The Story of RonWil

My name is RonWil. RonWil is only one of my names, but you have no need for the others. You probably couldn't pronounce them in whatever language you are receiving this anyway. But if you are part of the civilized universe, you can find out what all my names are, all my manifestations, and all my aspects. And surely you would be able to find translators that will pronounce my names for you. But why bother?

I am going to tell you my story. You can believe it or not, it matters not to me. Nothing matters since I lost Liebergott and Mathiya. I lost Liebergott when mortals such as you caused his death. I lost Mathiya when I killed her.

Since then, nothing has mattered.

Nothing except Sonli, our daughter. Yes, Sonli matters. She is my only hope now.

Sonli matters a great deal. You might even say that this is not my story, but the story of Sonli. However, I don't dare tell her story, I don't dare presume anything with Sonli. It is a dangerous thing to presume anything about Sonli. So I will tell you my story, and if Sonli ever deigns to tell her story, so be it.

Here, then, is my story.

I was born a long time ago, though among my kind I am considered a youngster. In fact, I am the youngest of a group, a race, maybe even a species, we call the Atmonians. We are generally solitary creatures for reasons that will become apparent soon. Most of us have been born on different worlds, millennia apart from each other. None of us knows who our "father" is. Most of us know of our "mother" only through hearsay, since whatever life form bore the egg that became us and delivered us into the world invariably dies in the process. We are thus universally orphans of unknown parentage.

We come into the world unappreciated, resented, and totally incomprehensible to those around us. If those around us are lucky, we are killed within the first few hours of life. After the first few weeks or months of life, it is harder to kill us, though it can be done if one is determined. Most species are not determined until it is too late.

The birth of an Atmonian is a special event. Not a joyous event, but very special. If any Atmonians learn of it, they will race across the universe to bear witness to the birth, confirm the addition of another Atmonian to our miniscule surviving numbers.

And then kill the newborn as soon as possible.

I guess you could say that we are not a happy race. It is a human concept, totally alien to us.

I was born on planet Earth approximately 3500 revolutions ago in a portion of Asia that lies between the Caspian and Black seas. My birth mother died giving birth to me. I am told that she was young, full of life and energy, and very pretty. Her last words were pleas to her husband to care for me when she was gone. She knew she would not survive my birth, but like most mortal creatures, she wanted only to protect her offspring.

Would she have been so willing to protect me if she had known what type of being I truly was? Would she have asked my birth father to protect me if she knew that the seed planted in her was neither hers nor his, but some alien's?

My birth father did not heed the advice of his young wife. I don't think he particularly mourned her death -- death came easily at that time, though it was always regretted. Like most of his contemporaries, he ascribed her death to the intervention of spirits, demons, demigods. In a way he was right. Those ancient nomadic tribes I was born into were often right about the universe around them, though they did not truly understand. Nowadays, the people I live amongst have much greater understanding about the universe, but they are often wrong in their interpretation of it.

He ascribed his wife's death to demon spirits, and he decided that the demon spirits still resided within me. Before my first year had passed, he had tried to dispose of me through a variety of techniques. The kindest were attempts to suffocate me, drain my blood, bury me alive, or abandon me. Demon spirits don't need air, can produce blood at will, can dig their way out of the deepest hole, and can find their way back. Finally, in desperation, my birth father suffered me to live, albeit with someone else.

He gave me to the tribal shaman.

This man's name was Atu, and he was the earliest influence on my life. He taught me all he knew about shamanism and the spirit world, which was a considerable amount of lore. Atu knew all the stories about my birth, and had in fact been there trying to save my mother from her inexorable death. If he believed that spirits inhabited me, he must have believed they were benevolent spirits, for he only treated me with love and kindness.

Why, then, did I repay him by killing him?

The first few years of my life were relatively uneventful. I had a wet nurse that developed an intense fondness for me. I didn't learn until several generations later that I could induce feelings of calm and happiness in people, and I apparently did this when I was nursing. I am sure I used this ability to manipulate my surrogate mother, but I do not believe that I ever used it on Atu. I pray to whatever gods exist that I didn't. But one never knows. I matured quickly and didn't succumb to the usual diseases that wiped out most of the babies of our clan. About half of them died within the first two or three years of being born. It was a rough life, imperiled by poor nutrition and disease.

