(This a repost from an entry in EFU's Student Forums. It has been since taken down.)
I understand a million questions might be coming to your head right now, most of them being along the lines of "but death doesn't work this way" and you're right! For most people life is a one-and-done ordeal, and once you're done with it you walk across the river and leave us all behind. But for some people, or better said, for one unlucky individual after life there is... life once more. You might think this is one sweet-ass deal, for most people dislike the idea of death, but do not be fooled for this is naught but a never-ending curse.
And I'm here to tell you all the ins-and-outs of this never-ending nightmare!
Let me tell you right now: you're probably not the fated one guy that keeps coming back.
Statistically speaking, there are millions of people in this bitch of a planet and this guy can only be one at a time.
Still, just in the slim chance this little post finds you, here's some info that might clear things up for you:
First off, the reincarneted ones (henceforth refered as Enochs for short) aren't really born. They rather... spawn fully formed with a random age. And with no memories of their former lives, of course, although you might start remembering later. So if the first thing you remember is waking up all alone in some strange corner of the world, it might not be the hangover of the nastiest acid trip of your life, but that you are the latest Enoch! Of course, since the age you begin with is random you just might have started out as a baby (is happned a few times, yknow?); in which case you might wanna ask your parents if they really gave birth to you or if they found you on a ditch or something.
Second, if you have spent enough time alive to be using a computer and browsing on the internet, you've probably spent enough time alive to start remembering. We'll talk more about it later but for the time being: have you had strange dreams? Dreams where you're not you, where you're living through someone else's skin? Sometimes in the distant past, sometimes just some days before your memories cut off? They may not be simple dreams but the memories of your past lives coming back, ever so slowly.
And lastly, have you seen the man with the horns? Now, amnesia and dream visions are not all that rare, if you had them you're more likely to be developing some form of dementia, or to have a very pissed off wizard nearby making your life dificult. But the man with the horns is an almost-Enoch-exclussive. He's as tall as a human, maybe even in the shorter side (not counting the horns, of course); he is always wearing a suit, perfectly ironed; he is white, and I don't mean "caucasian" or whatever they call it, I mean pale gray next to white, except for his black-tipped horns. Now, even most Enochs never encounter him, so don't be discouraged by his absence! You can still be the lucky carrier of the worst curse known to man, with or without creepy aparitions to come with! Although maybe, he's just taking his time, gods know he's one to make an entrance...
Has this guide helped you? Of course not! Sadly for you the random nature of the curse means it's pretty impossible to predict, and almost impossible to study. Almost.
So now, having all your doubts about your origins answered, let's truly discuss what this nasty curse means to YOU.
Everytime an Enoch dies, a new one rises from their ashes like some bargage-bin phoenix. And every new life has a random age, race, gender, and even personality and intrests. I really hope you aren't racist because whatever race you look down on, you've been at some point in your lives, and you will be again! In fact most certainly you've been something you look down on nowadays. You've been a fighter and you've been a lover. you've been a criminal and you've been a cop. You've been royalty and you've starved in the streets. You've been a lider, a runaway, a traitor, a poet, a fool, a celebrity, a villian. You have literally been everything under the sun. You've even been a software engineer, for whatever that's worth.
Then, is there nothing in common among Enochs? Well no, but also yes.
As you get more and more of a grip on your undending chain of existances, you'll find that, while there are no consistent similarities, there are some themes that crop up in most lifes. And they are as follows:
The nuns at the Lizbethian temple has been harassed for months by the Grasstop's barbarians, until that amnesiac young woman they had rescued picked up a sword and put an end to both the harrasment and the barbarians. From that day on, her name became Lizbeth.
Of course, not all victories are as epic; as a matter of fact, most are not. Cedar fell a tree; Fen-dai found a rock; Chica stole a book; and the least we say about Timothy, the better.
Some Enochs, as previously mentioned, even started out as babies, where the heroic feats they could acomplish were limited, to say the least. One such baby was Ev'ar, in her own words: "my name was given to me by my mom when she found me, in that way, you can say, my first ever victory was to be loved by her".
Not all Enochs are happy with just one meager name, some choose more to conmemoreate some special feat, and quote: "I got the name Wolf after I killed the Cursed Faewolf with my own hands; then I got Damian from the vampire I killed with nothing but a toothpick; and Bloodforge is for the time I got my enchanted sword, now that was an adventure; and then Durian is from, heh it's a funny story, so I was hunting weremokeys in the southwest when-".
