"Undying" (Patreon)

The fourth 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 ❤️

Death is quiet. But more so than the silence between lovers who are now strangers. More so than the tense air between bad news and denial. More so than the isolation that follows betrayal.

Death is silence were it a tangible thing. Could you grasp silence in your hands, wrap it between your fingers, cradle it in your palms like a wounded bird, it would be what greets you in your final hour.

The first time I died it was jarring, like a headfirst dive into glacial water. A rug pulled out from under me, glass shattering on the fragility of mortality, a stark shift to a parallel that had only ever been a concept, not a reality. Of course, we all will take Death’s hand one day, but who truly anticipates it? It seems like such a distant thing, a mirage of an island on an unfathomably far shore you could never reach if you swam for centuries.

But reach it we all will. I did, I have, and I do. Your senses adjust to the stillness, and it is peaceful. Your existence suddenly ceases to be. There are no memories, no thoughts, no movement, no pain, no joy. All things that define a being being blink out of this world as suddenly and as calmly as simply drifting off to sleep. And after all, isn’t sleep a comforting thing?

Starling says I’m obsessed with death, that it’s all I think about. How beautifully naïve. As an undead thing whose sole purpose it is to die, what else is there? Perhaps it’s cynical, but I did not choose this unexistence. I had already lived a life before this one. My time was done. Who would choose to fight for eternity over peaceful sleep? Who would choose the loud, violent screaming of life over the serene silence of death?

Any Guardian not obsessed with their deathless deaths is either newly reborn or driven mad by the soul constantly tearing through the seams of realities. Our spirits were not meant to be ripped back and forth from life and death like dolls, pawns discarded by gods in favor of the more important pieces on the board.

Don’t get me wrong, I say to Starling when she starts to get that concerned look in her eye, life has its beauties too.

Life is the only experience that can be experienced. There is nothing outside of the living. To live is to experience, and anything else is a vacancy where death settles. Life is vibrant, fleeting, full. It is being handed the day and the night, the earth and the sky, the beauty and the ugliness of everything that is or could be. It is opportunity. Where death is four walls closing in, life is boundless freedom.

I do my best to remind myself of that when my hundredth, thousandth, ten thousandth death fall upon me like gentle rain. When I leave that cradled womb of safety and silence and rejoin the living amidst battle cries and gunfire. When Starling tells me to get up and I grab my gun again and again and again.

But it’s difficult to hear that reminder over all the noise.