I learned to walk earlier than most infants do, but apparently I did not learn to speak until I was much older than other children were. My peers considered me strange, but since I was the shaman's "son," few clansmen questioned my behavior. This gave me a degree of freedom many of my peers did not have. While they had to learn the traditional skills essential to survival in the Bronze Age, I was free to pursue the more esoteric arts of that period - the forerunner of botany, biology, pharmacology, zoology. These weren't true disciplines 3500 years ago -- they were primarily collections of anecdotes, folklore, suppositions, and descriptive knowledge passed down orally from one generation to another. I picked up this information at a prodigious rate. Atu thought himself a great teach, and undoubtedly he was. But my knowledge extended far beyond what he taught me, and included information and insights I gleaned directly from others.

Let me explain a little about this concept, since it is one of the features that distinguish Atmonians from their host races. Most sentient species have one or more means of communicating. It is this ability to communicate that makes a species dominant (there are, of course other things that contribute to dominance, but we'll ignore those for now). Human beings can communicate information genetically to some degree, through physical pantomime and the faculty of sight, and primarily through sound. Atmonians use these conventional channels of communication, but augment them with other channels not available to our host species. One of these channels is what is commonly called telepathy.

To a more primitive race, it would appear that we are reading another being's mind. That is a good analogy, but what we are really doing is discerning the electrical patterns that exist, and then re-creating them in a portion of our own minds. We can do this with any living creature that uses a combination of chemical and electromagnetic energy as part of its physiology. I developed this talent instinctively, as part of my alien heritage. I would read the minds of my fellow clansmen, know their thoughts and feelings, know what they saw and heard and smelled and felt. I would know their moments of pain and joy.

There was nothing that went on in our village that was secret from me. It is fortunate for me and those I cared about that I could not speak, for at this early age, I had no concept of what was appropriate or inappropriate in human behavior, and I might have made some inadvertent utterance that would have revealed I had knowledge I should not have had. I now know that I would never have been in danger, not from human beings, for my instinctive defense mechanisms would have protected me.

A lot of my clansmen, however, would have died.

In a strange way, I loved my clansmen. We were part of a vast movement of people being pushed out of central Asia, partly by the need to find new sources of food, partly by the constant encroachment on our lands by peoples to the north, east, or west. For the most part, we were a peaceful people, anxious to build a more permanent settlement, yet sill closet enough to our nomadic roots that we would move onward without hesitation.

I knew from an early age, even before I acquired the faculty of speech, that I was different from them. That didn't matter to me, because at that time I saw enough differences between each of them to believe that I fit into a strange and wonderful continuum of unique individuals. It was only later that I became aware that the differences were of a quantum nature. I suppose all Atmonians feel this way. I don't know, because none of them would ever talk about their early existence among their host races, not even Mathiya would talk about it. While most claimed that the experience lay too far in the distant past to be of consequence, Mathiya admitted that the memory was too painful for her to recount. Not even for me would she dredge up those distant memories.

Of course, I never told any of them of my own experiences. Atmonians don't have emotions or feelings, or memories of such dangerous things.

By the time I learned to speak the language of man, I already knew far more than any other member of my clan. I suspect that I already knew how to speak, since Atu told me that I didn't speak as a child but as an adult when I first started speaking. While others thought I was demon possessed because of my reticence, Atu knew otherwise. He was not surprised that I had a full command of language. That's what made Atu remarkable to me. Nothing ever surprised him, not even his own death.

I think I entered the stage now called puberty at about the same time as other boys my age. It had the same effect on me that it has had on young men throughout human history. I was overly excited, thrilled by my own power, constantly lusting after anything female, and anxious to prove to the world that I was no mere child, but a person of consequence. These traits are bad enough in normal human beings.

In a being such as I, they can have devastating effects.

Most pubescent boys merely get into minor trouble, and the clan had established customs to deal with this. These customs had been handed down from one generation to the next and were very effective in controlling the wild impulses of young men growing into manhood. Modern civilization, thousands of years later, has lost much of value by losing these customs and traditions.

Unfortunately, the customs and traditions were designed to control humans, not Atmonians.

My puberty was characterized by invasion of privacy (the concept had no meaning for me, since I could enter the mind of anyone), the very, vandalism (two thousand years before the Vandals ravaged Rome!), and murder.

It is not a period of my life I am proud of, but only in a relative sense, since I don't have the same feelings about life that mortals do. Their lives have to have meaning -- some sense of accomplishment, a sense of family, or pride in their craft. Atmonians do not have these feelings. To start with, we have no families, so there is little source of pride or joy in that. Even though I have fathered tens of thousands of offspring, most of them are mere products of lust or convenience. Sure, I loved them at the time, but all of that was a sham, an act to keep the mortals away from me. It wasn't until we broke the law and produced Sonli that I had any inkling of the feelings that mortals took for granted. But I get ahead of myself. I am still speaking of that distant time when I first walked the soil of earth.

