They say that when a person dies, their entire life flashes before their eyes. For me, it is very nearly the opposite. When I die, darkness advances and sound abandons me. Then comes the flash. It splits the void like lightning behind closed eyes. Thousands of years surge from some hidden chamber of my mind and spill across my consciousness all at once.

I see all of the lives I have lived, all of the times I have died. It all comes upon me like a great and powerful wave that surges through my being. Suddenly I am no longer just the person whom I was. I am still the same man, but also something different. It is not as though another life enters me. Rather, a door I never noticed swings inward. Beyond it waits a room that has always belonged to me. Once I glimpse what lies inside, I can never close it again.

Compelled by an irresistible force to look inside, I am unable to look away. Wish as I might, I cannot erase or suppress the memories once I have peered beyond this veil. Something new, yet very old lives within me from that point forward, not just a part of me, rather still me. I am the same man but I am changed, awakened, illuminated. The beautiful caterpillar emerges a hideous rank butterfly.

It happened to me again on a bright morning in a small village in Eastern Anatolia. I was with a crowd of angry villagers, their voices chattering excitedly in a shallow field behind a house. I could hear a woman sobbing in the road. Circling her I saw several other women of the village, offering their comfort and consolation and wiping away her tears with their brightly colored kerchiefs. While in the narrow ditch before me lies a man, covered in blood with a pitchfork sticking out of his chest.

Something about the corpse troubled me. The angle of the jaw. The shape of the hands. A familiar scar crossing the left eyebrow. I found myself staring longer than seemed proper.

Then recognition struck with such force that my knees nearly buckled.

I was looking at the body I had worn before dawn. 

It was very disorienting at first as I had never experienced seeing my previous incarnate vessel upon my sudden reawakening. I found myself nearly overwhelmed and had to step back from the crowd for a moment to better orient myself.

Looking at my hands was comforting and helped me steady my thoughts which were like a stream rushing through me. There was little time to collect myself, however, as a few men from the small angry mob turned to me and directed me to fetch a cart to haul away the body with. This cart was inside a small shed behind the church toward the center of the village. Nodding in agreement I walked down the single narrow stone street running through the middle of the village.

Arriving at the church I  found a bulky iron lock affixed to a rusted hatch across the shed door. IBefore I even knew what I was searching for, my fingers found a rusted iron key in the folds of my robe.

The sight of it filled me with certainty I could not explain.

I knew exactly how much pressure the lock required.

I knew the little twist and wiggle needed to free the stubborn mechanism.

I knew these things before I knew who I was. 

I twisted the key, giving it a familiar little wiggle imprinted into muscle memory and the hasp clicked open. Pulling the door open I stood inside among the various tools of an undertaker. A large cart with a flat wooden bottom and two aged pine planks on either side rested in the dark.

When I returned to the field where the body was lying, two men yanked out the pitchfork with a squelching sound. They hoisted the body up by its arms and legs and dropped it onto the worn platform of the cart.

I turned and wheeled the body back to the church until told what to do with it. This was the body of an invader who snuck into the village and brutally killed someone. In their house under cover of the night. It was not to be interred with a blessing from the priest. Bodies like these are attached to a wooden stake and burned in the square where the people of the village could gather. They would bring all manner of spoiled foods and manure to fling angrily at the body as it was catching flame. It was important to the villagers to vent some of their anger. Chasing the intruder to hell, hurling insults and pelting it with manure the whole way.

That night at the burning, I saw her again. She was in the crowd clutching a handkerchief and sobbing. A few women wearing dark scarves lingered near her offered their comfort and whispered prayers. I stood far to the back, where I had a good view of her. Angry villagers were shouting and hurling objects at the body upon the stake as the flames beneath it grew higher, eventually consuming it with a crackle like meat turning on a spit.

While it was certainly disorienting to watch the burning of the body my own consciousness had just inhabited mere hours ago, I could not take my eyes off the crying woman for whom I still felt a deep and inaccessible love. A great sadness consumed me as I gazed transfixed at the scene. 

The villagers shouted at the wrong man.

Every curse struck the wrong face.

Every handful of dung, every stone, every insult belonged to me.

The blacksmith's son had awakened only that morning. He had never slit a shepherd's throat. He had never crept through a window with murder in his heart.

Those sins were mine.

Yet I stood among the crowd untouched while another body burned in my place.

I wept for him, and I wept for my beloved Nazil. The young man I was now who would not have much of a life ahead of him, the hideous immortal beast I embody had awakened within him. I wept for myself, that I could not end this life no matter how many bodies I dispatched. What a cruel and perverted sense of justice the universe must have!

The body had burned enough to slide off the stake, collapsing in a smoldering heap upon the burning coals beneath it. After all of the villagers had gone home to their beds and the shouting had subsided, I snuck away again into the fields around the village. I wandered around through the night picking an enormous arrangement of wildflowers by the light of the pale moon. I left the bouquet on the stoop of my love’s house, with a simple note that read “May the light always shine upon you from the heavens and bless you with the many kisses of God’s angels. Know that love conquers all and that his love for you was an eternal flame which even death is unable to quench.”

As the sun rose in the east, I was upon my horse and riding. The white-capped peaks of the Pambak mountains shrinking in the distance behind me. The countryside was constantly under siege from barbarians and swelling armies dotting the roads and hills. Yet somehow no trouble befell me on my journey. 

No brigand troubled me. No patrol challenged me. No wolf crossed my path.

Looking back now, I find that fact unsettling. The roads swarmed with soldiers that season, yet somehow every danger stepped aside before I arrived. By dusk I stood once more before the mouth of the cave.

Its darkness waited for me as though it had known the exact hour of my return.

Hidden Journals of the Shining One

• entry dated 18 July 1427