About 32,000 B.C.E.

Ice crystals formed in my nostrils with every panting breath, tingling my nasal cavity. I swaddled the damp Megaloceros hide around my body as I struggled against the cold wind. The tattered furs wrapped around my feet supplied little warmth to my numb extremities. The wind bit at my flesh like an undead wolf sinking its bitter teeth through my withered muscle.

But none of that mattered anymore. I had to find her. She was the only thing that meant anything to me right now. The memory of her skin pressed against mine warded off the hungry cold. My memory is vivid. The simple language the tribe used failed to express this. It had been that way in all of my lives. Everytime I die, I’m reborn again with the memory of all my past lives haunting me. Nobody else seemed to remember their past lives, but I did.

And so did she. My beautiful Anki. I couldn’t help but pull my cracked lips into a smile as I thought about her.

“Do you remember the warmth?” I’d asked the night she died while we took shelter from a storm together.

“Yes,” Anki replied, “The light of the fire in the sky.”

Our whispers seemed to linger in the cave as we lay on the hard, icy stone, facing each other. Her soft skin shivered against me as we embraced, sharing our inner heat. I held the four remaining fingers on my right hand on the side of her head, pushing her tangled black hair back from her once plump face.

There had been sadness in Anki’s eyes since our own child died several full moons earlier. Our child had been cursed, weak and finicky about her food. It hadn’t taken long for her to succumb to the harsh gods of this cold wasteland. But Anki had been too exhausted to even feel that loss anymore.

The tribe huddled around the meager fire, picking the last scraps of cold meat off our six day old kill. Two more of the children had died that day, their tiny bodies buried as deep as we could dig in the frozen ground. The melancholy of the loss was already teetering back toward fear as our chief pleaded with the spirits for the storm to dissipate, his desperate chants drowned out by the shrieking wind. I didn’t quite understand this fear, as I knew that those children had been reborn again, probably somewhere warmer. I would welcome death if it wouldn’t take me away from Anki.

“We will go there again,” I said, “that is where the tribe should head.”

“It’s gone,” she said, keeping her foggy gaze on me, “the fire in the sky is dying.”

“I was just there in my last life,” I said, making sure to keep rubbing my hands over her, “the water is fickle, but there is plenty to eat.”

Anki said nothing for a time, her eyes clouding over further. I listened to the chief plead to the gods in vain, the wind only seeming to pelt the entrance to the cave even harder. The embers of the fire grew dim, reflecting weakly off Anki’s cold sweat. I shook her body, trying to keep her from moving on.

“I was there long ago as an eagle,” Anki whispered, “I flew over the rivers and saw the land without snow,” she took in a laborious breath, “But the spirits in the sky no longer feed their fires. We’re left with the cold of night.”

“You were alive as an eagle?” I asked, “that’s amazing!”

“Yes,” Anki said with a weak smile, “but I’m afraid of what I will live as next,” the smile faded, “I was not able to keep our daughter alive.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, leaning so close to her that my lips were touching her cheek, keeping my hand rubbing over her arm, “the spirits saw fit to abandon her. She is now living somewhere warm with new parents, wearing her beautiful dark skin and eating so much food.”

Anki smiled again, “you’re right,” she said, “I would love to see the people with beautiful dark skin that you talk about.”

“Then we will see them!” I smiled back, “and we will see our daughter again. We will go to sleep every night with our bellies full. We will feel the warmth of the fire in the sky on our skin.”

Anki fell asleep that night with a smile on her face in my arms. Her body became cold in my embrace, her weak smirk permanently etched in her face as she stole away my warmth. But I was happy to know that her suffering was over. She was surely born again with the tribes I’d known in the warmth. I actually felt excited to get to see her in the beautiful dark skin of the people in the warmth.

The tribe had trusted me on many things, but they didn’t believe me about the warmer lands. I told them I knew how to get there. The sun flew across the sky in a different position there. The way we had been walking, the sun was getting lower in the sky. I knew we had to turn back to get to the warmth, but the chieftain had received a vision that there was more food in the direction we were going.

So I left them.

At this point, walking with the freezing wind at my back, my feet numb, my stomach empty, alone and miserable, I welcomed the short respite of death. Becoming a child once again, receiving warmth and food from a mother, and hopefully being born somewhere that wasn’t forsaken by the spirits, was more of a goal now than actually walking anywhere.

A sense of euphoria seemed to come over me as the cold overwhelmed my inner heat. The image of Anki’s dead smile swam through my delirious head. The wind began to sound distant, like it was echoing through a tunnel. I barely noticed the dark shapes to my sides and my peripheral vision blurred into the gray of the sky. They followed for some time, watching me with curiosity until I fell to my knees, still smiling, no energy left to even shiver.

Hands grabbed violently at my limbs, but the feeling was happening to someone else. People were talking in a garbled, nasal...Continue Reading