Our Infinite Fates

by Laura Steven

Such a simple thing, it would be, to bicker over what to eat for dinner. Such an ordinary pleasure so many took for granted. All I wanted was a life with him. All I wanted was a life. And yet here I was, viciously plotting against him.

“This is a bit much, Evelyn. Even for you.”

I should have hated him. I should have hated the person in front of me. I should have wanted to cross the room and punch him in the face. I should have wanted to hang him from the rafters with the very rope I’d used to restrain Ceri. I should have wanted to devour the world with my rage.

Battlefields and asylums, olive groves and caravels, the whole world a backdrop for our doomed love, for our infinite fates.

It was Arden. Arden was here, with me. He had been here for years. Watching, caring. It made me feel vulnerable, but also comforted. I had not suffered alone.

“I know.” His eyes fluttered shut, long lashes brushing his skin. “Fuck, I know, all right? But at least we won’t be around to watch her go.”

Bruh

And with you … it doesn’t matter to me how you look, what form you take.” I tapped the top of his cane. “You’re just you.”

As Arden withdrew the inevitable knife, her final words had been: “Until we meet again, my love.”

“So would you like to spend that time falling in love, only to destroy me anyway?” I asked, heat rising in my belly. “Or shall we get it over with now?”

Ceri’s eyes widened. “So you’re threatening to murder her now?” Arden’s gaze snapped to Ceri. “Oh, it’s not a threat. I am going to murder her.”

Sure, he was also a person in his own right, but a thousand years in this world had taught me that we only truly exist in relation to the ones we love.

Apparently, wailing about a supernatural curse and immortal murders and the semi-conviction that you are a ghost does not a sane person make. Augusta, realizing that I was shut away out of her reach, had had herself committed a month later for melancholia—a common affliction of poets.

“I trust Dylan, and I trust you.” She cupped her hands to her suddenly rosy cheeks. “Oh, it’s so lovely. You and Dylan!”

Everything in me hurt. If only this were real. How many times over the centuries had I wished our love for each other were as simple as this? As simple as a mother’s soft approval, as firelight on our faces as we kissed by a hearth, as a thousand tiny pleasures and kindnesses adding up to an entirely ordinary love story? But our love story was not like that. It was blood and pain and death, an awful cycle doomed always to repeat.

If we turned eighteen, it would ruin us.

“Fate brought us together this time. Not I.”

“So, theologically speaking, we should not exist.” The idea was profoundly lonely, that our existence fell outside the beliefs of most of the world’s population. It made me feel wrong, somehow. Shunned by the gods, broken in a way that could not be mended by worship or prayer.

I wanted—oh, how I wanted—to feel our existential pain melt away beneath his touch. Truth be told, I had wanted it for centuries. I had burned for it. And centuries were a long time to spend burning.

For the thousandth time, I longed to ask him why he did this to us over and over again, but I knew he would shut down. There would be no answers. Not today, and perhaps not ever. But it was comforting to know he too agonized over the how.

Everything in me softened. The soul I loved was still in there. He was not as unfeeling as he pretended to be. The walls he had built around himself only kept the emotions gated inside—it didn’t stop them from existing altogether.

A stiff beat. Then: “You were right. Siberia hurt too much.” There it was. Something real at last. My arms yearned to hold him. To share this mutual pain.

A tear slid down my cheek unbidden. I couldn’t remember it forming, couldn’t remember the point at which my body had decided to cry. “I miss you so much.”

It’s beautiful, Arden. All of it. But that part broke me. You don’t have to do this to yourself. You are allowed to feel warmth.”

“Arden, if you don’t come to me right this second, I swear to god I will yank on this cuff until my wrist bleeds. I will gnaw my actual hand off. Do you really want to see me go full beaver on myself?”

He pressed his eyes closed. “We got married, once. Do you remember?”

“So why do you do it?” I asked, out of habit more than anything.

Shes frying me

“I did write some particularly angst-filled poetry in those years. But keeping my distance is not just to protect myself. It’s to protect you too. That night in the trenches, when I told you I would lay my body over yours, war after war after war, life after life after life. This is me doing that. You deserve to live the fullest eighteen years you can in every incarnation without the complication of loving me. You deserve a quick and painless death, not devastating poison in a frozen grave.” A ragged breath. “If that means swallowing my emotions, so be it.”

coral. I wanted to make pancakes with him on a Sunday morning, his folk music playing in the background, the window cracked open to let in the fresh scent of the moors. I wanted us to be ordinary. Was that so much to ask?

