He said the locket would protect her. He never said from what.
She'd found it at a flea market in the bustling city of who-the-fuck-knows, in the middle of Fucking Nowhere. She wasn't sure what she had actually been looking for---herself or her true love or some bullshit---but it certainly hadn't been a battered old locket that didn't open.
Nevertheless, that was what she found. As soon as she saw it, she knew she had to have it.
The man at the stall seemed eager to get rid of it and sold it to her for peanuts. She put it around her neck and went on her way, barely giving the locket a second thought. The quest to find inner peace or some such nonsense was more important to her.
She didn't really notice the man brush past her in the crowd, gentle grazing her arm with a knife. When she read the newspapers later she realised she'd seen the man who'd killed five people in that market. She was lucky; she was spared. It rattled her.
Two days later, on a bus journey from who-the-fuck-knows to where-the-hell-is-this, she had another close call. They were attacked by a motorcycle gang on the road. Most of the passengers were killed; she survived by hiding under a seat. Later, when they were gone, she started walking towards the nearest town. She should have died from thirst or sunstroke, but somehow she made it.
The strange incidents kept piling up. She survived a car accident here, an armed robbery there. At first she put it down to unnatural good luck, but then she remembered the locket.
Every incident she'd survived she'd been wearing the locket. Maybe it really was some kind of protective talisman.
She decided to test it.
Skydiving, mountain climbing, shark diving. Every form of danger she put herself in she came out of unscathed. Emboldened, she even started sabotaging herself, cutting parachute chords and pissing off people who were better left alone.
She survived it all.
At some point she realised that while ever she was wearing that locket she literally couldn't die.
House fires, diving accidents, gunshot wounds. Over the years she survived them all. She daren't take the locket off. Without it she'd have died a hundred times over.
She wondered how far she could push it.
At a hundred and twenty five years old, after countless miraculous escapes and hundreds of ordinarily life threatening injuries, she finally tired. Everyone she knew and loved was dead. She'd had her time, escaped Death long enough. She wanted to choose her end, and greet Death like a friend.
She stood at the edge of the cliff, the wind blowing in her hair. She'd made up her mind. The locket came off for the first time in nearly a century. Without it she felt naked. She let it fall from her hand, no longer wanted or needed.
She stepped off the edge of the cliff.
This time, there was no miracle.
