Our Infinite Fates

by Laura Steven

“Like the sway of the sea and the tug of the tides, love is a moving, eternal thing.

“Like the sway of the sea and the tug of the tides, love is a moving, eternal thing.

Ten Hundred Years of You.

Ten Hundred Years of You.

“Why?” The question floated out on a plume of breath. “Not the big why. But why eighteen?” “We can’t live to … We can’t. It would ruin us.”

“Why?” The question floated out on a plume of breath. “Not the big why. But why eighteen?” “We can’t live to … We can’t. It would ruin us.”

That’s all I want. You. Alive. With me.”

Almost everyone I had ever loved was dead, and the hurt never went away; I just learned to exist alongside it.

In truth, a part of me believed that everyone I’d ever loved would come back to me again in another life, in another form. They wouldn’t necessarily know we had met before, and nor would I, but that energy would still thrum between us, that recycled love, that historic bond.

that love was a physical force, and it was never wasted. Once it was called out into the universe, it would echo back to us forever.

“My love for you could fill an ocean, Evelyn.” There was an awful resignation to her tone. “But it can’t stop the tide of time.”

It means endless compassion, a deep empathy for others.”

“You have faith in all of humanity. You have faith in love. Please, have faith in me. I do this to protect you. Do you understand that? That I would lay my body over yours, war after war after war, life after life after life?”

A world of white bone and falling ash, of pleading and begging so animalistic I couldn’t tell where it came from. Pain so large it took on a form of its own. Pain so absolute it was like the darkest pitch of night, like a black hole in the universe.

And more importantly: Why did I forget and he did not?

“Is that what happened to us, Arden? Did we make a deal with the devil? And is the valuable thing we sacrificed … adulthood? Our futures?”

If a hero is someone who will give up love to save the world, then a villain is the reverse. Someone who will give up the world to save love.

Arden hunched to his knees, sank his head into his palms, and let out a pained roar. I couldn’t tell what emotions were spilling over—frustration, hatred, terror—only that they were.

Which would suggest, then, that a soul is born at first breath.”

For Hindus, souls are infinite.

Their energy has existed since the dawn of time, and they’re reincarnated from one life to another. Thus, all souls are bound to saṃsāra—the infinite cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.”

My heart is a haunted house surrounded by a moat of my own digging, kept empty of warmth so that I will not miss it come winter.’

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.

“I love you,” he moaned, as though it was the most painful thing he had ever said, and it was.

“And I will always be yours. But I gave up the right to call you mine a long time ago.”

Dragon gates painted red and gold. Lotus leaves on rolling rivers. Candles flickering in stone churches. Forests so dense they obliterated the sky. Greek tragedies in wine-drunk amphitheaters.

I have to kill you, in every life. That is our true destiny. The true reason we were born within moments of each other. Gods-fated.”

Listening to friends argue in coffee shops because they both want to pay, both want to treat the other.”

“Everything I do, everything I have ever done, is to protect you. Shielding you from my emotions is to protect you, because they’re so fucking overwhelming that I can barely deal with them myself.”

“God, if I’d just said no, back in Lundenburg. If I’d just … but then there wouldn’t be us. And which is worse, really?”

“When I witness suffering, it is as though I feel it in my own body.” “Empathy.” Sun Tao tsked. “The human curse.”

I looked at her, and she looked at me, eyes strained and watery, and she nodded without nodding, pleaded without pleading, something rich and complex knotting between us, and I threw myself to the ground beneath the bamboo, and as the pain rained down on my back I knew, somehow, somewhere, I had felt such agonies before, had felt the skin and flesh on my back

felt the

furious stripes of pain all the way to the bone. And I also knew that somehow, somewher...

Love had been my downfall, as it always was.

Maybe that’s all love is, in the end. An endless tempting of fate.”

“It’s an unstoppable force, and our love is an immovable object.”

“Sometimes I think it was seeded from the start. Decided by the very hand that wrote the universe.

You laid down your body for me, for my father, even though I was then a stranger. I had lived a few by then and never before seen such selflessness. Such goodness.”

“The very foundations of us—the moments in which our love was forged—just don’t exist to you.”

But my most compelling theory is that we made a deal with the devil.”

“We didn’t make a deal with the devil, Evelyn. You are the devil.”

I would never die, for I was not mortal. The suffering would be agonizing and eternal.

empathy. I felt human pain in my own flesh and sinews. Felt my heartbeat like theirs in a place there should have been no heart at all. Almost as though I had a soul of my own.

Foolish, I thought with a devil’s distance. It is all so foolish, to love and be loved, knowing it will always end like this, and yet I yearned for it more than I yearned to breathe.

Now her sacrifice was for nothing.”

“All sacrifices are, in the end,” I replied.

but only if enough is sacrificed in return.”

“Your soul.”

You will reap souls.”