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The first time Davenport’s too-long life ends, he’s four, and it’s an accident. One of his cousins, old enough to know better maybe, picks him up and twirls him around, too fast and too rough. Davenport fights back, naturally - he’s just old enough that his claws have come in but not so old that he knows when not to use them, and when they let him go, the momentum drives his skull back into the corner of a stair railing.
Davenport doesn’t remember the event, but he does remember what happened next. He’d woken up in a pleasantly warm room to a hushed discussion between a woman dressed in a thin grey ball gown with the head of a bird. She wore a black, spiderwebby veil and black flats, and when she turned to look at Davenport he saw sympathy in her uncannily human eyes. The other was both old and young at the same time. She looked as though she had both been around forever and as though she had just been born yesterday. She was hard to look at - something about her was bright, and her hair, which was both every color and none, reflected the light, seemed to come from everywhere, and was like looking out on a landscape of snow.
“Hello,” He’d said, and then, “How do you do?” Because his mother told him that was the polite thing.
The woman who was also a bird squawked, but found he could understand her just fine. Her voice was regal, and sad. “I’m afraid you ended up somewhere you weren’t yet supposed to be, young one.” And then she put her hand against his cheek, and he woke up home.
The adults said it was a dream, but Davenport could tell they didn’t really think that. It took him a few years - neither the Raven Queen nor Istus was a widely worshipped god in gnomish culture, but he found them. By that time though, the memory was fuzzy with age, and there was a part of him that doubted it ever really happened.
The second time Davenport dies, he’s twenty-two. The work at the IPR is challenging, but he’s driven by the stars. Davenport is top of his class by no small margin, and he’s taken one of their dingy old planes for a joyride - he’s done it before and gotten off easy. The people at the institute like him. He’s a hardworking young man, all energy and pride. He lands in a field a good ways away from the IPR, lays down and looks at the stars.
Davenport loves the stars. They’re what’s driven him this far, and he doesn’t expect them to fail him any time soon. He wants to fly into a star. That, he thinks, will be his dying wish. When he knows his time on this world is coming to a close, he wants to get into a ship and drive it into a star, until he burns and becomes part of the star himself.
What kills him is sloppy flying. He’d skimmed too low over the trees landing, and he’d smacked one of the wings of his plane. Hard. Davenport doesn’t realise it’s broken off and is falling until it’s too late, and in the last five seconds that make up Davenport’s second life, his only thought is that he wishes he hadn’t left his cat by herself.
He wakes up in a bed this time. He’s nestled under a warm, heavy blanket that doesn’t smell like his home, but is definitely someone’s. He sits up. Istus sits in a rocking chair at the other end of the room, swinging her legs.
“I thought I dreamed it the first time,” Davenport says, bewildered. “I guess this is the real deal?”
Istus sighs and shakes her head. “You might wish it were, down the line, but you have still more suffering to endure, good captain.” She stands, walks over. She slides her hands into his. “You want to fit into a society in which you feel you do not belong, but remember this - if you never rock the boat, you will one day face a fate worse than death.”
Then he’s gone. He jolts upright in the bed in his apartment. His cat is at his feet, sleeping away, and he wants so badly to believe it must have been nothing more than a dream but there’s really only one way to know for sure. He makes his way down to the hangar where they keep their planes, and sure enough, the one he stole is missing. He would try to go get it back, but there’s no way to fly it really without the second wing, and he doesn’t want to know if somehow his body is under there.
Mostly, he tries to shake it off, but he does voice his opinions more often. He doesn’t know when exactly he’s supposed to be rocking the boat, but he doesn’t want to miss it if the opportunity arises.
The third time Davenport dies, he’s either 44 or 56, depending on how you count it. That time he doesn’t see Istus, or the Raven Queen, and he just wakes up again in the cockpit of the Starblaster. He doesn’t the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth times, either. He wonders if this is what was meant when he was told he wasn’t supposed to die, not yet.
He’d like to know. He’d like an answer, just once.
The ninth time Davenport dies, life never leaves his body. Only everything else. Maybe he should have weighed in on the relics, maybe he wouldn’t have changed anything, he doesn’t know, and he can’t even think clearly enough to wonder.
The tenth and final time Davenport dies, he does it properly. He doesn’t fly himself into the star, but he’s out on the ocean. He can see the sun on the horizon, dipping below the waves. He breathes, in, and out. And then he doesn’t anymore.