I had a favorite game at that time. It was a vicious game, but it gave me pleasure. Perhaps that speaks to what kind of a creature I really am.

I would leave my body each night and float as a spirit through the village, looking for excitement. For me, excitement was what others were doing, since I had not yet developed my own set of values or interests. And what most others were doing was dealing with each other.

It has always surprised me how preoccupied humans are with each other. Each of you spends most of your life worried about how others think of you, how they react to you, how you can dominate them and make them submit to your will. And nothing typifies this more than the relationships that develops between men and women.

I have watched humans for thousands of years, and in that time there have been subtle changes in the relationships, but for the most part, they haven't change dramatically in 3500 years. I suspect that they haven't changed that much in a thousand times that long. Men still dominate, and women still control. It is this interaction that has always fascinated me, even as I learned of other species, other worlds, other universes, I always came back to this basic concept of human existence. I always was fascinated with the way men try to dominate and the way woman react to this.

During this phase of my life, I spent a lot of time in the minds of men and women -- as they engaged in household tasks, as they made love, as they fought. I would flit from the mind of the man to the mind of the woman, exploring their feelings, their reactions. I would experiment with them, make them say and do things that were contrary to their intents, then watch the ensuing consternation of people caught up in events they had no control over.

I learned the joys of a man and woman deeply in love with each other. I shared the guilt of men taking other men's wives and daughters, and I shared in their triumph over their weaker rivals. I experienced the trauma of being taken against one's will. I experienced the pleasures of ejaculation, the wonder of ovulation, and the mystery of childbirth. I did this all before most boys my age have bedded their first wench.

I soon tired of human experiences, and started exploring the behaviors of animals. I found this strangely exhilarating. I ran with wild horses, fought for possession of a herd, swam with sturgeon in cold streams, flew with eagles and ravens, explored the programmed dominance of hive life with a swarm of bees.

There was no experience too exotic for me to partake of.

I would return to the stark reality of our dwelling to recount my experiences to Atu. It never occurred to me that he could never experience the feelings that I had. Perhaps in this regard I vastly underestimated the nature of humanity. It is only now, from the perspective of 3500 years of existence, that I doubt that he truly shared my experiences. But back then, in my infancy and naivete, I believed that he not only understood, but also could share in my experiences.

He warned me never to tell anyone else what I experienced. He said that I had privileged information, given to me by the Great Goddess herself. I could believe that, since I already knew that most of my clansmen could not do what I did.

It was during this period that I committed my first murder.

It is strange that this event stands out so poignantly in my memory. I, who have killed so many billions of beings, still remember the first mortal I slew. I wonder if other Atmonians have similar recollections? I will never learn the answer to this question. It's funny, how you can know so much about the universe, but still not be able to answer the simplest of questions.

The first person I killed, naturally, was my birth father.

He had abandoned me at birth, ignored the pleadings of my dying mother, and had taken another woman to wife and started another family.

It should not have mattered to me. And if I had been a full-fledged Atmonian, it would not have mattered. But I wasn't an Atmonian yet, I was merely a demon-possessed young man, suffered to live among the clan as the shaman's son. The abandoned son of a man whose very existence was an affront to me.

Is it surprising that it was his mind, or the mind of his pretty young wife, that I entered most often? Is it surprising that I knew intimately what he thought of me, how he resented my existence, how he wished I had died instead of his first wife? It is from his mind I learned of her dying wish, for he lived with this guilt every day thereafter. Unfortunately, he buried the guilt beneath the lust he felt for another young woman, beneath the daily tasks that gave his life meaning, beneath the pride he took in his normal children, beneath the hatred he felt for me that I still reminded him of his first wife. Yes, he buried the guilt very deeply, but not so deeply that I couldn't find it and savor it, and use it to exact my revenge.

I started with the object of his current lust, his current wife. As they coupled, I would enter her mind and plant visions of other men there. It was not hard, since many of these visions were already there! It was easy to justify my intrusion into her soul, since I found her soul already corrupted. What I added was a little more reality. Instead of merely fantasizing another, she came to believe that the men she imagined were taking her. She would call out their names, scratch her nails into their backs, and arch her back to receive their thrusts.

And the stronger the passion she felt, the more certainly my birth father would know her perfidy. The greater her ecstasy, the more bitter his reaction, the more brutal his reaction. She paid dearly for her brief moments of pleasure with bruises that lasted for days, and eventually became an almost permanent aspect of her appearance.

