Omega rode the souls of the dead and they rode her. the distinction was not particularly strong for a shaman. Most people didn't get that. The average person on Terra could use the choir, heavily sanitized and tuned to make the sharing of knowledge easy.

The work of generations of expert singers to lay down the foundations of the unified voice of all of terra. Laced in their souls and further supported by a skeleton of crystal lattices used to store data and reflect and repeat.

Totems learned and crafted to precision needed to amplify, organize and control the quality of choir.

Most of the midland countries were full of children who could not even hope to share a simple sight without a totem to format it and translate it for them. And they took this refined and easy manner to the old and refined science of shamanism.

A lot of hopeful shamans at the academy treated dead souls like you would some data store on the choir network. And they utterly failed to even show the slightest glimmer of potential and failed out of the program.

Some thought you had to force the dead, others thought you appeased them, some tried to beg, some attempted to make praise.

Those found all of those methods were wrong, those that tried in spite of the teachers and lectures stating otherwise also were dropped from the program.

Of those that got over that first hurdle? That learned that to share a soul was to first find what was within you that was the same? That to share was to be? Those that realized that first step then often faltered on the second lesson.

They could hold a soul together within them sure, primitive humans had been doing that for all of recorded history.

But as with most of those original shamans they ended up with muddled reults. No coherent knowledge, no usable skills. They would take on the soul of a master musician and find themselves in anguish as they discovered they were tone death.

A sculptor's soul would find the hands available to them useless for their work.

Omega had struggled mightily with herself and her soul riders and steeds back then. Frustrations in herself and frustrations in them twining in a way that kept her in the program despite faltering at this next and least palatable of lessons.

The one that nearly any hopeful that wanted to be a shaman was desperately trying to avoid acknowledging.

There were no shortcuts.

The skill of the musician was not in the soul, but in the hands and the blood. In the body and the brain if what Pylo had shown them to be correct. A lot of professors and armchair necromancers were going to be very upset to find that out. Omega had time to make peace with it.

But what had made her top of her class, better than even some of the esteemed shamans that had reincarnated four generations in a row honing their craft?

Omega had discovered a cheat. It was not precisely a new trick but it was one that was poorly formalized. Many of the third or fourth lived people in the academy had learned it without realizing it and never wrote it down.

There was a secret in plain sight for anyone who had died and been made anew in a second life, and the subtle little whisper would grow more obvious and blatant with every rebirth until you forgot you never knew it.

Omega however was hoping to write it down and teach it to Aleph some day. The secret of it and how to be a master of a shaman and to skill share to a degree almost unprecedented.

For although the soul might not know what the hands had learned. The soul would remember the story of how the hands had learned.

Omega when she realized that had spent months with barely any sleep riding herself to exhaustion. She would grab every master spirit at the academy and rather then try and pull what they did not have she would play with her own limbs and fingers and hands the practices and trials they had.

When she was young it had not mattered what.

Anything, everything, so long as it was the spirit of an esteemed and deeply lived master of the craft she would ride them and be ridden and let her muscles burn, her tendons ache and her eyes itch with strain. She would let the frustration and annoyance burn in her, share with them their abject horror at having lost what they had once had and then turn and hone that burning desire to rebuild what was lost.

Over and over again.

She burned a year of her life like that. Then she got selective, she noticed patterns, she found master teachers and educators, souls that had the scattered pieces needed to know how to train the inexperienced.

She drank deep of those lives, quite a lot of herself was blurred in that time, in some ways she suspected that she spent maybe one hour out of a hundred actually being just herself.

But when the proverbial dust settled she was a master shaman. She was one of THE master shamans of terra, some random girl from the outskirts. No ordained reincarnation from a great ascendant spiritualist. Just a simple soul that had mostly lived her lives as farmers and house wives and craftsmen.

The politics of the situation had been less than ideal and she suspected if she had not wanted to be on a colony expedition with every fibre of her being there would have been motions made to force her onto one anyway.

It was an embarrassment that she could pull random souls from any walk of life as far as they could determine without having lived a hundred lives to build the common ground.

There had been rumors she was really a secret reincarnate from an ancient civilization of supreme shamans, who had willingly culled her own conscious memory. Conspiracy theories and idiocy all of them.

It was just learning the pieces needed for a soul to build what they themselves lacked. It left her a wreck without that guiding attention of another to share the skill. Without them she was a mess, her head and body riddled with fragments of knowledge. Frayed abilities waiting for their other halves, waiting to be woven into complete selves.

