Our Infinite Fates

by Laura Steven

Odin was the groom’s favorite god; he found himself inexplicably drawn to the interweaving of past, present, and future, to the perpetual knot of life and death and rebirth.

“Like the sway of the sea and the tug of the tides, love is a moving, eternal thing. Let us not be afraid of the wax and the wane, the rise and the fall, the eternal undertow. Each time our souls meet, let us submerge our bodies in the bright blue cold, and let the waves make us anew.” A tear slid down the apple of her cheek. “I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.”

The last thing they saw before the world blinked out was the red ribbon of fate still binding their wrists.

I missed him before I was even gone, a kind of preemptive grief I’d grown accustomed to over the last several centuries. In a futile attempt at self-preservation, my mind rehearsed loss before death closed its fingers, as though practicing it would lessen the blow. It never did.

Then, as though our lifestrings were woven fatally together, my own pulse waned.

“‘… and I thought of how it feels to hold you, each season of you,’” she proclaimed, holding a leather-bound poetry book in her pale hands. “‘Our love blossoming afresh, year after year, century after century, new flowers from old roots, an eternal seed from which life will always bloom.’”

I shook my head numbly. “I’m not on social media.” Not just out of some vague sense of self-preservation but out of principle. Over the past lifetime I had seen the way it eroded democracy and gamified conflict, the way it splintered attention spans and polarised opinions to dangerous extremes, the way it devalued art and fed the leeches of artificial intelligence, the way it jacked adrenaline and manipulated dopamine and narrowed human awe to a singular flickering point.

Silence settled around us, pulling the air taut. When digging into the permafrost to make a grave, you had to be careful not to hit a pocket of methane or it’d cause an explosion severe enough to crater the ground. This conversation felt like that: the quiet devastation of digging a grave, made infinitely worse by the threat of detonation.

I begged my mouth to finish the question, to stay awake long enough to hear this new answer, but I was slipping, slipping, slipping, and there, in a grave colder than Mars, next to the soul I’d loved for a hundred lives and lost in every one, we took our final breath beneath the indifferent stars.

An image came to me, raw as a wound and deep as a well: our hands fastened together with a ribbon of red. But the picture vanished as soon as it came, leaving behind an empty grave. Fallow earth.

Portugal. That was where I’d heard the word saudade before. It wasn’t easily translatable. A kind of longing, a nostalgia, a sense of incompleteness, not just romantic but existential, rooted in the very fabric of our people. It had suited Arden. Portuguese was the tongue of melancholic dreamers, of lonely poets.

“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.”

If I could get inside and search Ceri’s flat, maybe I’d find the ironclad proof I was looking for. In fact, I was sure I would. Because that’s the thing about humans—we leave traces of our souls everywhere, as unique and identifying as fingerprints.

“Ruthful, the original. From the thirteenth century, or around then. How can you have forgotten? It means endless compassion, a deep empathy for others.” His jaw was taut and his gaze was urgent. “I hope you never lose that bottomless capacity for love. I hope you hold on to what makes you human.”

There was much to condemn about the internet, but there was no denying how flint-fast it made the art of connection. How easy modernity had made it to declare love—a funny video shared with a friend, real money sent to virtual coffee funds, a snap of the flowers your grandmother picked from her garden. The everyday tenderness of “I saw this and thought of you.”

“I understand. And you know, sometimes it’s good not to preemptively agonise over loss too much. Practising grief is of no real benefit to anyone. Losing a loved one is not something you can rehearse—at least, not in a healthy way. It’s better to enjoy the time you have with her.”

“It’s impossible to have bravery without fear. Bravery is picking up the fear and carrying it alongside you, rather than allowing it to block the path.”

life gives us grief like mounds of wet clay, ripe and heavy beneath our reluctant hands, and with it we can do one of three things. we can carry it with us wherever we go, stooped beneath its awful weight, we can shove it to the back of a wardrobe, buried beneath an old waxed coat, or we can make something beautiful, and let it live on beyond us.

I walked down the ward corridor in a daze, the lights too bright, the emotions too big, my breathing too loud in my head, and I thought that hospitals heard more prayers than churches ever did.

“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.”

A wedding, a home, a child of our own, all the quiet rituals and shared stories of ordinary, long-lasting love.

even when we are but bones in the earth my eternal heart will love you still, for even when a star does perish its light burns on for millennia