The clan did not like this type of behavior. Unlike modern society which permits people to abuse each other with abandon, life in the clan was much more regulated and controlled. Such behavior was not acceptable, and my birth father found himself ostracized from more and more of the life functions of the clan. You no longer know how important that it; the closest you can come to such an understanding is to assume that society had the power to cut off your phone, television, mail, and shopping privileges, that while you are free to move around, you are not free to do anything. No one stops you -- they just don't do anything with you. You just don't know how powerful that kind of ostracism is. As I said earlier, we have given up an awful lot to be civilized.

Punishment rarely works the way it is intended. My birth father did not become a reformed man, he became a more vengeful man. He beat his wife even when I didn't force her to insult and humiliate him. I developed a sense of morality as I watched this interplay between them. I learned the incredible power I had over people, and I saw that it could be used for evil. In this I later learned that I differed from most Atmonians (Mathiya was an exception, of course). While almost all Atmonians learn this lesson early in their existence, they learn another lesson that seems to have a much greater impact on their morality. When you see hundreds of generations get born, live, and die within your lifetime, you lose the perspective that they are your peers and equals. You tend to regard them with the same individuality humans typically afford an ant or a cockroach. Perhaps if I had lived the ten to twenty thousand years the average Atmonian lived, I would be as indifferent to humans as most Atmonians are to their own host species.

I haven't lived that long, and the lessons I learned within my first few decades have remained with me for thirty-five centuries. I learned that it is wrong to manipulate people for your own pleasure; it is wrong to manipulate people simply to see them do things they do not want to do; it is wrong to manipulate people. Simply that.

When I met Liebergott, I was surprised to learn that this was one of the primary tenets of his philosophy and ethics. Liebergott was the longest-lived Atmonian. None of us could ever truly determine his age, but we estimated that it was the equivalent of two to three million earth years. He was two hundred times older than any other Atmonian, so old in fact that many of us believed that he was the last remaining member of the Father species -- the species that created us and scattered their seeds around the galaxy. Liebergott always denied this paternity. But I digress from Liebergott's ethics.

Liebergott always claimed that our powers, vast when compared to those exhibited by even the most advanced host species, did not make us gods and gave us no special rights in the universe. This is an incredible message to give to a race of beings who had powers that most of their host species ascribed to the gods -- the power to manipulate the basic forces of nature, to bend space and time, to create matter, to transform matter into energy. What more was there to being god, we would ask?

Compassion, he would answer. Understanding. Humility.

It was a concept of god that we always found hard to comprehend. To us, the definition of god was power.

To Liebergott, the definition of god was the absence of power.

It took me thousands of years to understand what he meant, even though I learned it within my first and second decades of life. It just took me centuries to realize that I had known the truth all my life and didn't understand it.

I tried to manipulate my birth father by stopping him from beating his wife whenever he started. In this I was successful. What power did he have against my will? Even at that young age, my powers were vast. But though I had powers beyond human comprehension, I didn't know how to use them. More importantly, I misinterpreted the behavior of a punished animal as an indication of its true feelings. I failed to think like my victim, so I failed to understand that my victim was working to defeat me.

If I had shown only the slightest degree of compassion, I would have become my birth father. Then I would have known that he knew he was being possessed by a demon and that he was developing his own defenses. He muted his thoughts when he suspected I would be controlling him. He feigned acquiescence to my will, lulling me into thinking that I was controlling him when in fact I wasn't.

It is hard to fool an Atmonian. He was the first and last person on earth to do it.

His demise came when I returned to their abode one evening. I hadn't possessed either of them for some time, devoting my attention to other individuals in the clan. But this evening, I decided to see how they were getting along.

I could float above them, sort of an invisible spirit or ghost. I had no form or substance in this state. My body lay back in my own hut, apparently in some sort of a dream state; my being, however, could roam the surface of the earth, as it did this evening.

When I entered their hut, I knew something was wrong. Normally, I can perceive the life forces that exist in a locality, much as most people can perceive something is wrong before they can decisively define what it is that's wrong. I went quickly to their sleeping area. The mats were stained red. The young wife lay sprawled on the woven blankets, her arms and legs spread akimbo. Her eyes were open, but stared at nothing. Her throat was slashed open, and the final tickles of blood edged down her throat to join the pool forming beneath her. He lay beside her, the stone knife still in his hand. He stared upward, not at anything in particular, but inadvertently in my direction.

"Hello demon spirit," he said. "I know you are here."

