"Destiny" (Patreon)

The first in a series of short works I wrote 1-2 years ago for the Destiny franchise. You don't need to be familiar with the games to enjoy. The only context needed is that Guardians are immortal warriors who can die and be resurrected by their Ghost companions ad infinitum. I hope you like ❤️

I’ve died a thousand times, and I remember each one.

Death is not finality, nor is it infinity. Death is not some looming beast in the dark, stalking the living like prey, awaiting its moment to strike. Death is a nuisance, a nagging little creature, a gnawing at the ankles and a twist in the belly like something rotten, a festering sickness.

It was frightening the first time, but welcome, I suppose. It was the penultimate conclusion of one who knows death no differently than as the end it is. Only, it wasn’t the end. It was the first of many, the beginning of a loop without escape. Now I don’t feel fear, only a familiar grappling between the body and the mind, a game the size of gods in which I am a pawn.

It tastes like metal on the tongue. Bitter, accosting, like a flood of bile you can’t swallow or release. There is nothing to see, even in the deaths that linger like caramel between your teeth. One moment, I look down at my hands quivering like leaves in the wind. I see my life spilled before me in rivers of red. Sometimes I see bone, sometimes I see flesh straight to the marrow. Sometimes what I don’t see is worse. Then the next moment, there is absence. An irrefutable lack of existence. This is where I am remade.

Wounds are stitched closed. Bones are pieced back together like a jigsaw puzzle. My senses are alight. That copper taste on my tongue and that rancid bile rising in my throat and that incessant ringing in my ears and that burning itch of mended flesh and that godforsaken agony of all the deaths that came before and the nagging voice of me before or me then or me one day scolding, ‘You should have seen that coming.’

Then it is all extinguished. I have brittle hope for a moment that this is it. The cycle broken, my soul permitted rest, the sour vitriol of this existence wiped away. Clean. Peaceful. Whole.

Then it all trickles back. Heaviness settles into my limbs. A throbbing rattles my brain like a bird in a cage. Slowly my ears remember life. I hear the sounds of battle, my fireteam, gunfire. My mouth is bone dry. My lungs gasp for air, burning as they fight to refuel a corpse. I hear that familiar voice, and my eyes open to see you there, bright and chipper, as if I hadn’t just made a bet with death and lost.

“Eyes up, Guardian.”

I stagger to my feet for you, your concerned eye never leaving me. Most days you’re my most trusted companion, one I love with whatever capacity for love is left in this fragility. Other days, I hate you as you watch me die and burn and drown and fail and die again and again only to bring me back to meet the same terrible fate over, and over, and over.

Today is one of those days.