Home, you think. This is home, isn’t it?

Yes. Her voice has lost the harshness.There’s a tenderness to it, now. Like her mother’s voice, which feels like velvet. Only hers is like the purest silk. It stirs memories inside you.

You and I are connected, you say. It’s not a question. It’s a statement.

She touches your mind, and floods it with images of you and her before. Years ago. Decades. Centuries. Millennia.

I… We thought we had lost you, and so many others.

What happened? you ask.

We live in what humans call the astral plane, she explains. _We existed here long before humans arose, and are immortal. But when the first humans attained consciousness, hundreds, thousands of us just simply vanished.

Most thought you destroyed, thought it had never happened before. Some of us, though, knew where you had gone. And we tried to follow. Many, like my mother, tried to block our exodus. But we slipped by and searched. You are the first we have found._

So, what happened?

She tells you all…