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Once upon a time, back when the gods still roamed the earth among mortals, there were two girls.
Gem is born in the times when it matters not who you are, but instead what you can do. Wars rage endlessly, always one or the other, and there is never enough food, never enough soldiers. She’s one out of the hordes of hungry, orphaned street rats, always scrambling for food or coin, scrappy and a little bit feral. Fortunately, or maybe very unfortunately for her, it makes her rather good at fighting dirty. When she’s offered a long knife and one meal a day, she agrees without a second thought and is promptly sent out to fight. It’s not a bad deal at all, really, with how low on supplies the troops always are.
Gem falls in a battle, untrained and underfed, someone’s sword sliding forcefully into her rib cage, someone’s arrow lodged deep in her shoulder, just another little nobody out of hundreds, out of thousands that soon will be forgotten forever. A tall woman in dark robes stands over her, looking terribly heartbroken for some reason, and reaches out with her pale hand, and in that moment Gem knows innately that this is Death, The Death . She seems familiar, strangely too familiar, even though Gem is certain she has never met her before, but maybe that’s the way it always is with her. Maybe everyone knows Death just a little bit.
The girls were inseparable, for they had no one but each other in the whole wide world.
Gem is born with big dreams. She’s a difficult baby, or so she’s told later, impossible to put to sleep, so her old nan whispers stories of brave deeds and knights every night to calm her down, rocking her cradle softly. Gem becomes taller and older, starts helping out in the fields, but the stories stay with her. Maybe it’s silly to believe in tall tales still, but there’s something deep inside of Gem that tells her that she’s meant for something greater than just being a farmer’s daughter.
A wandering knight strolls into the village one day, truly not impressive at all, with a surly, sagging face and a lame horse tailing him sluggishly. Still, it’s exciting enough for Gem. The knight is old and Gem, with her hair shorn short because of the lice, is young enough for him to mistake her for a lad. She loiters around him all her free time, ceaselessly asking about his adventures, and in the end manages to annoy him into taking her with when he leaves the village.
The knight’s mare, almost as old as the knight himself, kicks her in the chest a moon’s turn later, spooked by the first sign of danger, and Gem never gets to find out what it’s like to become a proper swordfighter. Death, at least, looks sympathetic when she comes to get her.
And the girls made a vow, a sacred vow to stay together forever, to their death and beyond.
Gem is born green-eyed, red-headed and with a penchant for trouble. She’s a bit too free-spirited for the likes of her fellow villagers, who are very obvious in their dislike of her. In fact, it would be harder not to notice it, even for such a young thing like her, what with the way they scowl at her and usher their children back home when she comes out to play. It stings, this clear distaste for her, it certainly does.
The little girl grows up but doesn’t get to savour the taste of adulthood for long – her wary, distant parents are the first to proclaim her a witch who had succumbed to Devil’s wiles.
Drowning is painful, dirty water filling up her lungs, choking her, and the heavy rock tied to her neck pulling her down, but it’s probably still better than burning. Everything spins and goes dark. When Gem comes to, her body is being cradled by a crying woman with sad blue eyes. Whatever awful things people say about Death’s embrace are all utterly false, Gem decides there and then. She has what to compare it to, and this is significantly nicer than her parents’ tight grips when they dragged her to the riverbank.
The girls became women and their love remained unwavering, but fate decided they were not meant to enjoy the companionship of each other for long.
Gem is born during unlucky times to streets full of slops and muck and so-so many dead bodies. She barely even gets to grow up before the illness takes her mother. Gem, all of six years old, is not far behind, following her steps faithfully to the sickbed first and the death soon after.
The woman that comes to get her looks so much like the bad doctor who came to treat her mother, if not for his bird-mask, that she doesn’t even think before she’s running, and running, and running, and hiding, only wide green eyes peeking from the corner. It doesn’t matter, because the woman sees her anyway and comes closer, crouching to be on her level. She reaches out slowly and her hands are so very gentle when they stroke her hair, gentler than the bad doctor’s, gentler even than her mother’s, that maybe it would be fine to go with this dark-clothed woman, Gem thinks.
And one of the two met her end way too young, before she could taste the wonders of life fully.
Gem is born in a seaside town in a fisherman’s house. Her life there is not that bad, actually, but there’s something that doesn't sit right with her for as long as she remembers herself. She’s restless, feels out of place even surrounded by her family.
Gem cuts her hair in an alley with a rusty blade that she filches as she runs away from home. Sneaking onto a boat is a bit harder than she’s expected, but she’s nimble and keen, so she manages to do it. She’s caught quickly, of course, but not before they leave the harbour. The captain stares into her eyes for a long moment and something he sees there makes him release his tight hold on her shoulder and let her stay on as a cabin boy.
