I find myself adrift in the darkness, wondering what had happened. My memory is fuzzy, but I seem to recall cruising down I-17 with my buddy Kyle and his little sister Eliza who had tagged along with them. And then... a car was flying through the air, and...

That was it. And now, it's just this endless dark.

Am I... dead?

'Dead? Who said they were dead?'

Huh? What was that voice?

'Is someone there? What is this?'

No, it feels like it's in my head. Just a thought. But...

'A thought? In my head? But no, it feels like someone else is thinking for me.'

Yes, exactly. That's the problem. And it feels like it's someone else.

...

The source of the intrusive thoughts has gone silent, but now I feel foreign emotions flooding into my mind. A sort of... hesitation and confusion. Actually, I really can't tell if these are my own emotions or if they are coming from the other.

Perhaps we are both feeling the same thing? It does feel a little more like a distorted reflection of my own chaotic and confused emotions alright. This is... definitely weird.

...

I try to speak and ask out loud who it is, but no words come out of my mouth. Actually, do I even have a mouth? Maybe thought is the only way we can communicate.

'Who... what are you? You are... incredibly powerful. Why are you scared of me?' It asks.

'What? Scared? Am I scared?'

'Maybe... am I the one who's scared?' The other voice asked.

'I can't tell. It seemed like you were scared, but this situation really is scary for me as well. It's strange having another voice in my head... anyway, what did you mean by me being powerful?'

'You have a l lot of power, I can tell,' The voice said. 'Your power is similar to a... a... what? I can't remember. Wait... why can't I remember? I... I don't remember... the Agarath. I remember the Agarath, but that's... what else is in the Agarath?'

Agarath? As the other voice said the word, I somehow understood it was the world it had come from. It didn't seem like it was human, or that it had come from Earth. Some of it's memories of the Agarath flowed into my mind. It seemed very different from Earth. Most curiously, it seemed like the thing talking to me had the ability to pass through solid rock as though it was air. Was I talking to some kind of spiritual entity right now? Also, it seemed like it lived completely inside of the ground. If there was a surface to the world it was remembering, it seemed like it had never gone up there. Or rather, if it had, it doesn't seem to remember.

'It's alright, you don't have to push yourself to remember,' I said.

'...'

Oh. Why did it go silent again?

'I'm sorry.'

'Sorry? For what?'

'I... believe I am supposed to be respectful toward beings of power like you.'

There it was again. Talking about me being powerful. Since I can sort of feel what this other voice is feeling, I just decide to skip over all this nonsense and see if I can read it directly out of their mind.

It seems like the two of us are somehow sharing a mind. So, reading the other one's mind is a little bit like trying to remember something I should already know. It's actually a little disconcerting. I'm suddenly remembering several things I've never done before.

Soon enough, I have the information and I immediately stop trying to gaze into the other one's memories. I don't want to experience that longer than I have to.

As for this "me being more powerful than him" business, there was simply no way I could write it off as some kind of mistake once I knew his basis for saying this. In his apparently very spiritual world, sensing the relative difference in spiritual power between one being and another was as easy as comparing the size of one object to another on Earth. Now knowing what to look for, I could easily "see" the difference between him and me from a spiritual perspective. It was like the difference between an Elephant and an Ant. About the only reason I didn't notice before was because, in addition to having no idea what to look for, his spiritual presence was just so small compared to mine.

This was definitely weird. I remember back to some reincarnation stories in a bit of bitter and sarcastic humor. In a lot of those stories, people wind up meeting a god when they die. In my case though, I encounter this voice that is so under-powered that I might as well be the god in comparison.

'I'm sorry,' the voice said in a rather servile tone.

'No need to be sorry, guy. I'm not planning on hurting you or anything.'

But still... what IS this? Am I really dead? What about this other voice? Have I just been reborn in his world and he stumbled across me? Or is it something else? Is he also dead? There's too much I don't know.

'Am I dead?' the voice asks itself thoughtfully after I bring up the idea. 'I... do not think this is the Agarath,' it says.

'So, it is not your world then. But, if it's not, then what is it?

'It is not your world. You have a lot more memories than I do, it is pretty easy to see it is not your world," the voice says.

'Maybe it's a dream?' I ponder. Somehow, even as I suggest it, I am already strongly doubting this could be a dream. And, knowing the other voice can easily pick up on my stray thoughts just as I can theirs, I don't bother voicing that doubt.

A short time later, I feel myself bump into something. It feels... soft somehow, and I simply bounce off of it without resistance.

What was that?

... I set the presence of the other entity aside as I wrack my brain to figure out what happened.

