The Sleep
Every life you have ever lived is still being lived right now, by a version of you who is asleep and dreaming that life forward.
The rule
You are not the latest entry in a line of past lives. You are simply the one who is currently awake. Your other selves are not behind you in time. They are beside you, in sleep.
When you dream, you drift close to one of those sleeping selves. Now and then, two of you surface into the same dream at once and recognize each other. People call that a past-life memory. It isn’t memory. It is contact.
Nothing here is past. Every life is still being dreamed forward by a self who never woke from it.
The other shore
The place where the sleeping selves lie is the Sundered Reach. The waking world, where you live, is the other shore. The Trees of Ebbs stand between them and hold them apart.
Lives in every direction
The sleeping selves don’t only dream the lives you would call past. They dream lives in the past, the present and the future, side by side and all at once, connected through the Reach. One person might have fifty selves running across hundreds of years.
The soul
One soul runs through all of a person’s lives. It grows, it falters, and it answers whatever each life throws at it. Taken together, that is the test: the true version of who you are.
Memories are the lifeblood of a soul. A soul robbed of its memories disappears, and because one soul runs through every life, that loss spreads into all of them at once: past, present and future. In a world where no life is ever past, this is the one true death.
The auto-correct
Seeing a monster and recognizing a parallel self are the same act of perception, and nearly every waking mind edits both out as they happen. The monsters are not hidden. You are deleting them. People whose auto-correct has failed see across the membrane; they are called the Broken.