||A  fter a span of time that may have been moments or years, I recognize that I am standing in a field on a path that leads into a lush green forest. I am wearing a robe and cloak of the same green colours. The heavy oak staff in my right arm is a head taller than me, and it is engraved with symbols that I recognize vaguely. My left hand is tied behind my back, clasping another arm.

Suddenly I am aware of a female presence in this place that is linked to my own. I open my mind to hers and I can see through her eyes. Before me is a deep lake that stretches out beyond the horizon. Her clothing matches her view: a robe that is a collage of blues varying from vibrant to almost black. Around her neck is a silver chain at the end of which hangs a clear white crystal that seems to glow just a little.

Again I am shocked into the awareness of others. Behind me are two other left arms tied together, locked into the centre as if we four were one entity. I glance into the mind at my left and see the image of a red mountain covered in storm-clouds through the anxious mind of a young warrior. To my right I see a field of grain through the eyes of an aged priest.

The others in this strange circle are as bewildered at this experience as I am. I suggest that we wait a few moments before acting. Everyone agrees that we should share our thoughts and speculations.

A part of me instinctively knows why I am here. I have brief memories of different lives in different times and places. Hundreds of these fragments, some of them overlapping in multiple ways, are stored somehow in my memory, though I can't quite connect them on an intellectual level. But through them all runs a feeling of contained wrath.

I can remember being a Pharaoh of great power, the first in one of too many dynasties that was plagued by violence. I had barely passed my thirteenth birthday when I was assassinated by a jealous relative. I was a Roman slave, a plaything in a palace of the gods. Another boy-king toyed with me before doing away with my head. And then I remember long ago that I was a boy living with strange creatures. I was like them - part animal, part man - slowly reaching for the future. To the Mayans I was one of their many virgin sacrifices to a god of blood. I remember the anger as I was pushed to my painful death. Twice I was killed in the womb for such a holy cause. Again I remember the distant past, hunting for food for the tribe, dying before making my first kill. The trail of blood, let by a stray arrow, marked my last steps.

Each of my companions is silent, though I know that they are also searching their souls for a clue to this existence. I search through the fragments and suddenly my female companion is exclaiming that we are sharing a memory. I recognize her as a wife of mine from sometime during a life in Greece. Another as a friend in a world I cannot begin to describe.

Each of the others appears again and again, sometimes even all at once, in my own memories and theirs. We have been associated with each other before. At least we know now that we can trust each other. But our moments not shared seem to have clues as to why we four are together here.

My female companion chooses to call herself Emer after a word she says sounds like the ocean. I choose the name Merlin because of a moment remembered in a forest long ago. The young man to my left says his name is Rithnok, a word for a warrior in a language as old as the earth. The old man on my right calls himself Zero, telling us that nothing was better than anything.

A word suddenly comes out of my mouth, "condemned," followed by Emer's, "to live." Another word from the youth, "training," and then the old man's, "not punishment."

And with that we begin to follow the path into the forest, moving somehow as if one being, neither of us ever changing the cardinal direction which we faced. Our path was guided collectively, each step a conscious decision in our minds. We thought as one, though our minds were separate and our eyes our own.

We come upon a clearing in the forest where a beautiful chestnut horse is lazily chewing on the leaves of the tree it is tied to. On its back is a tanned saddlebag that appears to be full of papers and aged books. Rithnok cries out. I reach into his mind and discover that he was blinded by an image of an old man with grey hair and the eyes of a wizard. Emer and Zero and I examine the memory as if it were a captured moment of time. None of us recognize the old man, but it is an easy guess that he might be the owner of the horse.

There is a sudden change in the air, a feeling of deja-vu, when Emer notices that he is standing beside us. The wizard is speaking to us in a language that we are forced to understand through Zero, who is the only one of us who knows it. The sensation was something like listening to a song underwater. Since we all used Zero's language filter, each of us comprehended the message identically. Little interpretation was required, for the bulk of the message was carried in the fine-tuned emotions of the old priest. The message was simple and explained much: that we were to act as the four elements, the eternal faces of fate, and that we were to train as a group; we would meet again in the future in human bodies on Earth to reestablish the respect that man once had for the Infinite.

Blood Conventional Chaos