'...' I can also feel the other one pondering. While no words are consciously exchanged, I can feel our shared confusion and drive to figure out what just happened bouncing between the two of us so quickly it's impossible to tell who's the instigator and receiver of any one thought.

'That was... strange,' the other one said. 'I have never... wait, but you have!'

Despite the broken sentences, the strange mental connection we had allowed me to know exactly what the voice was trying to communicate.

'No, I don't think I have ever felt something like that before,' I denied his assertions.

'No, a body!' the other one persisted, this time seeming completely sure of what it was saying. 'It was a feeling you can only feel if you have a body! I don't think I've had one before, but you have, and now... we do!'

Wait, he's right! I... or is it we? We have a body? Oh no! No, I know exactly what this is! I felt that warm and squishy thing I bounced off of, and it feels like I must be floating in a fluid environment! So, my earlier thoughts about reincarnation really WERE true after all!

'We are a baby?' the voice asked.

'Yes, it seems that way,' I replied.

But why... it seems like both of us are in the same body. What is going on here?

'I'm sorry,' the voice says again.

'Seriously? Stop apologizing. I'm not mad or anything,' I say to the voice.

It's just confusing more than anything. Why was I reborn with two spirits in the same body? I mean, it does at least give me something to occupy my mind as I'm here in my mother's womb. It also keeps my mind a little active as I try to think about these things.

I find myself bouncing off the wall again, and then the other side. The other side seemed really close that time. That's strange. I could swear I just drifted through the fluid environment the last time. But now, the other side seemed really close.

'What is going on?' I wonder

In the time it took me to relay that one thought, I hit the wall several more times in rapid succession, until finally the bouncing turned into me not moving at all as the space inside was so cramped I couldn't even move and the walls were firmly holding me in place.

'It's getting smaller? Or...'

'No, we are definitely getting bigger,' I said. In the time it took us to have this exchange, the walls of my mother's uterus kept becoming tighter. I was now cramped against the walls of flesh.

'We are growing really fast?' the voice asked.

'Maybe, or maybe our thinking is just really slow right now,' I thought.

That last exchange seemed a little strange though. It was getting a little harder to distinguish the big voice from my own. Wait, since when was it the big voice? I've never thought of the other one like that before. But... oh no!

'Which one of us is which?' one of us asked.

'I... am not so sure anymore,' one of us replied. I swear that this time it felt like both of them were me... just me talking to myself. Well, maybe it was better that we were fading into each other... wait, is that what's really happening? As soon as I had the thought,  I knew it seemed somehow correct.

As I searched back in my memories, I found I had far clearer memories of the Agarath than when I first tried upon meeting with the 'big voice' as one side of me had once thought of the other. I remembered more about who that side of me was. I was a spiritual creature with absolute command over the elemental energies around me. Those outside the Agarath referred to us as 'gnomes,' the spiritual entities of the earth element. And as for the Agarath, that was the elemental plain of earth. Funnily enough, Earth is also the name of the world the other side of me is from.

For that side of me, I could still very clearly remember Earth. I had come to remember my life and death on Earth in a lot more detail as I thought about things. My name on Earth was Jole Walker. As for how I died, I was driving my friend Kyle and his little sister home from school. I had a Honda Prelude with a K20 swap. My dad was a mechanic, and the vehicle was a reconstructed title, so I managed to get a pretty sweet ride for cheap and was the envy of half the guys at school.

I'd even installed the sound system myself at dad's insistence. Said I needed to put in some work on my own car. It was a pretty powerful system too. Kyle definitely enjoyed blaring it out as we traveled down the interstate. His sister Elizabeth was not such a fan. She had her hands clamped firmly over her ears. I remembered the two started yelling about it, screaming at the top of their lungs in order to be heard over the loud music. I'd turned to yell at them to both settle down, and that was exactly when someone got into a wreck in front of me.

And then... it was all black. I could piece together what must have happened from there. Everyone in front of me must have stomped on their breaks at the same time, and I missed the cue to follow suit. I must have slammed into the guy in front of me, and whatever happened after that is the reason I've ended up here.

As for how my gnome side died... I still couldn't really remember that. They must have died in order to wind up here... or, maybe since he was a purely spiritual entity, it could be possible he could wind up here without dying? It seemed like that could be the case. Was it even possible for a gnome to die? I think it is possible for us to be destroyed, but as spiritual entities, would it actually be possible for us to reincarnate after death in that manner?

In the end, I decided it was likely my gnome side had not died at all. But then, how had that side of me wound up in this body if I hadn't died?

That's a mystery I'd never really found the answer to. But, at some point, the walls of my mother's uterus had started contracting, and it felt like I was being pushed out of a very narrow tube. Looks like it's time to be born.