Request Denied

Date: 2/17/2019

This is a backlogged dream from October 15, 2018. A lot of other stuff aside from the main plot happened in this dream. There was a wood cabin complex in a forest somewhere. There were complaints over how long it took to slaughter and butcher livestock. There was a holiday dinner riding on said livestock being prepared. There was a gas station. There was a fight. There were a few people staying neutral and just carrying on with dinner prep. There was magic, but in a really boring and mundane way. A lot happened. But it wasn’t any of this that really stood out to me. What stood out was a concept, one that makes an excellent Soulmate AU Writing Prompt. I’m shoring up the details a bit, but the basic concept still comes from the dream itself. In it, every living person knew that soulmates, reincarnation, and the possibility of being reincarnated into a world that wasn’t yours existed. Your reincarnations were finite, but you could go anywhere and be anyone in those lives. You wouldn’t usually remember anything about your past, though, and you’d only ever have vague feelings about your future. You could ask someone “how many lives do you think you’ve got left?” and they might reply, “I feel like I’m about kinda sorta halfway through. You?” This would be a perfectly acceptable answer, since knowledge of the past and future is so abstract and yet so readily accepted and believed within the culture of any worlds where this system exists. You’ll know, yourself, if you’re nearing your last day r if you’re just starting out or if you’re somewhere in the middle. You’ll even get a feeling about whether your next one will be in the same world or a new one. Beyond that, you don’t really know anything about your own fate at all. Well. With one notable, commonly celebrated and honored exception. Everyone who possesses a soulmate in this system will automatically know their partner’s name(s) by a very young age. You won’t know what this person looks like, what their personality is like, where they live, how many reincarnations they’ve had, none of those details. Just their name, and the knowledge of what TYPE of soulmate they’ll be; ie romantic, platonic, found family, pet, those kind of categories and more. You’ll also have vague feelings about whether you need to wait for your next reincarnation to meet — or theirs, or both — and whether they’re on the same world as your current one or on a different one entirely. So, you might learn your soulmate’s name and role, and then tell people “I dunno, it feels like it’s kind of far away. Maybe one or both of us has a lot of reincarnating to do? Maybe they’re across the world? I’m pretty sure they’re not in a different world, they’re in this one as far as I can tell, but... I get the sense I won’t be meeting them very soon.” Or when your family asks a few reincarnations later you might say “It feels like it’s gonna happen really soon! I think they’re really close, and we’re probably around the same age cause I don’t feel like we’re gonna need to reincarnate at all! I’m so excited!” It would differ from person to person, given the personalized nature of soulmates and the vagueness of this system as a whole. The only time anyone received concrete knowledge was when they died. They’d end up in this expanse of blackness and stars, like outer space but even more ethereal somehow. There, they would silently state the name of their soulmate and a voice would tell them the truth. It would tell them when and how the soulmates would meet, show images of what they looked like, and confess how many reincarnations the pair had left before they would die for good and head to the real afterlife. Some people got very excited about their deaths, knowing they would receive this information. They wouldn’t remember it, exactly, upon reincarnating. They’d still remember the name, and sometimes they’d see the images in their dreams, and they’d be more certain of the other abstract feelings about their reincarnating than before, but that’s it. Even so, people still got happy in their final moments of life because they knew they’d be getting more info to work with soon — and possibly heading into the life/world where they finally meet their soulmate. In the dream, there was one boy in particular who learned his soulmate’s name while watching butterflies in a field. He associated her name with white butterflies ever since, and considered them a lucky charm for the rest of his life — like she was watching over him when they were nearby. He loved butterflies, and he loved her, and he figured in a reincarnation or two — or three at most, he’d meet her. He had a feeling it would be on a different world, partially confirmed by how strange her name sounded to others he told. He would reincarnate in a different world, and speak her name to her and she would know it was him. Her soulmate. Her name was Aitagonia. He spent his whole life dreaming of her, patiently waiting for his death(s) so he could finally see her and speak her name in person. He was in college when it finally happened. He was in an accident, and his neck broke. He died almost instantly. He was so happy to be in the galaxy place. He was like a kid on Christmas morning. He looked up into the stars and silently spoke the name Aitagonia. The voice didn’t reply for a long moment, but he remained undeterred. Ecstatic. Until it finally did speak, sounding a lot like when you call a number and the other person hasn’t set up their voicemail yet, and the robotic voice of the afterlife says only one line. “This person does not exist, in this or any other universe.” Just like that, his hopes and dreams were destroyed. His reincarnations lost meaning. He knew her name, but she didn’t exist? How was that even possible? Had she run out of reincarnations before they could meet? Or had he made it all up, and he’d never had a soulmate to begin with? A white butterfly flew past his face. He felt numb. He was about to be reincarnated into a fantasy world when I woke up. I don’t know if the butterfly meant he would meet Aitagonia in this world or not. I like to think it did, despite things feeling so finite in the dream itself — it really felt as if she didn’t exist and there was nothing left. I like to imagine that his last thought while in the galaxy place was about the system potentially being fallible. Maybe she was dead, maybe she was made up, or maybe the voice was wrong. He’d take things into his own hands, and follow the white butterflies, and find Aitagonia himself. And if, at the end, he never succeeded... he’d welcome his last death knowing he had at least tried.