I was astounded. How could he know that? No one could perceive me. I felt fear for the first time in my life. But I did not run. I hated him too much to give him that satisfaction.

"Do you know me?" I asked.

"Of course," he replied. "You are the demon spawn that killed my wife. I should have killed you the moment you first breathed air, but I was foolish. I let you live. Are you going to kill me?"

I hesitated only a fraction of a second. "Yes, I am going to kill you, Father." I had never called him that, and I do not know why I did so then. I certainly did not regard him as my father. I did not know then, as I do now, that my true father or mother or whatever contributed its DNA to my existence, was some passing alien. Perhaps I did believe that he was my true father. Perhaps I wanted him to be my father. I don't know the answers to these questions, and over the centuries, I have had so many different answers to them that I no longer believe the questions have meaning.

"Then do so, Demon!" He held the knife in front of him, hilt outwards.

I thought about using his own hands to commit the act, but I rejected that idea. I wanted to kill him, to punish him for abandoning me. I didn't even consider punishing him for killing his young wife. What was she to me? Nothing. Even then, I had adopted the belief that what humans did to each other was their own business.

I took the knife from his hands. To him, or to anyone observing this scene, it would appear that the knife floated in the air. I waved the knife around, bringing it closer and closer to his throat or face or chest. To his credit, he did not flinch or pull back, but watched the slashing knife with contempt. I was still human enough to be infuriated by this, and it wasn't until decades later that I appreciated his courage.

The knife broke his skin in dozens of places. I had infinite control over the depth to which the knife cut, so I could slice away his flesh layer by layer. I could move the knife faster than the eye could see, so that within a blink, he had a hundred cuts all over his arms, face, and chest. His body became encased in a cocoon of dripping blood, slowly oozing from the multitude of cuts.

"Your tortures mean nothing to me, Demon. Are you afraid to kill me?"

Like a mortal, like a foolish, weak mortal, I fell victim to his ruse. With a scream of outrage, I plunged the knife into his heart, twisting it cruelly, until his heart was destroyed beyond recognition. He died almost instantly.

He died with a smile on his face. A smile that has haunted me for thousands of years.

He was dead, but my hatred of him still lived.

My hatred survived him for hundreds of years. Until it was replaced by a stronger hatred.

A hatred of myself.

You would think that a creature that has lived as long as I have would be infinitely smart. After all, I have seen all that there is to see in human affairs. I have seen things that humans have never even conceived. I have done things that are beyond the comprehension of humans.

Yet, the sad truth is that I am not much smarter than I was in my teenage years thousands of years ago.

This trait is not unique to me. The fact that we are Atmonians does not make us superior; it merely gives us superior powers. I have noticed the same trait among humans throughout history. The possession of a unique power or capability does not convey any kind of true superiority in terms of anything that is important: truth, wisdom, morality. The only superiority that any advantage has ever conferred is the ability to destroy more efficiently or effectively.

Those of you who know about Atmonians may object, "That is not true!" You will protest that Atmonians have the power to change the nature of the universe, to reverse time, to raise the dead, to create universes that don't even exist. True, some of us have the power to do that. I, for example, could manipulate this universe so that no human being ever perished. Everyone could have immortality. Or I could change the genetic structure of humans so that they could all fly like birds. Or I could kill every single being on Planet Earth and then resurrect them as if nothing had happened.

I could and have done all these things. They are meaningless.

The greatest Atmonian who ever existed is der Liebergott. He has a name, but none of us can truly interpret it, so we all call him the equivalent of "the Loving God." It is particularly appropriate in human interpretation, because the original concept of Jehovah was a vengeful and possessive god; the Greek and Hindu gods were all tainted by human frailties. It is only in modern times, when we stop believing in God, that we begin to view God as "loving."

No human that I have encountered has ever really met God, though I have met a great many who think they have. I have met godlike creatures, but I have never met God. I have met hundreds, maybe even a thousand races, many of which believe in God, and the same holds true for every one of them. We all tend to ascribe to God powers that we do not have.

Liebergott has more "powers" than any creature we have ever encountered. By Atmonian standards, he is a thousand, ten thousand times more powerful than the average Atmonian. He is clearly more powerful than Mathiya, more powerful than I am. If he were still alive, he probably would be more powerful than Sonli.

If any of us were as comparably smart as we were powerful, Liebergott would be the one. Perhaps it is because he had lived for several million earthyears, while the average Atmonian has only lived for a few tens of thousands. Perhaps it is because Liebergott lied to all of us for thousands of years and was really a member of the Father race. Perhaps it is because Liebergott lied to all of us for thousands of years and was really the Devil. We don't know and, frankly, don't care.

