Our Infinite Fates

by Laura Steven

“Did you truly think I would not find you?” The bride and groom looked up in horrified unison to find the elder’s eyes glowing like crucibles. Her lined face was washing itself smooth, and her nails lengthened, thickened, blackened.

so they kill each other bc some unholy monster follows them through their lives

I shrugged. “We should be celebrating. Love is in the air, after all. Love is in the aaair.”

ok thats lowkey embarassing, especially if this particular lifetime is set earlier in the timeline than that song is created or in a country that differs from american colloquialisms

Slipping off my espadrilles and hitching up my flowing skirt—cerulean blue embroidered with red and gold roses—I

this feels a little clunky. the sentence structure doesnt feel right even though the em dash was used correctly

Before I could finish my sentence, there was a knife at my throat. A sharp bolt of adrenaline; a hollow pit in my stomach. The blade was warm from where it had been tucked into his pocket. I sighed a long-suffering sigh, letting my eyes flutter close. “For fuck’s sake, Arden.” My tone dripped with sardonic boredom, but my chest thumped wildly. No matter how many times I was murdered, it never got any less painful. And, in truth, I hadn’t suspected Rafael for a moment. Arden was getting better at this.

so the point is to kill the other first and ig they fall in lovr? or already are and refuse to admit it

How had I not known? How had I not felt that wrenching soul tether, that intimate magnetism? How could I ever hope to protect myself, to survive, if I didn’t see the threat coming?

im already anticipating some inconsistencies with this like you obviously have been doing this for hundreds of years - you should already know better by this point

crunching his nose with a bloody spurt.

once again, this fragment feels clunky

and some traitorous part of me throbbed at the feel of his body beneath mine. Focus. This time I wanted to look him in the eye as I killed him. Unlike in Nauru.

i feel like this is suppised to be an enemies to lovers version of addie laurie if she time traveled

water. Then, as though our lifestrings were woven fatally together, my own pulse waned. A sun falling below the horizon, a slow orchestra fading out. Old blood ebbing to a temporary trickle.

word choice feels weird and i would love the last sentence if it lade sense in the context of the mc's thoughts

A sudden sharp image came to me: a sickle propped against a dark stone wall. It felt deeply, viscerally important, and yet there was no context attached.

being chased by death? or perhaps its their first life together

I remembered the last five or six lives in Technicolor detail—the sights and smells and emotions, the casts of loved ones I’d left behind, every line of Arden’s new faces. But the lives before that became less and less distinct the further back they went, until everything was smudged with fog.

if youre living 18 years each time, you havent actually lived THAT many lives unless yall started in the 1300s. it's like 4-5 lives per century if they started in like the 1700s or 1800s like i thought then theyve only lived like 12 lives edit: prologue says "several hundred - so at least 400 years -> so at least 20 lives. which still isnt as much as the book implies

There were glimmers of reason, of truth—such as when Arden had let slip, in darkest Siberia, that it was a deal made long ago that had sealed our fate—but

so Arden remembers why theyre like this & wont tell her -> she probably has to figure it out herself

She was simultaneously human sunshine and darkly gothic. One of her first full sentences was “The shadows are very quiet today.”

riiight ok sure whatever thats not a normal full sentence from a toddler btw

They didn’t need to get away with it, because it would kill them too. Our lifestrings woven fatally together.

fragmented sentence in my back bruh🫩🫩

If only I could tell her that my original generation was born more than a thousand years before hers.

at least 1000 years means at least 55 lives THATS NOT THAT MANY😭😭 THEY KEEP ACTING LIKE ITS HUNDREDS OF LIVES AND ITS NOT

Our whole family was a patchwork blanket of relationships that shouldn’t quite work but did. Housekeepers turned godmothers, postmen turned babysitters, every Sunday roast an eclectic mix of people who made us smile.

why is that "not supposed to work" you can essily become close to blue collar workers whenever you want, it doesnt mean the relationship is strange or weird

Technicolor

the author REALLY likes to use this word

The same could not be said for Arden. Arden loved words, and ideas, and poetry, and plays. Arden loved to learn, to express, to weave long and meandering thoughts about the human condition.

what happened to pronouns

expecting to see a sharp-eyed stranger of exactly my age walking through the door.

clunky sentence

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.

HAHAHAHAAHAHA THIS MONOLOGUE IS LITERALLY WHAT TWITTER IS LIKE TODAY, NOT 3 YEARS AGO

handwritten book of poetry about reincarnation in the Siberian wilderness. It’s apparently decades old, and they have no idea who wrote it, but they published the original in Russian and now it’s become a sensation.

so that'll be from their stint in siberia!

The aurora borealis glowed science-fiction green above us.

what

The raw magnetism

more repetition pls use something else

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.

i hate when paragraph structure like this is put in published books. it still feels very fanfic-y to me theres other ways to write this in actual paragraphs also sidenote if youre gonna do paragraphs like this make it fit your writing style. like doing this with the level this author is writing at feels like a very juvenile decision

Yet, for better or worse, I always let myself love anyway. Call it courage, call it insanity; both would be correct.

good

It would mean another round of this twisted game lost to my hunter.

this feels like kind icky cuz wdym the thought hasnt crossed her mind to hunt them before they hunt her

He was sitting outside the café next to the bookstore, sipping a black coffee and reading a newspaper.

