1 The river of souls - forgotten names

I was submerged in countless soul flames. Each of them represented a separate being, a minuscule part of the eternal river of souls. All were pulled forward by an invisible current. The river had no surface, no bottom, no borders, it seemed to be endless - at least from my limited perspective.

The happiness that came with the realization that death wasn't the end was really short-lived, quickly squashed by a wave of understanding that flooded my mind. It seemed that some knowledge about this posthumous journey was granted to everyone participating in it.

All of the souls in this place were undergoing a gradual removal of their previous life's memories and things connected to them such as personality, character, and finally the sense of self. Everything deemed unnecessary was to be cleansed until a pure, untainted soul remained, ready to be reborn.

The souls' reactions to this process varied greatly.

Some soul flames were thrashing around wildly, trying to fight against the inevitable, clinging to their fleeing memories. Some were searching in vain for the people who died before, wanting to be reunited for the last time. Some were wailing in despair, either passively flowing with the current or madly rushing forward to cut short their suffering. Some were calmly preparing for the process of cleansing. And some, bloody red ones, were laughing loudly, happy that there was no eternal damnation awaiting them… although something told me that it wasn't so simple since they were the only ones whose color was clearly distinctive from the bluish rest.

As for me, I was one of the wildly thrashing ones. Doing my best to rein in the fear and slow down the process of losing memories, or at least offer the meaningless ones first - I had a lot of those.

In my eyes, restoring a soul to its factory settings was no different from being sentenced to eternal oblivion. The reborn person wouldn't be me anymore. I had way too many unfulfilled dreams and unrealized desires to accept this cruel end without fighting. Especially after I saw that some lucky bastards were able to avoid this outcome.

Numerous smaller and bigger portals were opening all over this shapeless river, offering an alternative to the chosen few who managed to reach them on time. Most of the portals seemed to target only one specific soul before disappearing, but there were also less discriminating ones that accepted everyone around.

I didn't really care what was on the other side, everything seemed like a better choice than reaching the end of this journey. However, the problem was that I couldn't do much. I lacked both time and power to effectively fight against the current and swim towards one of the short-lasting escape routes.

All I could do was to hold onto most precious memories, count on luck, and pray that somewhere out there was a merciful god willing to rescue my poor soul.

'Any bored goddess around? A free spot in a white room? Or a king that could use an otherworldly hero? I'm...'

I wanted to add that I was an intelligent, courageous and hardworking soul, one without a flaw, one that could easily tackle the greatest challenges, but lying didn't seem like the best course of action in the current situation. There were way too many souls to pick from, and mine was by no means special. That was why I quickly started to lower expectations, hoping to attract someone's attention eventually. Those thoughts doubled as a great anchor to remind me of my core self and tripled as a means of staving off the overwhelming despair.

'I've got no problems with fighting on the 'bad guys' side. I can even start from zero, without any power, in a harsh environment… I can give up on a good looking body… I-I'm f-fine with reincarnating as a normal human, even c-changing my g-gender is acceptable!'

After lowering the bar a few more times, I was on the verge of panicking. There was no guarantee that any of those portals would respond to my internal voice, and it was getting harder and harder to keep intact my sense of self.

'Eternal gratitude, eternal servitude… damn it, I'm fine with eternal celibacy! I offer everything. Just please… someone... help me!'

To my surprise, as if responding to this desperate proposition, a massive portal opened merely two meters away. There was only one huge problem - millions of tiny flickers of blue light representing the countless souls, all rushing towards it. It looked like I wasn't the only one prepared to risk everything in exchange for salvation.

Despite best efforts at wiggling my soul flame, I barely made any progress among the sea of souls - unable to break through the wall formed by competitors. But not everyone had this problem. Some souls were clearly bigger and stronger than the others, easily pushing average ones like mine out of their way. It felt as if a giant hand pulled me back by the shoulder, which was strange since we were all composed of the same incorporeal flame. They were screaming something, but the cacophony of sounds coming from everywhere made it an impossible feat to distinguish each individual voice, and the few that somehow reached me were in an unknown language.

The big portal that loomed nearby only welcomed the stronger ones. Any other that touched it was repelled with great force. One of such rejects swished through the crowd, bounced off a few souls, and finally stopped after colliding with mine.

It didn't hurt, but felt… bizarre, as if a small girl fell right into my arms and stayed in my embrace. We somehow became connected, or merged, or joined… it was hard to find the correct way to describe this feeling. Not entirely two in one, neither two that became one, but half and a half that somehow made two.

Murky blue flame with smaller silverish blue one protruding from its side.

Thanks to the newfound mental connection we shared, I instantly realized that she was doing exactly the same thing as me. Desperately protected the core of her being while sacrificing various other memories, all in order to slow down the cleansing process. But she was about to give up after her big lucky chance turned into a spectacular rejection. Her resignation seemed to speed up the memory leakage.

