We Have Died Here Before

They have died together a thousand times. Odom and Rala wake in the mud of a world with no name, no memory, and no idea that they've done this before. They build a fire. They bury a small, broken thing, and invent grief doing it. They fall in love — not for the first time, though neither of them knows that yet — and somewhere underneath the ordinary noise of an ordinary life, their hands start sketching doors neither of them remembers dreaming. Every version of them has made it exactly this far. And every version of them has ended the same way: reaching for the door out of fear, and getting fire in return.