Our Infinite Fates

by Laura Steven

“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.”

in Chapter 1?! yupppp this book will devastate me

He was famous for his irascibility, for his endless cursing and hot temper, but I knew there was tenderness at the very heart of him. A fondness for rock music, a love of architecture, a wicked sense of humor. Genuine adoration for his children, evident not in mawkish compliments or bedtime stories but in the way he worked himself to the bone to give us a good life.

I pressed the tip of the knife under his chin. “And still you won’t tell me why you hunt me through every life.” “It’s insulting that you don’t remember.”

our fate—but nothing solid enough to build that why into a robust structure. And for whatever godforsaken reason, Arden would never willingly share our origin story.

Ten Hundred Years of You.

A born performer. A pristine strangeness.

Yet while I had lost a lot of people in a lot of lives, I could save her. A rare power. A gift in a lifetime of curses. I just had to survive long enough to do so.

In every life, Arden was drawn to literature like a bee to nectar.

darkest corners of the internet had anything insightful to say.

Something sickly and fearful lurched in my ribs, though I couldn’t quite say why. A prickle of danger on the periphery of my mind.

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.

“I’ve never quite gotten used to the way smiles here are earned, not given.” We both froze; a minor slip. If he’d only ever known Siberia, there would have been nothing to get used to.

“So don’t. What happens if you just … don’t?” I shook my head ferociously, locks of snow-crisp hair wisping free of my fur hat. “What happens if you don’t kill me, and I don’t kill you, and we can be together?”

“Fuck, I don’t want to do this. I love you. I love you. What am I doing?” “Damned if I know.” I laughed, but nothing had ever felt less funny.

My heart bucked wildly. We’d been in love in countless lives, but this was the first time he’d ever changed his mind about killing me. The first time he’d ever changed his mind, period. A stubborn mule of a human, so doggedly determined in all matters, so unwilling to alter a course once it was set.

“All I know is that I’d do anything to lie in that bed with you just once without thinking about how I’m going to have to kill you soon. That’s all I want. You. Alive. With me.”

“I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you,” he whispered, hoarse, tortured. My throat ached. “I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.” Then, very seriously, he added, “I hope we don’t have to eat frozen

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.

And so, in the absence of any abiding religious convictions, this was the one blind faith I had: 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.

I had a fleeting vision of a chessboard in the desert, decades ago, or maybe centuries, the image sharp and bright, then murky and indecipherable. This was how memories of early lives came to me—tiny vibrant bursts, like butterflies I could never quite pin down. The ever-changing kaleidoscope, twisted by some great hand.

Witnessing the changing trends of the last few centuries had been like experiencing the gradual pixellation of the Sistine Chapel, or Michelangelo’s raw genius flattened into sixteen bits, or grand orchestras stripped back to a single synthetic keyboard. Though modern sewage systems were pretty great.

I frowned. “Do you mean ruthless?” He shook his head vehemently. “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.”

Ruination. That was how the vision had felt. Like utter ruination. Arden was doing this for a reason. And that reason was to protect us. My bones knew it. My blood, my guts, my soul. It was written in the very fabric of myself.

Ya’aburnee was a favourite. It means ‘may you bury me.’ It’s the idea that one person in a pairing longs to die before the other, because living without them would be too excruciating.

“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.”

if people are songs written in the major or the minor key, then you, my dear, are major. a climb, a crescendo, a thousand trumpets, a clashing of cymbals, joy and awe, rousing, reaching, always to the stars. and I am but a dirge, a requiem, a lamentation, a melancholic harp in D minor, forever wondering why you chose me. —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

I wanted to watch my sister heal and grow, to see who she would become without the shackles of illness.

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

This was all some cruel mistake. I was just a girl.

I swallowed hard, choking back the emotion of the moment. “Evelyn.” He nodded once—an unspoken agreement, a fate sealed, a promise that could never be unmade. A nod that would define a millennium. “Arden.”

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

Every word was a blight, a tumour, a sin, a whip-crack of self-loathing across my heart.

I had never felt as small or as infinite. We had lived for so long. 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 had touched a thousand people, most of whom were now but bones in the earth. And yet, beneath the great canvas of the stars, we were nothing. A blip, a finger snap, a single note in the symphony of the universe. The realisation made me feel at once better and worse. We were nothing, but we felt like everything. The fifth item on my dream list: to grow old with the love of my life.

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?

The loss was bigger than anything, a gaping cavern of grief, and I was teetering on the edge. Every fiber of me pleaded against it, but the force was too strong, and I was too human.

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

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

Arden’s eyes were both the depth of the ocean and the height of the clouds. They were soaring wings and glimmering sapphires, they were my anchor and my sword and my ship and my whetstone, they were everything, everything, everything, and they would soon be gone.

It kept flowing into her, rich and raw and bright, too strong for her withered soul to handle. It overtook her like a parasite, seeping into her every atom, bursting into glorious sunlight.

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

Did they not know? Could they not feel it, this seismic shift, this earth-shattering loss, this great before and after of my life?

How could a mind so iridescent ever die? How could such honeyed eyes ever cease to shine?

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.