Colby Cinders and the Life She Starts Remembering

Colby Cinders and the Life She Starts Remembering Colby goes to Dorian Island with a boyfriend who wants her to feel more connected to her heritage. She mostly wants a vacation. She's been having horrible dreams, she's tired, and the place makes her uncomfortable. Her friend Talia tells her she doesn't have to turn into somebody else just because Leo hoped the trip would mean something to her. I appreciated that conversation, especially knowing where Dark Shaman takes her afterward. Before all the blood and spirits, Colby is trying to explain a feeling she can't make herself have. She knows her ancestors suffered. She doesn't feel personally connected to it yet, and she barely remembers her father. Major spoilers for Dark Shaman #1–4, including the ending. The dreams get worse. Colby sees violence that happened long before she was born, hears a voice telling her to wake up, and starts recognizing things she shouldn't know. Meanwhile, a shaman has returned to the island, the weather has changed violently, and the animals attacking people are part of something much worse than a freak storm. Colby tries to warn her friends. At first, nobody has a particularly good reason to understand what she's saying. They've seen her become unresponsive, and they're worried about what's happening to her. Then the deaths make it harder to dismiss her warnings. The story is careful about one distinction I don't want to lose. Leo is Seminole. Colby's connection here is to the Timucua. When the others look to him for answers, he points out that the traditions aren't interchangeable. Caring about his heritage doesn't make him an expert on hers, and it certainly doesn't prepare him for this particular supernatural disaster. Colby's own answers come from remembering another life. She was the chief, and the shaman was her brother. They had grown apart as the chief made alliances and the shaman became more isolated. When the settlement was attacked, both lives ended in ways that left the shaman trapped between life and death, holding on to spirits and searching for the brother he couldn't find. That brother had gone on to be reborn as Colby. There's another part to the relationship that makes it even stranger. The shaman's own surviving bloodline led to her birth. Colby is his descendant and the reincarnation of his brother. Those are two different connections happening at once, and the last issue makes both important. Remembering doesn't turn the situation into an easy victory. She takes ceremonial objects from the museum, and when Leo asks about protection, she explains that they help her remember. He picks up an axe. It's a fairly blunt picture of the position they're in: she's trying to recover enough of a previous life to understand her opponent, while he's looking for something that might keep them alive long enough to do it. The shaman wants the chief to answer for the past. Colby can acknowledge the mistakes without accepting what he's doing to people now. The original attackers are long dead. The people being torn apart on the island aren't going to give him the life he lost. Then Leo is badly injured, and Colby makes the most disturbing decision in the story. The shaman claims the souls of the people he kills. She kills Leo herself so that he won't be taken that way. The comic treats it as saving his soul, but it still means she has to end the life of the man who refused to leave her. Afterward, the spirits begin turning toward her. She tells them their souls don't belong to the shaman or to anybody else. Releasing them costs her own life. She closes with her brother, lightning strikes, and the bodies fall as the spirits emerge. It's an extremely dark ending to a trip that began with Leo wanting to show her where she came from. Colby does recover that connection, but she has to decide what to do with it. She refuses to let a shared history become permission to keep hurting people, even when the person demanding that loyalty was once her own brother.