14. One life.

His earliest lives were vague and blurred, even to the clear sight he now possessed. It had been a matter of awareness. Though he had the faculties to recall every event of every life, to compare and correlate them, to examine neutrally how there were lessons he failed to learn life after life (all this irrelevant now, and unimportant, because he had arrived where he was, regardless of the path and the steps), awareness had eluded some of his past forms. Their memories were streaks of fear and agitation, each with its ocean of feelings unconnected to those of the others, though interwoven.

In some lives he had been a monster, a predator. In others ostensibly gentle, but no less destructive. In some lives hot metal had run through his veins, in others he had spent years within four sets of walls, imprisoned.

As he readied himself to speak, one life suggested itself, drew itself into his memory.

He had been beautiful in that life too: very beautiful.