What I do know is that Liebergott taught us, and enforced among us, a simple concept. Power did not convey wisdom. The ability to create or destroy did not confer the right to create or destroy.

Only God has that right.

And none of us has ever seen God.

I stated that I stopped hating my father when I started hating myself.

It was not as simple as that. If never is that simple.

I went through a period of what I will call wildness, a period that ended with me killing my adopted father.

This is not a period of my life that I like recalling, lest of all recounting for all to peruse and judge. I resent being judged by beings I typically regard as inferior, but I have already stated that my superior powers do not make me superior. So I in fact have no right to have disdain of your judgement. You will probably judge me to be a monster. Well, you are right. I am.

After I killed my birth father, I began to engage in a lot of behavior that I now regard as juvenile and stupid. I would do a variety of things, such as take over the bodies of young men as they copulated with their mates. I would variously complete the act for them, stop it in the middle, change the act from one of love to one of hatred. I would foster and strengthen some relationships, destroy others, all based on my personal whim.

When I think back on this period of my life, this is the time when most of the most significant experiences of my life occurred. This is not so surprising, since it was during this period that I experienced many things for the first time, and first time events tend to be more memorable. We loose the sense of awe the second time around. But what surprises me about this observation is that many of the experiences I had later in my life, while equally unique and wondrous, had comparatively little impact on me.

The only way I can explain it is that my early experiences were those shared by most humans, while my later experiences were those that most humans could not even relate to. What made the biggest impact on me were those things that affirmed my humanity.

So what, you say. You who are human and truly do not know what it is to be non-human cannot understand how much it means to belong, to belong to a species, a race, a tribe, a clan, a group, a family.

I lost most of those affiliations thousands of years ago, and I have been searching for them ever since.

I lost them by destroying them... by abusing them... by taking them for granted.

I never tried to rule my tribe. In retrospect, I find that very strange. I had all this power, it would have been so easy. But then I still believed the myth that I was one of the humans that I fit into a grand scheme defined by powers greater than we were. I didn't realize that I was one of those powers. We didn't have the belief that power confers superiority. For me, and for my human hosts, that concept came later.

We believed that we were born to certain positions and roles, and only in rare exceptions did someone switch roles, as I had done. We did what we were called to do, and for some inexplicable reason, that calling was handed down from mother to daughter, father to son.

My calling was shaman, not village elder, so it never occurred to me to consider ruling over others.

I took my calling seriously, learning what my adopted father taught me, often going beyond what he taught me. For him, it was a matter of faith that all things had spirits. For me, it was a matter of fact. I, after all, could go inside the mind, or what passed for a mind, of any creature. I could become the essence of any living creature, live its life, see through its eyes, and interpret the universe through its being.

These powers, which I assumed were typical of most shamans, quickly elevated me to a position of power, respect, and fear in my village. Even beyond my village, they knew of me, though I had no reason to travel far.

Not physically, at least. I found other ways to travel.

I found that I could travel by floating through the air, flying much as a bird flew. Then I discovered something even more remarkable. If I had once been to a place, I could think of it in my mind and be there instantly. Finally, I learned how to go to places seen and known by animals or people. If a hunter could envision in his mind a place where game was plentiful, I could see the place also and be there instantly.

This ability proved useful in many ways.

I could find things people hid. There was no way they could hide anything from me, since they invariably would see its location in their minds. Even those who were smart enough to learn to deceive me were only partially successful at their deceptions. Invariably, they would lose control and I would succeed.

I became interested in wanderers and traders, people who had been to other places. I would search their minds for scenes they had seen and then go there myself. Where a journey had taken them days or weeks, I could traverse the distance in a blink of an eye.

I learned of places that others in my village could not even conceive: Crete, Egypt, Sumer. I saw races and people unlike any that we encountered in our hilly farming and hunting communities. In comparison with these strange and exotic peoples, the members of my tribe were pathetic and uninspiring. My respect for them diminished as my knowledge of the ways of others increased. I began to treat them with arrogant disdain. I would not answer their questions of the spirit world, telling them to find their own answers. I refused to help them heal their cuts and illnesses.

I began to mistreat them, to abuse them, to hurt them. When I possessed their bodies during lovemaking, I would become cruel and barbaric, harming the partner I was with. What I had done earlier paled by comparison.

