Chronicles From The Future: The amazing story of Paul Amadeus Dienach

“Nothing special. That’s why I don’t understand where this inexplicable melancholy is coming from. I was fourteen when I first visited these places,” she replied while pointing to the snow-capped mountain ridges on the horizon. “And not only do I not have any special memories tying me to that trip but also, because I was in the awkward phase of adolescence, I remember dealing with a thousand worries and problems.”

“And who tells us that, in another life, powerful memories did not connect you to this place?” I asked her, averting my gaze.

“Well, no one can know that for sure,” she said without looking at all surprised. “Maybe yes, maybe no… Within the scope of the Samith

, everything is possible. But we are humans, Andreas, and we will never know everything.”

She seemed entertained by the conversation. The fact that she seemed to consider it neither heavy nor pointless, made me dig further into the subject, momentarily losing my control. “Do you believe, Silvia, that it’s possible for a person to suddenly recall incidents from a previous life? Have you ever tried to?”

It was the first time I ever talked to her in this voice trembling with emotion, gazing into her eyes with an expression of love and loyalty, almost as if possessed by a divine inspiration. I then remember telling her, “Who knows? It could be that we just met again after being separated for centuries…”

At first she looked somewhat puzzled by my rambling on “memories of pre-existence”, but soon she smiled with an expression of joyful surprise and eager acquiescence. “Do you think so, Andreas? That would be nice… But, I would prefer to remember everything that has happened to me in this life before I get to the memories of pre-existence. Because I think that there still are some incidents of my childhood buried somewhere in my mind. I’d like to remember those first…”

Obviously, her words did not satisfy me. They were somewhat irrelevant to my point. But I insisted, “What would you say if someone suddenly happened to remember incidents of a past life very clearly?”

“What do you mean ‘what would I say’? I’d call it exactly what it is: a rare metapsychic phenomenon.”

I was quite befuddled by this whole conversation, unlike Silvia who, as I said, dealt with it in a completely natural way, so I decided to change the subject. We kept on walking hand in hand in the woods.

I feel like our love is growing, day by day. The signs are too many to ignore, on both sides. We can no longer spend even a single day without seeing each other. Our loneliness grows heavier than ever when we do. As I had now read in the books that Stefan had supplied me with, one of the basic principles of Volkism is, for the Troendes, the “nostalgia of the Samith”, “the pain of the heart”, which is caused by the lack of it and which pervades the entire human existence without us being aware of it. In our species, this nostalgia presents itself in the form of “noble pain”, such as the anticipation of a great and true love.

“A voice inside me,” said Silvia interrupting my thoughts, “has always been telling me that there would come a day when someone would give meaning to my solitude and my sensitivity; so I had to wait. There were days when I sat, dressed up, in front of the mirror in the morning and thought to myself, ‘Maybe today…’ But I feared that I wouldn’t recognise him, that I wouldn’t be able to tell who he was. In the end I was right; it was you! Why did it take me so long to recognise you?”

She then started asking me questions about my childhood, meaning, of course, Northam’s childhood, questions quite difficult for me to answer. She remembered the first time she met Northam, at the Tebelen, during “The Prayer of the Wildflowers”. He was about to write his name on one of the windows, fogged up by breathing and she stopped him.

“I was so indifferent towards you back then… I think, though, that the first time I really met you, was in the Molsen institute, where I had come as a nurse, when I saw you wounded and helpless like a little baby. But enough of that. Now tell me one of these ancient stories that you like to read together with Stefan, the ones about the dashing princes and beautiful princesses…”

I started to tease her, saying that when she was young she must have been addicted to the Reigen-Swage and their three-dimensional spectacles. She admitted it. As for the fairy tales about princes and princesses, she has loved them since she was a child.

I have realised that these ancient, for them, stories exert a very strong appeal on the people of this contemporary Universal Commonwealth. In my view, the reasons why they appeal to them so much are the depictions of youth and beauty, fate and destiny, the ideal of “happiness”, and all that combined with the extra charm that huge temporal distance gives. The notion of “political power”, which is completely alien to them, is certainly not one of the reasons.