Finding someone who was in a worse mental state than me helped to regain a lot of my own fortitude and made me realize just how important the proper state of mind was in this place. The fact that her soul was that of a young girl, probably half my own age, also played a significant role.

'Don't give up!' I sent her a mental shout, hoping that she understood my thoughts.

'...?!'

'Throw away your fear and despair, feed them to the river together with other negative thoughts. Get rid of them and let me help to regain clarity!' It wasn't as easy as I made it sound, but this message was filled with additional wordless explanation and support.

It was enough to rekindle her resistance.

I helped to achieve a superficially calm state of mind and reinforce her mind's defenses against the external influence. Then she started probing around the outer layers of my mind, the same way I did inside hers.

It was a bit ticklish.

'Who…' She didn't finish this question, realizing that neither of us could answer it anymore. No matter how much we wanted to protect some precious things like our names, they were already gone by the time we regained consciousness inside the river of souls. However, we could still focus on retaining the most fundamental sense of self.

'Why…, how...? I see.' As soon as she asked, I provided the answers by using the connection between our souls. It was a lot faster compared to communicating with inner voices but lacked in sharpness and felt unnatural. 'Can I?' A lot of mental content was packed within those two words.

She politely asked for permission to probe further inside my mind and in exchange offered the access to the deeper parts of hers. There were two reasons why she decided on this approach. One, such permission wasn't even required, it was just a mere courtesy. She was going to scan my mind in depth with or without it, unwilling to cooperate with a random suspicious soul before checking it for potential sources of danger. Nevertheless, she still found it proper to notice me about it first. Two, it was done in order to see if this would somehow help us to resist the cleansing influence.

'Go on.' I gave her clear permission, and we began investigating each other.

A lot of memories connected with places we came from were already gone. Still, my remaining ones were enough to give her a slight rush of panic interwoven with amazement and disbelief when she realized that my soul originated from a completely different world than hers - one without magic, one a lot more technologically advanced, and one where only humans lived.

That was also the moment when she finally took notice of the race I used to be a member of and sent me a deep wave of repulsion mixed with anger. In the world she came from, silver elves and humans were bitter enemies. On top of that, the former were losing.

The soul link between us began to tremble significantly, it was connected with a sudden premonition that severing it entirely would be a very foolish choice. Each of us made a quick decision to avoid that outcome if possible.

Luckily, due to the incredible sights she kept discovering in my memories, she managed to convince herself that my previous race was an entirely different one, not even slightly connected to the humans from her world. She HAD to believe that it was a different race. Because for her, the mere thought of her noble soul being half merged with one of those 'worthless dirty human trashes' was inexcusable.

I also learned a few things about her origin and not only. The proud elven girl never saw me as her equal, and now the chasm between us was a little wider.

It was also caused by the fact that after sending me numerous images of great forests from her childhood, beautiful elven cities in which she grew up, and wonders of nature that took her breath, she still failed to obtain a truly amazed, full of disbelief reaction from my side. It might have been a different story if I saw them in person, but in this format, it wasn't much different to admiring screenshots from various games.

'You really think souls have races?' I sent her a direct thought message to change the topic since she stubbornly kept flooding my mind with something like her personal collection of national geographic pictures of the year.

'Can't help it. But don't worry, I think your race is an equivalent of common elves from my world. There's no way those human barbarians could achieve so much. By the way… what's national geographic?'

She knew that I found her reaction highly racist, but dismissed this accusation with a thought that it wasn't something that a person who lived in a world with only one dominant race could possibly understand.

There was no point in arguing, so I wanted to move on and answer the letter part of her question… but I was stopped by the nature of this place. One second of inattention was enough to make us forget about whatever it was she asked about. The overly familiar sensation that a memory which was here just a moment ago slipped through our fingers was a really nasty one. Neither of us knew anymore if it was an important or a worthless one, and this time it hit her stronger than me.

'Calm down, it's ok.' As soon as I felt that she was on the verge of panicking I began helping to refocus her mind. 'Don't worry about it, instead, put more effort into wiggling your soul flame. Don't make me do all the work.'

'Hah! I stopped only for a moment, and we are already flowing with the current just like the rest. Your work ain't worth much... but thank you…'

When one of us was close to losing against the overwhelming feelings of terror and hopelessness, the other helped to calm down and purge the negative emotions. It wasn't the best solution, but it worked... for now.

Thanks to the combined efforts of our soul flames we managed to slow down our posthumous journey significantly. Two or three times we even broke through an incoming wall of souls, not allowing them to push us down the river. That bought us some extra time, now we only needed a convenient portal to open nearby.