The villagers knew I was responsible, though none could explain how. They complained among themselves, seeking a way to be rid of me, the monster in their midst. I let them talk. I knew what they were saying, since they could hide nothing from me. Since nothing could be hidden from me, they were no threat to me. When they crept up to my lodge to set it on fire and burn me alive, I was already out of it. I let them burn it, thinking I was inside. Their surprise at my appearance outside the village was my delight. Then I made them rebuild my lodge.

Twice more they attempted this futility. The second time, I remained in the lodge, confident that the flames would not harm me. I feigned agony but in the end, walked through the smoldering ashes unscathed and unharmed. I taunted them, confronted them with their perfidy. I made them feel the agony of the flames, even though there was no fire, for now I had the ability to create those thoughts in their own minds.

It was at this time that my adopted father tried to intercede and stop me from my barbarous behavior. I laughed in his face, made fun of his lack of power, his weakness and ineptitude as a shaman. He beseeched me to respect life, but I had no respect for life. He begged me to remember all he had taught me, but I told him that what he had taught me was nothing compared to what I had taught myself. He shook his head sadly and said that my powers were not what he was talking about, but the wisdom and goodness that he knew was in me.

It was then that I impaled him on a stake. His body wanted to die, but I kept it alive and kept him in torment.

For a day and a night, I forced the villagers to witness his pain and torment. No one could move from the circles of faces that gazed with numbed terror on this poor broken man.

Finally, becoming bored with my depraved game, I let him die. I let the villagers fall to the ground, exhausted.

As I looked around at them, I no longer saw hatred. I no longer saw fear. I saw something that went far beyond those puny emotions. I saw total revulsion, total alienation from what I had become. I saw a people who would do nothing for me and nothing to me. It was as though I did not exist, or I had become one of the elemental forces of nature.

It was then that I knew that I had lost all traces of humanity.

I let them return to their own lodges, to the remnants of their own lodges. I took my adopted father down off the stake. I repaired his body, and though I knew then how to bring him back to life, I did not know how to change this thoughts and memories of what had happened to him. I could not tolerate the thought that he would live and hate me, so I left him dead.

I took him far from the village, to a high mountain peak I had discovered. It was a non-descript mountain in the Roof of the World, a place I would come to many times in my life. I buried him in the frozen ground, high above the tree line, high above the level that most humans can travel and breathe. It was a perfect sanctuary for me, since I had no need to breathe as normal humans breathed.

I placed his body in the hard, cold ground, covered it up with soil, rocks, and ice. Decades later I would return to this spot and build a more proper tomb for him. Centuries later, Buddhist monks would find my little tomb and wonder about it, eventually making it a holy spot. Which it was.

I spent days or weeks in the frozen retreat. I had no shelter, no clothes, but I did not feel the cold, any more than I had felt the heat in the burning lodge. After all, I was now an elemental force -- what power did the other elemental forces have over me?

I spent that entire time trying to determine what I was.

I did not like the picture that emerged from my thoughts.

The image was horrible beyond belief. My simple villagers had no concept of what kind of a monster I was. Their vision was too limited. But I had seen further, seen more than they had. I could imagine creatures far more sinister than they had, and I was even beyond them. I developed an intense hatred of who I was, what I had become.

I decided to do something about it.

I took myself to the edge of the precipice. I had chosen this spot for its total inaccessibility. Part of its seclusion was guaranteed by a rocky wall thousands of feet in height. I peered over the edge of the precipice and could look straight down to the distant slopes below. I leaned a little further, and gravity took over. I began to flail as I plunged downward. My mind wanted to stop my fall, to propel my body through the air, but resisted this, and allowed myself to race towards the earth. I closed my eyes, savoring the furious pain of the impact as I crashed into the rocks below.

The impact came, the pain came -- then disappeared! Even as my body crushed itself into a pulp, it rebuilt itself within a few blinks of an eye.

I lay there, astounded. I should not have been, for had I not survived fire and cold? Had I not also survived knife cuts, arrows, and spear thrusts? Yes, but the knowledge of immortality had never presented itself so firmly to me as it did then.

Was there no way for me to die?

I knew at this time that I was no quite human. I did not think in terms of alien or non-human at that time. I was more inclined to think that I belonged to some unknown tribe or race of humans who were vastly different from those among whom I lived. Discouraged with my attempts to kill myself, I decided to search for others of my own kind.

My search techniques were quite simple. I probed the minds of those around me, searching for thoughts and memories of distant lands or distant peoples. Any strange concoction I discovered in their primitive minds became an object of inquiry for me. Relentlessly, I pursued every trace of a memory, teleporting myself to the location remembered or to the individual remembered, where I would repeat the process.

