Have you ever met someone for the first time and felt you already knew them? Not knew of them. Actually knew them.
Perhaps it was their voice, their manner, or simply a feeling you couldn’t explain. A strange familiarity that seemed to exist before the meeting itself.
We usually find an explanation. Coincidence. Chemistry. Déjà vu. Our minds looking for patterns.
But what if, just for a moment, we considered another possibility.
What if it was reincarnation? This is something that I explore in The Word Guardians and the Lost Beginnings.
What if we really had met before?
The idea of reincarnation raises a fascinating question. If we have lived previous lives, perhaps we don’t necessarily remember them consciously. Maybe something survives without becoming a memory in the conventional sense. A feeling, a connection, a recognition.
And perhaps the strangest experience of all would be to meet someone from that life again.
Knowing someone you don’t know
Imagine discovering that the person sitting opposite you was once someone you loved deeply.
They don’t remember. You barely know each other. Yet somewhere inside you is the knowledge that you have shared a life before.
How would you behave?
Would you expect the old relationship to somehow continue? Would you trust the connection? Or would you recognise that although their soul, or whatever part of us survives, may be familiar, this is still a different life, and they are still a different person?
This is the dilemma faced by Mira and Sunyal in The Word Guardians: The Lost Beginnings.
They meet in this life as strangers, but Sunyal seems to know that their story began much earlier.
Mira experiences glimpses of that past, but initially she questions them. Are these memories genuinely hers? Are they fragments of another life? Or is Sunyal somehow putting the thoughts into her mind?
And that question matters.
Because if we cannot trust our own memories, how can we know what is real?
What if forgetting is part of the design?
In The Lost Beginnings, forgetting isn’t simply a natural consequence of being reborn.
Some characters have no access to their past because their memories are being controlled by the power behind the Otherworld.
That introduces a darker philosophical possibility.
What if forgetting is not an accident?
What if knowing where we came from gives us knowledge that someone doesn’t want us to have?
Memory shapes identity. It tells us who we are, where we belong and what has happened to us. Take away the past, and you can profoundly change how someone understands the present.
Perhaps, then, controlling memory is another form of controlling choice.
And that brings the story back to one of the central ideas of the Word Guardians series: freedom.
If someone else decides what you are allowed to remember, can your choices truly be your own?
Ultimately, we don’t have to know
I don’t know whether reincarnation is real. Perhaps it is, perhaps not.
Perhaps those strange moments of recognition are simply the mysteries of the human mind. Or, they could be something else.
Maybe we don’t carry complete memories from one life to another. Maybe we carry impressions, something buried deeper than conscious thought.
And perhaps every now and then, something triggers that buried knowledge. A face, a place, a voice or a person.
For Mira, discovering her history with Sunyal doesn’t make their relationship easier. As you’ll discover in The Lost Beginnings, it makes it more complicated.
Because knowing you have loved someone before doesn’t tell you how to love them now. You still have to meet them again and learn who they have become. You still have to choose.
And perhaps that is the most important thought of all.
Even if we have lived before, this life is still ours to decide
Maybe the past can explain the connection. Maybe it can reveal where the story began. But it cannot determine where the story goes next.
To learn more about Mira and Sunyal’s adventure, read Book 4, The Lost Beginnings.
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