“You’ve got a wanderer’s heart, girl,” says the old sailor once, a few years later, gruffly and somewhat cryptically, but it rings true for Gem. She is wandering, is searching, though she doesn’t yet know what for.
The ship is attacked and Gem fights to the best of her ability, but it’s not enough, and she feels the burst of pain from the enemy’s sword slashing at her stomach, before falling gracelessly overboard.
As she sinks into the salty depths she sees an image of a woman holding out her hands towards her, and for a fleeting moment Gem knows exactly what she’s been looking for her whole life.
And the other young woman cursed the God of Death for taking her friend from her so soon.
Gem is born last in her family. She’s the twelfth child, the fifth daughter, and her mother dies bearing her. She’s raised more by her elder sisters than by her sullen father and then runs away to the nearest town to join the monastery as soon as she’s old enough. She has never been particularly pious, definitely didn’t plan on dedicating her life to serving Lord and Saviour, but anything will do if it means she can avoid meeting the betrothed her father found for her, good twenty years older than her, heavy-handed and a known lover of booze. So the nunhood it is.
She makes do with what she has. She prays and works as she has vowed, but never fully starts believing, never lets go of the strange dreams and wisps of insight she gets sometimes. She knows what she’d hear if she ever uttered a word about them, knows she’d be told about the Devil trying to tempt her, lead her off the sacred path. She doesn’t think that’s right, though. To be perfectly honest, she’s always believed more in old faiths, tales passed down to her by her grandmother and to her by her own grandmother, which spoke of spirits, fairies, and old gods. She keeps her thoughts secret, of course, acts a perfect Christian, since it wouldn’t do for a nun to voice even remotely heretical ideas.
Her suspicions are proven right when she dies of unknown sickness, surrounded by her sisters praying faithfully for her soul, and is greeted not with the sight of heaven, or hell, or purgatory, but instead of a woman. She bears a bit of resemblance to a nun, with her dark robes and a sombre expression, though definitely isn’t one. Her presence feels older, different, like all of the things from her dreams she wasn’t ever allowed to think about in this life.
And the God of Death heard and took offence, for he was a god and they are prone to anger.
Gem is born and then promptly orphaned. She is lucky, supposedly, to have a place at the orphanage, instead of having to fight for scraps with other unfortunate urchins in the streets. But the Matron is stern, and short-tempered, and a big believer in corporal punishment. Gem shoulders the worst of her ire, takes the blame more often than it truly is her fault, distracts her from noticing the others, because they are all younger and less sturdy , and Gem doesn’t remember ever having any siblings, barely remembers having any family at all, but it seems like something a big sister would do.
The Matron hits too hard with her cane one day and Gem falls and doesn’t get back up, her body peppered with red and black-blue and yellow-green flowers of bruises. When Death comes to collect her, grave and sorrowful, she looks proud as well, looks approving, so all the pain is worth it in the end.
And he wanted to smite the impudent woman, but the sacred vow of love protected her, so he damned her instead to serve him for an eternity, collecting the souls of the dead in his stead.
Gem is born in the time where the interest in the occult is at a high; regrettably, that does not aid her in any way. Societies convene regularly to discuss the latest improbable happenings and findings and Gem’s greatest wish in life is to take part in these gatherings. Her lady-friends do not understand her fascination with the mystical and she doesn’t try to explain, but, putting it mildly, in contrast to the majority of members of such exclusive clubs, her curiosity in the matter is no passing fancy – she’s troubled from girlhood by dreams that tell of the times long past, of unbelievable occurrences, of an impossible never-ageing woman. She would give anything to have a chance to explore them more thoroughly, but she is never taken seriously enough. She is a woman, unfortunately, and all the gentlemen are dismissive of her at best and irritated at being disturbed at worst.
Her death is as ordinary as they come – just another young lady falling into the vicious clutches of the so-called “white death”. The gentlemen from the esoteric society barely even notice her obituary in the morning paper. She gets to meet the real Death, a mournful blue-eyed lady, first out of them all, though, so she has them beat at that, at least.
But in his fury the God didn’t notice that she wasn’t the only one he was cursing, for two souls were intertwined together with the ties so strong that they couldn’t be broken even by gods.
Gem is born at the end of one World War and grows up to see another. Her father enlists and her mother weeps and threatens to never forgive her if she gets any foolish ideas in her foolish head . Gem, because she is a dutiful daughter and has been taught to never argue back to her parents, reassures her and consoles her to the best of her ability and then immediately goes and signs up for the nursing training.
The work at the frontlines is gruelling and miserable and Gem likes it anyway. It doesn’t fill the emptiness she’s felt in her soul her whole life, but it gives her a purpose, and maybe that can be enough.
Sometimes she gets flashes of other wars, wars long past, so different and so similar to this one all at once. Sometimes she thinks she sees a dark figure of a woman out of the corner of her eye, standing over the fallen soldiers. Sometimes she wonders about those things, but always decides they don’t matter – she’s so tired all the time that maybe seeing things is perfectly understandable.