“I love you,” he moaned, as though it was the most painful thing he had ever said, and it was. He pressed his forehead to mine, and pure, raw emotion surged through me. His breath was on my lips, his red-rimmed eyes searching mine in plea, or prayer, or something altogether more devastating. “And I will always be yours. But I gave up the right to call you mine a long time ago.”

“Arden,” I pleaded, barely able to see through my sobs. I had him. I had him. He was in my grasp, in the notches between my ribs. “Come back. Come back.” But he didn’t. He laid his body once more on the hard, unforgiving floor, his bare back facing me, his racked shoulders finally stilled.

“It’s overwhelming, loving like this,” I said weakly, my chest aching and aching. “My heart feels like an open wound. I don’t understand how everyone just … walks around with the knowledge that everyone they love will soon be dead. I look at my sister, my mum, and it’s all I can see. Inevitable loss. I look at them and I think, I love you so much, and we will one day lose each other forever, and I might die from the pain of it. So I try to pull myself back, to detach, to keep a healthy distance, like you do, but I can’t. I can’t.”

“And part of me believes I’m tempting fate just saying this—if I show the universe how much I love my family, they’ll be taken from me in spite. Maybe that’s all love is, in the end. An endless tempting of fate.”

I sounded mad, I knew I did, but it was flowing out of me, a millennium of love and loss. The constant games we play with ourselves to try to keep our loved ones safe. The thousand tiny b...

thundering in my ears. I was about to have a thousand years of questions answered. “I’ll tell you,” he whispered, and he looked younger than I’d ever seen him. Innocent and afraid and so unsure, a millennium of conviction crumbling to the earth. “I’ll tell you everything.”

“It’s hard, remembering things you don’t.” He wrapped an arm around me, then the length of his scarf, until we were cocooned. “The very foundations of us—the moments in which our love was forged—just don’t exist to you.”

ones. I, on the other hand, possessed the single worst trait it was possible for a devil to possess: empathy.

“All sacrifices are, in the end,” I replied. “But humans make them regardless.”

“I can save your sister, but you must suffer immensely for it.” His eyes narrowed. “I am already suffering.”

and I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Arden, and I could not look at him, this soul I had destroyed, this soul whose love for his sister I had turned into something monstrous, this soul I’d spent decades chastising for not caring enough about his family. “I’m so sorry.”

“Because I wanted to tell you what I’d inadvertently discovered the first time I killed you. That if I killed you, we both died, and the clock would essentially reset. We would be born into new lives and have another eighteen years before we were torn back to the Underrealm. And we could keep doing that forever. We wouldn’t have to reap anyone, nor would we ever go back to the hot coals, as long as we kept dying at the right time. No matter how much I resented you, it seemed a mutually beneficial solution.”

“You didn’t remember.” He shook his head, as though the memory still confused and troubled him. “You didn’t remember anything, in those early lives. Your memory seemed to be wiped entirely with every fresh incarnation.

And god … I hated you for it. Because I hated you so much for the miserable existence you’d sentenced us to—I was beginning to understand, then, that I would never again be able to live or love the way others did—and you just did not remember. And in that moment, nothing could’ve felt worse than being in your debt. My pride wouldn’t allow it.”

Even if I’d explained the situation to you, right there in front of the guard, I very much doubted you would have raised a blade to my throat. Your heart was too good, too pure. And I did not understand it one bit, given the way we began.”

Surely you must know I would sacrifice myself a thousand times over to rid the world of this evil.”

“Now that you understand everything, we can just live out our eighteen years in various lives and mutually die when the time comes. There’s no reason we can’t keep doing this forever.”

“Why do you have to be so good?” he asked, pained. “Why can’t you be selfish, just this once?”

We had been farmers and bakers and soldiers, jewellers and thieves, royals and rogues, sons and daughters, the shape of us changing with every life but not the heart of us.

We were love and want, pure and raw and perfect. How could the soul fated to kill me be the one to make me feel so alive?

“No matter what happens next,” he whispered, the shuddering finally slowed to a breathless halt, “I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.”