

The creature nodded.

“You surmise accurately. I am an elf. We are bastions of learning, made to spread Satisfaction’s knowledge across these lands.”

Thus began my second cluster of lives.