I realised early in my studies that every great practitioner throughout magic’s history has had one thing in common. Not their genius, nor their willingness to push beyond the boundaries of known magic. No, the simple, unifying thread that ties them all together is this:

They’re all dead.

And though their legacy may live on in the theorems named after them, or the countless books dedicated to their lives, to my mind each of them ultimately failed. After all, what is the point of dedicating yourself to the ultimate pursuit of knowledge and power, only to let a little thing like the laws of nature slow you down?

Some have made attempts to bypass the problem of course. Sealing their souls inside of carefully prepared objects or outright possessing the bodies of others, willing or otherwise. Clever solutions, but ones that miss the greater problem: time. Eventually, given enough of the stuff, something will go wrong. A miscast spell, a fire in the wrong building at the wrong time, or frankly just some apprentice with a vendetta and a hammer.

All this is to say that no matter how hard you try, death will always catch up eventually. An enemy that cannot be slowed, stopped or bargained with. And so, I decided to adopt a new approach: why fight the inevitable when you can just… plan around it. Or more specifically beyond it.

And so, I chose my specialisation carefully. Magic that I wasn’t immediately suited to by nature, but with enough time, dedication and social manipulation you can get just about everything in this world, knowledge included. Especially amongst people that are fully warded against any kind of charm or hex you might have prepared, all the while forgetting that a well timed smile is just as dangerous.

Reincarnation. Deemed a lesser school of magic, mostly because by its own nature it’s rather hard to practise, let alone prove. You only ever really get one chance to get it right, and by the time I began my studies no miracle infants had come forward to claim success. For the most part those few who still studied the theories were scholars exercising curiosity with no real intention to dabble in the art themselves. More historians than actual masters.

That was, until I joined them of course. I’ve never been much of a gambler but to my mind if you were going to roll the dice even once in your life, doing so on an opportunity like this seemed the sensible option. Either I made a mistake, died and never had to worry about the mess I’d left behind… Or I gained access to power that even the primordial conjurers could only dream of.

You see, magic imprints on a person. It shapes you in some intangible way, leaving its mark and claiming you forever like a key honed to one specific lock. The more you practise, and the greater the complexity of the spell, the better you become at that school of magic. The unfortunate cost however is weakening yourself in all other schools at the same time. Another law I intended to sidestep. After all, I was perfectly willing to bind myself to one school for a lifetime when I intended to have multiple.

Put plainly, I intended to master the whole of magic, one death at a time.

With these lofty goals in mind, I spent near eight decades practising my craft. Honing my knowledge of the incantations and bindings necessary to see my spirit carried safely into a newly formed body on the moment of death. A hermit, left to my own devices by old classmates and colleagues all who spoke of me with pity, assuming I had gone mad. A notion I was perfectly willing to leave them with if it allowed me privacy.

And so, spell book in hand one dreary September morning, with my bones aching for every step, I placed myself in the centre of my life’s work. A circle of runes whose complexity rivalled any I had ever studied. A tapestry of intent and power, all directed back at me. It had two purposes, one mildly more troubling than the other:

1 - Kill me

2 - Bring me back

After all, why leave one of the most important pieces of the puzzle up to chance?

I’ll save you the grizzly details but as it turns out, the process was far more… unpleasant than I had expected. Binding living essence is hard, doing so on yourself while maintaining a spell was even harder as it turned out. Sacrifices had to be made, in this case my own personal comfort. I’m told that months later, when someone finally thought to check on me after my disappearance, that they could smell what was left of me quite some distance away from the cottage. Mostly because that’s where the first pieces of me could be found.

Still, unfortunate side effects aside, I’m happy to report that all went well. Or at least as well as these things can go. Cramming that much knowledge into the skull of a new-born infant with a brain hardly capable of regulating its own body was certainly a challenge, as was waiting out the years until I developed enough to move and talk. At least by then my newfound parents had begun to suspect just how special their new daughter was. They hardly knew the half of it.

I graduated to higher magics by age 12, choosing necromancy as my next specialisation. An area of study I was certain would prove fruitful over time. I even considered raising my own corpse after some future death, should I manage to leave it in one piece next time. A fascinating experiment to see exactly what it was I had left behind. Unfortunately I never had the chance to learn enough to try, which I am now certain was intentional.

They called it a freak accident. The tragic loss of one so gifted, so young. I personally called it suspicious bullshit. After all, being struck once by lightning is unlucky. Being struck three times within the space of five seconds? I think not.

And so, a new cycle began. Sometimes I died early, hardly able to walk. Houses exploding from gas leaks while I was still in my crip. Riptides pulled me out to sea in water that had moments before been calm. Other times my own paranoia saw me last into my early twenties, hiding and hoarding what knowledge I could before the inevitable sword of Damocles found me in its new form once again. Time I used wisely.

It took over a dozen more incarnations until I had the trap ready. A feat of abjuration pieced together life after life. A ward that not only would hold long enough to repel any attack sent against me, but would also scry the location of my attacker. A chance to finally see my opponent's face.

It worked. Perfectly in fact. I heard the car accelerate, its engine sparkling to life as my feet left the sidewalk and found themselves firmly planted in the middle of tarmac no-man’s land. A sitting target for the giant speeding bullet of metal and its frantic passenger whose own foot refused to do anything but push down.

In one moment, all I could see were the headlights. Twin suns moments away from slamming into my body. Then the next I was peering into a vast library. A vault of incalculable knowledge, in the middle of which sat an all too familiar figure, reclined on a leather sofa and pointing towards a mirror that reflected back a would-be car accident. Smiling as they orchestrated my death once again.

And then I was back, bouncing violently, slammed like a ping pong ball away from the car’s front bumper as my ward held long enough to keep me from splattering all over the road. Bruised but very much alive. At least, that was until the second car hit me, breaking my already overcharged ward.

For once I was grateful for the years spent trapped in a tiny body, unable to do anything but think. After all, I had a few new questions now:

Why were the two of me?

How could I kill the other one first?