[Episode 168024] [Episode 168024]For the sixth time in two days, Saotome Ranma awoke drenched in cold sweat. He'd lived with recurring nightmares for years - Neko-ken training will do that - but the ones he'd been having lately were new, and to put it mildly a lot more frightening than any mere c-c-cat.
Every time he went to sleep, he'd be dreaming of a different lifetime - from beginning to end - and those ends were nearly uniformly gruesome. In the first dream, he'd been living as a farmer somewhere, married to a girl he didn't know in real life but would likely recognize immediately if he ever laid eyes on her. They'd had three kids, and Ranma had been teaching them a little of the swordwork he'd learned in the war when the farm was raided by large... well humanoid was probably thw wrong word, but they walked on two legs, anyway... creatures looking like they'd been put together from various parts of oversized animals, like pigs and horses and goats, led by a man-thing all in black that moved like he was part snake. He'd nicked the thing once while they fought, and for that, the man thing had made him watch as his wife and children were raped, then gutted alive and butchered by the animal-people. Trollocs, they're called, supplied some part of his mind.
The other dreams, lives, whatever, had been similar. There was one where he'd been a girl, raised utterly pacifist according to some religion called the Way of the Leaf. That one was the shortest of all - she'd been stoned to death at age fourteen trying to get water from a well whose owners had no wish to share. In yet another, he'd been a common, if skilled, soldier, struck down from behind by his own comrades after saving their lives by summoning a ball of water to put out the burning hay in the stables they'd been quartered in. And the explanation for that had been perfectly clear after the dream where he went insane and killed ten thousand singing men and women, one by one, then burned the city they were distracting him from until only a pool of bubbling glass remained.
As a matter of fact, he could still feel the warm, glowing sensation on the edge of his awareness that he'd felt in the dream where he summoned the power - clean, as in the beginning of that final dream, not filthy as at the end of it, or in the preceding one. None of the snippets of remembered thought explained that fully - he knew that the original incident that had caused him to go mad in that last dream had caused a "taint" on the source of his powers, but there was no clue as to why it had disappeared. Especially since it had apparently been a very, very long time between those last two dreams.
Come to think of it, there'd been a glow, of sorts, in the dream where he was a girl, too - feeble, and very different compared to the other two, but she'd been reaching for it instinctively before that final rock crushed her skull.
Eww, Ranma thought unhappily. That tears it. I'm not going back to sleep tonight, I'll just head out to the dojo and meditate on this strange "glow" business. And the memories, dreams, or whatever they are.
Silently, Ranma shrugged into his clothes from the day before and padded down to the dojo. He could feel the others' chi auras, and could tell they were all asleep at the moment - though Nabiki had probably been awake until pretty recently, since she wasn't sleeping very deeply yet, and Kasumi was slowly coming out of her deep rest state and would probably wake in a couple of hours, as usual.
Sitting down on the cold dojo floor, Ranma tried to find his center. The glow was there in the background, but it was hard to make out with all the clutter on his awareness. Frowning, Ranma pushed and prodded at the various thoughts that were zipping around, trying to put them away so he could concentrate. Floating around him were the dormant auras of the Tendo family, and his father - well, not the auras themselves, but his mindscape's representations of them. These, he left alone for the time being. The surface thoughts he started collecting piecemeal at first, shoving them into a sack like a litter collector at first, until he grabbed one that was a little too racy. That one, he burned - as his ears were probably doing, and after that he repeated the same for all the rest, as well, eventually forming a bubble with only himself and the auras remaining.
With his center finally firmly under control, Ranma set about completely digesting the dream lives he'd been living the past two nights. It was pretty clear none of those lives took place on this world, he thought - the animal-people had had recurring roles in nearly all of them, and had been just as savage in each dream, though he had thankfully only died at their hands the one time. Also, the dreams were too detailed not to be real, he thought. He'd had nightmares about taking a beating before, and could tell the difference between dreaming about a real life beating, or about an imaginary one. These felt more like the former than the latter, ergo, they did happen. Possibly even to him, in some other lifetimes.
There were lots of lessons to be learned from all of these lives - from the first one, he'd learned that while he could probably be very happy without his Art, that happiness would be so much easier to take away. Even without a sword, had the present day Ranma taken the place of the one in that dream, the raid would have failed rather spectacularly, snake-man or no. He'd also learned trust between a man and a woman - something that seemed in precious short supply at the Dojo. He'd learned - lived, breathed - love, and knew it wasn't the same as what he had with any of the girls right now. and he wasn't positive it could even develop the way things were.
The other dreams, once he was through processing them, were awesome founts of information about the other world. The girl had been something of an apprentice loremistress, and had known a lot of her people's history up to that point, including the tale of the burned city and the ten thousand singers who bought time or the evacuation. In a way, he had to admire them - their honor would not let them lift a hand to defend themselves, so they lifted their voices, and sung to the last man - a song in itself, a thousand years later.
He'd learned swordcraft and several other things from his various soldier lives - three of them, so far. Some of them, he'd have to try out when he could get away - archery for example. He'd been taught the basics of Kyudo by an old monk when he was eight or so, but that was a long time ago. The form of archery he'd assimilated now was similar, although the bow used was much more powerful. Not practical, perhaps, but probably a good meditation exercise.
But the most interesting life by far was that of the madman. He'd lived at least a thousand years before the others, and remembered a far different world - though it was pretty clear it was the same place. He'd known much about the "One Power", and its two halves, saidin and saidar, which were what he'd been able to see and feel at the edge of his awareness. Ranma reached out with a mental finger to try and touch the Power, and found it shied away. He chased it around a bit, then forced his awareness around it and grabbed on, sucking part of it into himself and filling the icy, chilling heat fill him, like a stream of lava with ice floating in it. Using the memories of his past life, he separated the stream of power, discerning the discrete flows of air, fire, water, earth and spirit - and wove a little air and fire into a fist-sized ball of light that floated above his hand, before winking out and taking his connection to the power with it.
Ranma didn't have a chance to ponder this for long, though, as he fell asleep where he sat a couple of moments later.
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(Posted Fri, 28 Jul 2006 23:47)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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