She had made sure, once she consciously realized what she was doing and made the connection, to recurse upon it. Reiterating this very process, mapping out what part were in her brain and wich in her soul, and making sure that the steps to relearn this cheat and these meta-skills needed to make the most of it were themselves burned into her through mantra and drills so she could retrace the steps during her next childhood.

Omega sighed and leaned back considering the blue and white sky around her. Quarti was busy mixing a wooden tub full of a thick musty sludge. She had enough with the ‘poor contacts’ and ‘muzzy interface’ of the modern meditation pods.

And it’s not like they were strapped for resources thanks to Pylo opening up what stores Tunie had for their use. All of this though was drifting through her head without sticking, pushed aside by a much wider and bigger thought.

She had been riding with educators, teachers, experts of numbers. And she was getting a sense of deja vu with Elsie. It had been months and she was getting a familiar sense of unease in her meat and flesh. Not from the souls that were at the moment as much a part of her as her own. But from her own meat and blood memory.

From inside her brain and alongside the more ephemeral and softer story of her own soul.

What Elsie was doing with her, and Quarti and Aleph was familiar.

Disturbingly familiar.

It looked random if you watched from the thick of it. It was scattered and fragmented, random shocks of passion, moments of dullness and repetition. She was suspecting it. It was on the fringe of her fingertips.

She shuddered, and felt an echo of a horror and nausea. When she was first pulling her first ‘refinement’ of self training she had noticed something that drew her crazed attention. Those souls that had survived war had terrible wounds in their memories. Things which would not come undone from them.

They could recall things sharper than a human had any right to. Alas every memory of that kind was an absolute horrific nightmare of trauma. But she had dug and gone looking. Sought out the most broken and bereft souls. Those that wanted to starve, that begged to be forgotten that were meandering away from people seeking the cold isolation of forgotten places.

Those that had suffered so many terrible moments of war and torment and horror that it was all that was left of their souls.

She had ridden with those souls in a fevered madness to know them, to take apart how they worked, why their memories were so special that they could vividly bring her limbs to action, her eyes to look. Where masters of other arts could not.

One had left her coming out of a fugue holding the broken off leg of a table as a bludgeon in a way she had never known how too.

The trauma of those things mostly faded she thought. Mostly didn't linger and poison her own soul. Her peers and instructors had taken it in stride as well. Shamans delved into strange lives. It was not strictly encouraged but it was not out of the ordinary.

But she read and rode and was ridden and yes!

Quarti was sitting next to her watchingher.

She turned to look at the ancient oracle who nodded.

“You spotted it then? What they are doing? Awakened to it?”

Omega nodded and coughed a bit to clear her dry throat.

That is why Elsie’s classes were familiar. She had been doing something like it to Aleph before, and to a lesser extent she had been doing the most terrible and severe version of it to herself.

“It’s conditioning, this isn't education, it's not teaching us, its trying to shape us. Associative reinforcement, environmental cues, high intensity emotion for keystone moments, breaking down resistance, establishing patterns, This isn't knowledge we are supposed to work at with our minds. It's going straight for the deeper limbics!”

Quarti nodded and looked up at the fake sky.

“Just exactly what was offered, Precisely what was said. Called it augment. Called it surgery. Nice glory hips ship mistress dressed it up friendly for us though. Made it feel safe and okay wise. Dressed it up familiar. Nothing like. Been putting us all to the knife. Just secret knives, gentle knives. But cutting at us all the same. Trying to slice and splice us into new shapes”

Omega’s head burned, she needed to let go of the souls, too much and too many held in flesh not meant for tripling up the connections like that. She was exhausted.

“You already knew, you went along anyway? How didn't I see this? I thought, was it... Jeeze has it been like this from the beginning?! Why did you let them?! Quarti! Why have you LET them try this?!”

Quarti was staring at the fake blue of a fake sky with fake clouds. It felt real, it felt like they were seated in the sky of Terra. It even smelled like the mountains.

“Big beautiful blue babe... We need this. We are all of us soft and wiggling meat for whats about and out here. They are cutting us and twisting us and doing it as nicely and sweetly as can be. And mean every best for us by it. They torment us and mean the BEST by it blue.”

Omega fell back into the cool breathing wind of the ‘cloud’. Quarti's words were soft still.

“Yon rest and not let it bother you just yet big blue. We talk when ya fresh and cheered and the big ole realization is not so heavy and new. We talk and look and see if the cuts be right and the shape we being made is one we agree too.”

She shuddered a little then turned to peer into the black sphere. Peering into the window upon the reef. Watching something vast and terrible devouring what looked like a tree but she suspected from previous experience was the size of worlds.