DISCLAIMER: The reincarnation in this story is not supposed to follow any religion particularly. I drew from several different reincarnation traditions, and invented details where it suited this story. Enjoy!

Prologue: The Drowning

The men from another life imagined that plants were the bottom of the chain of reincarnation, but truly, there is nothing more fulfilling than the life of the tree – there is no hunger and little pain. Roots grow out to embrace your brothers and sisters and your branches entangle like the caresses of a lover. The trees speak to each other over centuries as you grow in the language of the world. A year in the life of a man is but a day in the life of the tree. You nurse a thousand thousand lives within your body and hold within yourself the ability to see a millennium. You are man, woman, and child. Being a tree is, perhaps, the closest a soul can come to being a god.

I hesitate to record these experiences. The things that I write here many will deny and others will exploit, but as the soul passes away, I wish to leave some imprint on this earth that will swallow me and make me over in its own image.

Life is eternal. This, perhaps, is not a surprise to many of you. It was not a surprise to me, when I woke again. In his core, a man knows that his spirit never truly passes. But men expect that if they continue to live after death, that the person that they are, with their memories and loves and neuroses, goes with them.

It doesn't.

What I am is an abomination. The person that I was, in another lifetime, should have faded with the decaying of my flesh in the soil. My spirit continued, born into a new body with new loves and new problems – perhaps as an ant, toiling under the sun for a few years, perhaps as a tree to reach up to the sun with tiny leafy fingers for a few centuries. But I should not have remembered these things. And after my spirit had taken on and discarded enough selves that the human part of me was centuries forgotten, I was reborn again as a new self who could experience the world with new, worshipful eyes.

But it remains that I remember another life – many other lives. I remember being a fish flickering through the sea without an idea of life above the ground. In that life I knew only freedom and hunger, a furious cycle ended on a fisherman's hook.

I remember being a tree with leaves reaching up into the sky, living, like a god, a thousand years.

I remember being an elephant, a hard, painful life, chained to a tree and beaten for the fear of smaller creatures. Mourning my sisters when they died around me, and rejoicing when reunited with a daughter thought lost a lifetime ago.

I remember being a coyote, where I skulked and hunted around the edges of a dangerous world full of rushing technology, my eyes growing sharper in the darkness.

But most of all, I remember my human lives. If being a tree is to be a god, then to be human is to be a devil.

Umi woke me when Kiyoko was seven years old, the orphan daughter of fishermen in the ruins of Uzushiogakure. The old witch-woman had stayed in our village for ten years before she chose Kiyoko. She never told me why she chose Kiyoko, other than the fact that she was an orphan with no parents to miss her. But Kiyoko was far from the only orphan on this war-torn continent, and Umi could have had her pick of orphans, many of whom were faster and stronger than the shrimpy redheaded girl.

It was without ceremony. Kiyoko was mending her uncle's nets, fingers red and raw from the newness of the task to her. I still remember the newness of the pain and the stink of the nets, a smell both revolting and familiar. Umi spoke to her for a moment, and only asked one question.

"Child, do you remember who you are?" Her voice was as full of crags and grit as her sun-worn face.

Kiyoko was confused, but didn't put down the knot she was currently working on. "Who I am?"

And Umi put fingers as crooked as an ancient tree on the temples of a small girl with fish under her fingernails, and killed her spirit.

They tell me that I shook and screamed for days in words that no-one understood – that I snarled like an animal and froze for hours with my hands outstretched to the sun. I believe them, for my first memory that is not Kiyoko's is of the pain of blistered sunburn on my palms.

When I finally opened my eyes and asked for water, my throat was dry and my voice cracked like the old woman's. My aunt hovered on the edge of my fuzzy vision before disappearing and re-appearing with a cracked dipper full of water.

"Drink, child," she ordered, and I stared at her with wide eyes.

I drank, and closed my eyes to feel the water slide down my throat. A thousand years ago, or only a moment, I had been drinking coffee in the car. I had been holding a newborn baby in my arms, confronting the miracle of life for the first time. I was covered with dirt and soot to darken my already-dark skin, kneeling behind a tree and aiming a musket at flashes of bright red through the trees.

I was falling asleep after a lifetime of terror and the trainer's whip, eager for the blackness at the end of a life. I felt the flash of pain in my shoulder before I ran away to hide and meet my end. I was suffocating on a bed of ice, gills searching for water that would never come.

"Am I a child?" I asked fuzzily. "I thought I was dead?" My palms burned, blisters scraped open and scabbed over.

My aunt froze. "You are alive, Kiyoko," she said very gently.

My mind was full of confusion – of lives half-remembered and deaths re-lived. But I knew one thing, as sure as I could feel the pounding behind my temples and the burning in my hands. "I'm not Kiyoko," I said, the empty tin dipper clutched in my hands.

The tall woman's eyes went wide, but, with the steadfastness of a woman who lived at the mercy of the sea, she gently took the tin dipper from me and said, "Are you hungry, child?"

I looked down at my hands, burned and raw, and saw the child in them. "A little."

She left without a word. I leaned back on my pillows and stared out of the small window across the room, into the bluest sky I had seen in any lifetime.

I was confused for a long time after Umi came to kill Kiyoko. There were many memories that were hard to sort through – hard to separate from one another. My body was a shocking thing – it was built so differently from my last human life that I didn't quite know what to do with it. In a previous life, I had been blonde and softly built. This body was taller than I remember being at that age, with narrow hips and hard hands. It felt as though this body could swim forever in a way that that past body had never been able to handle.

The animal lives were not as complicated as my human lives, but the brutality of them shocked me. I had endured a few brutal human lives as well, but the farther back they were, the harder they were to remember.

But the question of who I was remained cloudy. I continued to refuse Kiyoko as a name, since she never really got a chance to live. It felt wrong to use her name. My Aunt Fu gave up and simply called me "child," but my uncle, a man who had learned that life was one big joke, decided to try and re-name me.

"How about Junko? We always need more obedient children," he said as he led me out to the boats.

I rolled my eyes. Out here, next to the ocean, the world made a little more sense – my cousin Takahito noticed that I wandered less and spoke more next to the ocean.

Uncle Takahiro put a heavy, fishy hand on my shoulder. "Not a child, then? Just Jun?"

A smile crept across my face.

"There she is!" he crowed. "Does she have a name? Or is her name to terrifying to hear out loud?"

That terrible joke got a laugh. When compared to the vastness of the sky and the depth of the ocean, my own confusion felt less important, somehow. As if I could stop thinking.

Whap!

My thoughts were interrupted by a sudden impact at the back of my head, like a very wet and sandy fist. Sand and water dripped down into my collar like an exodus of ants. I whirled around to see Takahiro with his hand already wrist-deep into the sand on the edge of the beach.

"Takahiro!" My uncle snapped.

Takahiro just grinned, and slugged another handful of sand at me.

With a speed I didn't know I possessed, I dodged, my own hand reaching down for a clump of orange in the sand with a habit that my body knew even if my mind didn't. "Hey, Takahiro!" I yelled, my voice sounding so strange echoing off the water and sand. Not my voice.

He turned around just in time to get a handful of crabweed to the face.

I didn't know it then, but I made a decision in that moment. Whoever I was, I was going to live.

After all, the best revenge is living well.