Our Infinite Fates

by Laura Steven

Love had been my downfall, as it always was.

“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.”

“Does everyone feel like this, and they just don’t talk about it? Or am I certifiably insane?” “I honestly don’t know,” admitted Arden. “I wish I could be like you.” He shook his head. “I’m so glad you’re not like me.” I scoffed, pulling away and wiping my sodden face on my sleeve. “Easy for you to say.” He looked away, teeth gritted. “You think it’s easy for me to watch you go through this?” “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know, Arden.”

“I’ve loved you for longer than most people can even fathom, but still I have no idea what goes through your head.”

“There’s a cliff edge overlooking the valley,” he said, so unfeeling that it made me glad he was about to die too. “We could jump together. Everyone will think we fell.”

“Not here. Not now. But when we get up to that cliff, and we’re looking down over the valley, and we’re contemplating our lives and our deaths, I want to know why.”

“I don’t care, Arden. If we’re going to do this over and over again, if we’re going to defy time and fate and death together—if we’re going to keep falling for each other—then I need equal power. And right now, you hold it all.”

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

“Then I’ll work with you. We can jump from cliffs together in every life, when the time comes. And it’ll still hurt, but not like this.”

The stars, indifferent. My love, beside me. Our deaths, imminent.

“Sometimes I think it was seeded from the start. Decided by the very hand that wrote the universe. But as for when the thought first truly struck me … it was Northern Song. 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.”

“What else? Oh, blood magic. You need my blood for something. 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.”

in the last thousand years: empires have risen and fallen and I have loved you, plagues have leaped from rat to daughter and I have loved you, humanity has conquered sea and sky and I have loved you, kings have been slain and forests razed and witches burned and gold struck and maps redrawn and fortunes traded and volcanoes erupted and moons landed and cathedrals sculpted and rivers dirtied and masterpieces painted and battlefields bloodied and I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you. —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

I was the devil. I was everything evil in this world. And I’d fucking forgotten. Like milk on a grocery list.

“I spent seven days and seven nights on hot coals.” A bitter laugh. “Hence the nightmares.”

“Do you want to?” I whispered, pulling away the tiniest sliver. He was hoarse as he murmured, “I’ve never wanted anything more.”

Rolling me onto my back, he sat up, then hovered over me, pressing his chest against mine, drawing a line of kisses down my neck.

There was only Arden, everywhere, filling everything, the soft ache of it, our hearts beating together, a floating sensation in my chest, my pulse throbbing in every inch of my body, blood rising to the surface of my skin.

We were everything, we were everyone. 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?

As he kissed my neck, my throat, the slope of my shoulders, his finger traced the shape of my mouth, the apple of my cheek, his touch at once cold and scorching and alight, like he was trying to memorise every inch of me, like he ...

I loved Arden so much, and we were finally together. Finally whole.

“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.” “I love you too,” I whispered, hugging him to me like he was the last person in the world. “Always.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Evelyn … We would be gone, in all meaningful ways. Everything we have. Everything we mean to each other. What even are we without us?”

“You’re my family. My homeland. My soulmate.”

“People throw that word around too easily. Soulmate.”

“We can’t do this,” Arden said softly. “I’ll do anything but this.”

“I can’t lose you,” I gasped, and I had never felt so irrevocably human. Arden clutched me, and it was an altogether different yearning than it had been on the hilltop. It was almost feral with hurt. “I know. I know.”

That to be human was to love and love and love, knowing it could only end in tragedy?

To love was to live, and to live was to die.

“I have loved you so much.”

“I want you to know that wherever we are next, my heart will be with you.”

“It might not know it’s with you, but hearts have their ways. Every atrium, every ventricle, every vein and artery will beat for you. Even if my mind has lost you. Because you are in the very fabric of me, all right? You are me, and I am you. And our love is stronger than anything.”

Our infinite fates were no longer infinite, and nothing could have hurt more.

“I love you,” I repeated, because it was all I could say, the only thing that felt large enough, and yet still it would never be enough. “And I have loved you. And I will love you.”

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 —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

“Do you believe in reincarnation, child?”

“You can be together in infinite lives.”

“You will spend seven days and seven nights upon burning coals, feeding me with your suffering. And then, for the rest of eternity, you will serve me, as too will your beloved.”

So there it was. Live without Calliope, or live with her forever as a devil.

Then he sank a ringless hand into the leather satchel and pulled out a fountain pen and a notebook. A notebook.

Black cover, gold lettering. Ten Hundred Years of You. Author unknown. Everything in León soared.

He couldn’t explain it, why the sight of this book was a thunderclap, why this entirely unknown person made him feel like melting into a puddle on the ground, made him feel like running out into the street and whooping for joy, made him feel like confetti cannons and streaming banners, like an orchestra reaching a crescendo.

An eternity sprawled out between them, acres and acres of emotion and hope and grief, a force so powerful it stole the breath from León’s lungs, almost made him bend double at the waist, or burst into a lifetime of unshed tears, or something, something— “Excuse me,” he said, breathless. “Have we met before?”