I LOVE A GOOD PERFOMATIVE MALE /j bro ur being so obvious

I wanted it so badly I could taste it, and I still believed I could reach it.

wojldve been a better choice to say something sensorily related to dressmaking than "i could taste it"

Nauru

so far, the best written chapter (definitely unbiased)

We’d both been born girls in this life, and I adored the softness of it, all sweet tongues and gentle edges.

this technically makes them both bisexual i believe

Portuguese was the tongue of melancholic dreamers, of lonely poets.

Could this really be the soul who had held me in the trenches of the Great War?

i'd like these statements better if they were like more diverse like dont always bring up ww1, bring up other hardships or conflicts from other lives to compare them

Surely that meant something.

that hes a stalker

He paused for a moment, staring fixedly at the cover, then nodded as though suddenly deciding something. “I want to buy it.”

i dont think this guy is arden i will be happy to be proven wrong tho

And maybe, just maybe, I wanted to see him again.

why would uou deny this. you talk endlessly abt how you love him and want to be with him but play coy in your head?

and I found myself missing the subtle glow of gas lamps. The twenty-first century was so gauche. Sometimes I marvelled at how far forward the world had moved—the beauty of modern medicine, and how it gave my sister a fighting chance—but other times I thought of smartphones and steel buildings and plastic-filled oceans and longed for a time long gone.

pls author dont try to do too much with this book im sure you care lots abt issues but we've already brought up surface level colonization and climate change analyses. newer authors often have this issue where they try to tackle too many things in one book

I didn’t miss the tide of eternal shit running down the streets of Rome.

im so confused on this timeline theyve been doing tbis for 1000 uears - which means they started at around 1000 CE. why are we discussing Rome?? unless you meant the holy roman empire in the 1300-1600s

even if I couldn’t remember many details of that life, my hands still remembered what to do. Muscle memory, or something similar.

thats not how- ok. time still degrades muscle memory and you only did it for like 10 of the 1000 years of your existence.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I withdrew my lock-picking kit,

WHERE DID YOU GET ONE?? DO YOU HAVE MARY POPPINS POCKETS???

So why had I wanted so badly to run into his arms?

do you ask yourself this same question every lifetime bc if so: are u dumb

though I didn’t harbor the same intrinsic loathing for them as other natives did. Arden and I had been French in our previous lives, dying for our country in the blood-soaked trenches of the Western Front. And now here I was on a shore that—justifiably—loathed the land I had sacrificed myself in the name of. Whatever divine hand was responsible for our reincarnations clearly had a sense of humor.

you should. the soldiers throughout ww1 barely believed in the war they were fighting, and thats not a good enough excuse for not hating the invaders of algeria. if anything serving in ww1 should make you hate invaders MORE

“Translation in a colonized state is an act of violence, and…”

ok babel

“The Evelyn I know … they love over and over and over again, even though it can only ever end in tragedy. Even though they’ve lost everyone they’ve ever loved, and they miss them in the next life, and the next, and the next. Never have they developed hard edges like I have. Never have they tried to protect themselves from that pain. They love softly, and fiercely, and openly, and it’s the bravest thing I know. The most human thing I know.”

this was so hard to read bc of the amount of repetition of words. my eyes started glazing over the sentiment is sweet tho

“We’re all born that way.” Arden gripped my hand so tightly it almost hurt. “All little children are like that. They’re not afraid to feel, to love.

i fear im still like this. it's always better to love and lose than never love at all

“Ruthful, the original. From the thirteenth century, or around then. How can you have forgotten? It means endless compassion, a deep empathy for others.”

habibi,”

sometimes i wonder if this author just decided to look for a list of popular endearments in languages to add them also its so funny how all the dialogue is in english except terms of endearment so that we are "subtley" reminded that they are in a different country

this is how bees make honey: they suck careful nectar from open flowers and bring their bounty back to the hive, where they kiss it from mouth to mouth until it runs thick and sweet. every parent we have ever loved walked this glorious earth gathering nectar from the flowers of their lives, kissing it into the mouths of their children, and now the honey is ours.

Sure, I could ascribe such bland descriptors to Arden—they were poetic, and creative, and stubborn, and reserved, and wise. Gentle with wildlife, tapped into the natural world in some fundamental way. Philosophical, deep, if often melancholic. The embodiment of saudade.

thats more than one dimensional pookie

What fascinated me, what compelled me so profoundly, was that theirs was a soul in the truest sense.

the only reason this book made it past the 300 page mark is bc the author is waxing poetic abt how loving someone comes from the soul & not from regular descriptors the whole reason theres a reincarnation plotline is to show the author's point abt love transcending mortality, and the characters just feel like mouthpieces for this. which i'd be fine with if it wasnt so repetitive

How could anyone who’d only lived one life compare? But while we had loved each other for centuries, we hadn’t talked in nearly four decades.

so from what i can tell - you dont ACTUALLY know each other that well. youve got some on screen lovey-dovey moments but nothing that makes me say "oh theyre in LOVE" for all ik this soul connection between arden and evelyn is the doing of the thing that made them reincarnate for 1000 years

It was a yearning so complex that it defied all reason.

its not that complex bro