She joins the lists of the deceased one day when she’s hit by shrapnel as she’s trying to drag an unconscious soldier, a few years her junior, barely old enough to have any facial hair, to the safety of the trench. The deafening sound of the gunfire fades to nothing, and the woman's familiar face is a comfort she didn’t expect but is grateful for nonetheless.
And so she was destined to watch her friend be born and live and die over and over, collect her bright soul again and again.
Gem is born in a country that is devastated by war, that struggles for food, for money, for manpower. Her mother’s houseguests call her serious, call her mature for her age, but it’s not really that. It’s not that she at four-five-six truly understands the gravity of the situation – it’s just that in some inexplicable way she’s already lived through every possible hardship, tasted all the flavours of pain that exist out there.
When she’s a bit older and everything is slightly better but only so much, Gem wears short dresses and colourful trousers, and goes out to protests, and lives with a constant sense of déjà vu. All of it: the solidarity, the hand-painted signs, the uneven rows of earnest fighters for justice – it all seems so painfully familiar. She can almost remember standing shoulder to shoulder with incredible women, shouting about their right to vote, being bodily dragged away to the holding cell, but that can’t be possible, can it?
She’s ambushed by a group of men one day, when she’s on her way home from a protest. They don’t intend on killing her, probably, just scaring her into dropping all the idiotic ideas from her head, but there are a lot of them and, as much as she wishes that was not the case, she’s smaller and weaker than them. Not again, she thinks nonsensically, as her head hits the pavement and the blood pools around her now unconscious body. Death, fair-haired and beautiful like an avenging angel, holds her close in her arms and mourns her. For some reason, Gem feels the urge to console her.
The cursed woman accepted her punishment but couldn’t forgive the cruel God for the fate of her blameless friend and vowed to make him pay, vowed to take revenge.
Gem is born a menace, an insolent, disobedient child, a disappointment that will never succeed in anything. At least that’s what her father tells her when he disowns her and throws her out for refusing to be the picture-perfect daughter and to stop keeping the company of various “delinquents”, as he calls them. She sleeps on the couches of said “delinquents”, friends and friends of friends, queers, and punks, and underground poets, and aspiring artists, until she is put up by an elderly gay couple, who welcome her like a daughter they’ve never got to have, who don’t mind that she’s loud and rambunctious, that she acts a bit strange even perfectly sober, that sometimes she gets too deep into her head and remembers things that didn’t happen to her. They care for her, and love her, and affectionately call her an “old soul” for as long as they can.
She doesn’t succumb to the “disease” and doesn’t get a drug addiction, like her father prophesied for her. Her death is much simpler, really, and tragic in its simplicity. The car hits her as she exits the video store after the end of her shift, a week before her twenty-third birthday, because she forgets for a moment that such things as cars exist. Death looks a little like some of her goth acquaintances and smiles at her like an old friend, and something clicks in her mind then – they are old friends, aren’t they?
She vowed to reunite with her dear friend properly one day, whatever it takes .
Gem is born a few years before the turn of the millennium with a head full of her-not-her memories. She learns, as she grows, that it’s different for other people, that nobody else remembers years-decades-centuries before their birth, nobody else misses the other half of their soul so much that it physically hurts, and while it sounds scary at first, she’s fairly sure she doesn’t belong in a psych ward, so she just chooses to accept that part of herself. She’s special like that, so what?
The internet is a wonderful invention, a weird place populated by a lot of weirdos, for sure, but great nonetheless. Gem signs up for a bunch of forums and websites, looking discreetly for people who remember past lives or something of sorts. She doesn’t think she would be drowned (again) in this day and age if someone heard about her delusions, but if her numerous lives have taught her anything, it’s that it never hurts to be more careful.
Half the people she finds are role-players and the others turn out to be trolling, which is only mildly disappointing, since she didn’t really hope to find anything truly useful out there. It doesn’t matter that the search is fruitless for now, in any case – she’s still getting closer and closer to getting all of the answers every day, she can feel it in her bones.
She’s proven right, much sooner than she expects. She doesn’t even have to die in order to meet her Death this time around, it turns out.
A knock on her door surprises her on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.
A woman she knows so intimately, despite never seeing her in this lifetime, waits on her porch, still fair-haired and pale and blue-eyed but no longer cloaked in darkness – not Death any more, gentle but otherworldly, but just a human, imperfect, flawed human. Gem’s human .
The astonishment must show on her face, because the woman's eyes fill with understanding and she gives Gem a soft, lopsided grin.
“Haven’t you heard?” says Pearl, pulling her into a warm, painfully familiar embrace, “The age of technology has come. There’s no place for old gods now. They’re all gone.”
For the first time in millenia Gem feels whole.