Synopsis

While taking my granddaughter to get some ice cream after practice one day, I died. It wasn’t just any death either. I died after selling my soul to a demon calling herself a goddess when she promised to repair my granddaughter's broken neck.

Now, I find myself in the womb, having been apparently reincarnated. But, it turns out I am not born a human, I am not born on Earth, and I am not born alone. I am as a grey elf, a hated outcast race in a world where magic exists. And, I was also born a twin. My twin sister is the incarnation of the very demon/goddess who I bargained with to save my granddaughter.

(This is a hard reboot of Second Life as the Sister of a Goddess.)

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Reincarnation. An idea several people like to entertain. It is the idea that when you die you are reborn and receive a second chance at life. With such an attractive idea, it is no wonder it is so intoxicating to believe in it.

There are several among the people who believe in reincarnation who claim to remember their past lives. These claims, however, seem somewhat dubious at best. One of the most damning things is the fact that nearly all of them claim to have been the assistants or maids of various famous people throughout history. You don’t really see anyone saying they were a ditch digger in south-Saharan Africa before they were introduced to the Gregorian calendar. Which is, statistically, the kind of job the majority of people should have held compared to being servants to historically significant people.

Perhaps more believable are the ones who claim to have been house pets in their past lives. After all, there is no reason t assume that you would always be a human. The idea of animal reincarnation is quite common among the aboriginal peoples of North America. It is quite important to several of their cultures as a matter of fact.

Perhaps the most surprising group to have entertained the idea of reincarnation though would be the Catholic Church. They are well known for teaching that when you die your soul either goes to heaven or hell depending on whether or not your soul has been saved from sin. The very idea they would entertain the idea of reincarnation seems rather incongruous, but it is true. In the middle ages, people took issue with the concept of hell. They asked, as many atheists do now, why such a good and caring god would condemn someone the likes of Ghandi to hell just because he did not accept Christ.

The Church needed an answer, and the answer they gave was “Purgatory.” The top and most mild among the levels of hell. Purgatory was a land where the only torture was the absence of god. Aside from this, people would merely wander the lands, and one day they would receive a second chance at life as they are reborn back onto the Earth.

There are several people who believe in reincarnation. However, reincarnation is often discredited by some of it’s most fervent believers by the incredible stories they tell. But, ultimately, the greatest sin of the reincarnation theory is that it is completely unfalsifiable. There is no way to test whether or not it’s real, and no positive evidence has been offered to suggest it is true.

I suppose using that to discount the idea of reincarnation is somewhat hypocritical of me as one who believes in God though. This is the exact same argument Atheists use to dismiss God after all. But, despite being a believer, I have never been one to accept even all the religious claims of my own religion at face value.

Ultimately, I’d never really considered reincarnation in all that serious of terms. But now, in my current situation, the topic has become completely unavoidable. Why you ask? Well, let me tell you a little bit about it.

Perhaps I should start off with the most obvious point. I died. Yes, I died, and now I am in a fairly warm and cozy fluid environment. No matter how much I doubted reincarnation, it becomes pretty hard to deny when you experience a feeling of being inside of the womb once again after having very clear memories of meeting an unavoidable end.

But, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The manner in which I died is a rather incredible story in and of itself. You see, I had been taking my granddaughter home after practice in the kid’s class. I am an instructor at a martial arts studio, you see? My grandson had left her in my care for the weekend, and dropped her off at my class with the expectation I would take her home after I had finished with it. She was also a student in the class, as was my son before her. So, the arrangement worked out quite well.

After class, I decided to go buy her an ice cream at a local ice cream parlor I liked. Along the way though, I crashed the car. Or rather, I got involved in a several car pile-up. I can’t really remember what happened, but it was rather chaotic.

The car crash isn’t what killed me though. That would have made things too simple for this to be a worthwhile story to tell. No, despite the extensive damage to my car, I was just fine after the crash. The airbag did it’s job, and I had gone through decades of being thrown to the ground repeatedly in a soft-fist style martial art. That has a way of strengthening your organs against impact, so the damage to me was pretty much negligible.

No, the real problem was what had happened to my granddaughter. I had wanted to spoil her for this trip. I knew the importance of using a car seat for such a small child, but I did not seriously think we would crash in just this short drive. The airbag is not safe for a child her age. She survived, but her neck was almost certainly broken. She would be paralyzed for the rest of her life, and all of it was my fault.