When Feather's pup Fairy attacked them, they had no way of knowing the curse that attached to that faewolf once came to this land on a ship on their behalf. Liz couldn't have known that the trap that took her life had been methodically crafted by her own hands, several lifetimes ago. Most Enochs don't remember enough to undertand the irony in their demises, often understood only several lives later, when the next unlucky fool manages to remember them.
Of course, not all of them die in blissful ignorance. Chica knew enough to recognize the armor of her personal guards from millenia ago dressing the man who'd kill her. Ev'ar knew that the hand behind the weapon that pierced her heart was the same hand she had once shared drinks with. If there is something all Enochs can agree with, is that knowing only makes it so much more painful.
But betrayal often works in both ways. Sometimes out of ignorance. Wolf has only walked this land for a week, and couldn't know the Cursed Faewolf he killed had once been the very puppy he had once raised since birth, that he himself named Fairy.
Not all such turns of fate can be blamed by ignorance either, after all, when Timothy took Soren's life he had alredy remembered the wedding vows they had once shared, lifetimes before. It didn't change a thing in the end, only made it all the more melodramatic.
Then again, there are plenty that didn't have to wait for reincarnation to die by betrayal. Cedar died to mutiny; Margrette to her old party; and Sigfried to his very own hand.
Every Enoch starts off as a blank slate, But it won't stay blank for long! The longer you live; and the more close-calls you go through, the memories will start to come back.
A few Enochs never manage to remember anything, dying probably too soon.
Most Enochs will remember a little, fragments of a past life or two seen in dreams, just enough to guess at their condition. Even then only a handful have ever managed to get useful information out of their memories.
And then... on the other side, a few of them managed to remember too much. The consciousness of the former lives fully awake even in their waking life. Hanging with the weight of thousands of lives isn't easy, y'know? Most of them end up loosing it before booking it. Sigfried tells it like this: "At some point I didn't even know which thougts were mine anymore, for every word a cacophany of voices. The eternal quietude of death seemed preferable"
"I found it easier to think of them as wholly different people, compartmentalizing and all that" said Timothy "I don't think any of us can really comprehend the totality of our existance without being driven mad. So I didn't try. There are funnier ways to waste your life anyways.".
Now from the lenghts of this stupid post, you can imagine the kind of effort I put into collecting all this information and then editing into a easy-to-consume format complete with punchy titles. Of course I know A LOT more than I can surmise in here. And since I'm one petty bitch, here's some additional info that you might not find useful per se, but very intresting nontheless.
You migth have been wondering, "well what if I reincarnate in some dangerous situation?" and to answer that I'd like to introduce Fifteen. The name was posthumous, given for how many minutes she got to live. Fifiteen holds the current record for shortest reincarnation, so it counts as some victory. "It is a bit humilliating, to be honest" she said "to be remembered by how much I didn't get to live. But at least I can be a reminder: get into safety, even when you know you won't survive."
In the same vein, the Enoch who lived the longest was actually the first! Javier managed to live several centuries before getting ultra-mega-cursed. And even got several decades after that! Almost no other Enoch managed to get past a hundred, and none other got to the two hundreds so far.
All in all, the average life expenctancy is 22.8 years, at counting only those I managed to get exact information on (around 3200 lives). Javier wasn't included since he "stopped counting after the third century". So know you know how long you have left! Congrats!
And on the topic of age, while the age any Enoch starts their life is random, it seems to favour the late-teens to late-twenties demographic. The information I've worked with is limited, so take that statistic with several grains of salt.
On a diffrent note, 8 out of 10 Enochs have had a loved one loose a limb; and out of them almost all (96.2%) have lost an arm either partially or completly. This humble reasercher belive this to be because most Enochs live lives more dangerous than the average, and it stands to reason that they surrounded themselves with people with similar, accident-prone lifestyles. Why is it always an arm is anyones guess, though.
And for a happier statistic, most Enochs have found themselves a family. 4 out of 10 were adopted into a family early into their lives; 7 out of 10 started traditional families of their own, and out of the remaining 3 most would say "depends on your definition of family" rather than no. Some Enochs even aknowlegde their others lives as family, so next time you feel like a lonely looser, know that there are other loosers burried inside your brain ready to claim you as one of their own!
Now?
Now you know all you need to know about reincarnation!
Like I said at the beggining, if you're reading this, chances are you're NOT Enoch, and what you need to know is nothing. And if you are, well this probably isn't enough.
I guess what I want out of this is for YOU, the next Enoch, to know you're not alone. That inside that thick skull of yours you carry thousands and, in due time, you might start to meet them. You have been through this before and you will go through this again and again.
I can only hope I made it a little easier for you, this time around.
(This a repost from an entry in EFU's Student Forums. It has been since taken down.)