I must have spent years, maybe a decade crisscrossing Eurasia, delving down the Malay Peninsula, across the Indonesian archipelago to Borneo and Australia.

I lived along the banks of the Yellow River during the rule of the Shang Dynasty, until I grew weary of their superstitious practices. I headed up the China coast to North America, over to the Pacific Northwest, down the coast until I lived among the peoples of Maya. My questions were still not answered, so I kept going on, further and further southward. I ranged among the peaks of the Andes, through the jungles of the mighty Amazon, across the plains of Patagonia, until I stood at the tip of the continent. I built a refuge there, partly to live in, partly to honor my lost quest. I finally constructed a craft and floated with the currents across the Pacific until I reached lands I was once familiar with.

All told, my first journey of search lasted eighty summers and winters.

Finally, I returned to the village of my birth.

It no longer existed, certainly not as I remembered it. None of the people I counted as my peers or elders were still alive, save a couple who was so feeble that they hardly recognized me.

I had not aged more than a day since I left eighty years earlier. When I said that I had lived there so many years before, the villagers laughed at me, thinking me no more than a foolish young man.

I let them persevere in their delusion, since it suited my purposes.

I took up residence in my village a second time, determined on this occasion to make amends for my prior transgressions and misdeeds. I tended the ill, curing them with herbs when appropriate, with my mental abilities when herbs didn't seem to work. I did everything by subterfuge, coupling all my cures with chants, incense, and propitiation to the spirit world. At that early stage of my life, perhaps I too believed that my chants were an intrinsic part of the cure.

I was at an age where a man took a wife. As a shaman, I was not obliged to do so, but I felt the loneliness of my existence, and the companionship of a wife seemed appropriate. I selected a comely young virgin who had just reached puberty. Her name was Neve, meaning sparkling dawn, and to me she was the sparkling dawn. I had no family to broker with her family, so I bargained for myself.

Our first few years together were very tentative. I followed the customs of the time, possessing her on the conclusion of our wedding, then letting her live with her family until she was sufficiently old to establish her own home. It was a joyous time for me when she did arrive. I treated Neve with a compassion and tenderness I have rarely given to anyone since. She bore me four children, all healthy, all without my special abilities. She was the loyal helpmate, the passionate lover, the devoted mother.

There was but one flaw in our relationship.

As the years progressed, Neve grew up, developing into a beautiful young woman, then maturing into a striking matron, and finally beginning to show the signs of becoming an old woman.

I, however, remained youthful in appearance. My features were still the features of a young man.

I had not yet learned the trick of aging myself so that I fit in with the group I lived amongst.

The villagers first attributed my appearance to the magical knowledge I had as a shaman. Then, when it became apparent that I was truly not aging, they wanted me to ensure that they did not age also. This I could not do, or rather, I would not do. I know realize that I had the power to do as they asked. Indeed, I could keep all humanity young forever, but to what end? I already regarded myself as a monster and demon; why should I make others into what I detested?

There was one among all of them who never once asked me for immortality. Neve knew that I was not aging, knew it with a certainty that no one else had. She knew just as certainly that she was aging, and that the day would come when she would die while I still lived, apparently younger than our children's children.

It was on the birth of our first-born's second child that she brought the subject up with me.

"RonWil, you must leave soon."

"I am contented here, Neve, why do you say that?" Though I could have read her thoughts, I had never done so, nor have I with any of my consorts since that day. I waited for her to speak.

"I know you are different, my husband. There are some who fear your differences, though I know that if they knew you as I know you they would not fear you. But each day that passes increases the chances that their fears would transform into some form of violence."

I laughed. "I do not fear them, Neve. There is nothing they can do to hurt me."

Her eyes saddened. "Perhaps not, RonWil, but in the process of attempting to hurt you, they will themselves become hurt, perhaps not physically, but in their hearts and souls they will become less than they are. Their jealousy of you and your gifts would cause them to become evil and destructive. And that is something I know you do not want."

I had never given this much thought, but her words, naive and innocent, set me to thinking. Could my very existence cause people to harm themselves? Was it my essence that caused evil to exist? Would not the evil exist even if I did not exist?

I thought long and hard about what Neve said. I asked her what I should do. She said that I should make love with her one last time, then leave the village forever.

That night, as we lay in each other's arms, we both thought that was our plan.

And while I left the village the next day, it was not as Neve and I envisioned. I left, not to escape the attentions of my fellow villagers, nor to fulfill the requests of a woman who loved me with all her soul.

No, I left because I found another of my kind.