It was in this moment of weakness that a demon appeared to me. She called herself a goddess, but everything from her smooth talking offer to let me undo my terrible mistake and take the consequences onto myself to the gruesome manner in which she carried out her part of the contract spoke to her being a creature of darkness.

I was quite certain in my conclusion of her being a demon. I went into it fully knowing I was selling my soul in a Faustian bargain. However, if it was to undo my terrible mistake, I would gladly give my granddaughter's life back to her in exchange for my own soul.

When I had agreed, the self-proclaimed goddess insisted that I do my part. She wanted me to take an assertive action as part of this bargain. She seemed very interested in some kind of meditation I did as part of my martial art. Said my meditation was actually the reason why she was making me this offer in the first place. It was a meditation that involved envisioning my spirit opening like a river, forcing my spiritual energy out of my own body in order to hollow myself out and then receive energy from heaven to replace the energy that had left. It was a meditation that involved active prayer and strong visualization. The energy of heaven did not like to remain static. It liked to flow through a person. It would not enter a person without a path of escape.

Several versions of this meditation exist throughout the world. Most call for envisioning the energy of heaven flowing out of you and over the Earth to touch the other people around you. However, my martial style involves the visualization of the four classical Greek elements, as well as the concept of a void for a fifth element, as things to focus on while you are training. As I progressed through my meditative practices, I inevitably wound up combining these two meditations and envisioned the energy of heaven leaving out into a void. In concept, it seemed wrong. But, in practice, I felt somehow assured and empowered by this meditation. My movements in training were always at their best while using my meditation in this form.

This demon/goddess had insisted that my part of the bargain was to begin performing this meditation and continue doing so until the moment of my death, which she assured me was necessary in order to save my granddaughter. As soon as I got fully into my meditation, as soon as I could feel the flow of energy going through me hit it’s highest point, she bit my neck like a vampire. I was shocked as I felt the gushing blood soak my shoulder, and I looked to the beautiful woman who claimed to be a goddess take on the appearance of the demon I’d known her to be from the beginning as her image was completely transformed by the blood oozing down her mouth.

“Keep up your meditation.” She commanded me as she made eye contact and then spat the blood she’d just sucked from my neck into her hands. After this, she brought her hand to my granddaughter's lips and fed her my blood. The reaction was almost instant. She stirred, and I saw her hand lift up to rub the dripping liquid from her chin and cheeks as she looked over to me. The last thing I heard before my consciousness faded were the sounds of my distressed granddaughter yelling out to her bleeding grandfather. The touch of her hand as she tried to shake me in order to keep me awake was the most wonderful feeling in the world, and I died content that the demon had held up her end of the bargain.

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And that brings me to now. Waiting in the womb to be born, and with nothing to do except to relive my final moments as I wonder how my granddaughter got on after my death. It is a strange experience, being in the womb. Especially as someone who roughly knows the timeline for fetal development. I can hear my mother’s heartbeat, so that means I must have crossed the 16 to 20 week line in my development. For that to be the case, I must have not been effectively asleep for almost the entirety of the first trimester of my new existence.

Well, I suppose that makes sense. My brain had to develop enough to think before I could be aware and conscious. And, I guess that the ability to hear sound would come up before consciousness. By how much though?

I felt something hit me. I flailed about blindly and hit back, trying to sweep away whatever it was. I felt the rubbery membrane of my own placenta. Something from outside of the placenta hit it, and it felt like… a hand? I kept feeling around clumsily in the dark, and I felt another body about the same size as mine outside of the thin membrane of the placenta. At my back was the far more thick walls that could only be the wall of the uterus.

Things were starting to add up now. It seems like, for this life, I’m going to be a twin. That’s certainly good to know, it will be pleasant having a built-in friend so early in my new life. Also, judging by the fact that there’s still enough room between the two of us to have some wiggle room, I suppose we must still be in the second trimester.

This rose some interesting questions. Chief among them is how it is that I have the clarity to form a conscious thought if I am so short along in my development? Shouldn’t my brain not even be capable of processing this information? Well, I’m sure there must be something responsible. The proof is in the pudding after all. The mere fact that I’m able to think this clearly means there simply must be something allowing it to work out that way. Working out exactly what it is would just be a fun side-project at this point, and only one of many things for me to be concerned about. Perhaps a better concern would be how I’m supposed to act in my new life as a baby who has the memories of a 60 year old former male nurse and martial arts instructor.