Cycles

I awoke in a bright cell with a dark shadow over the bunk. I'm stuck in a room with someone I vaguely recognize. My memory is blurry. I know I know them but I don't know much else. There's an official there, who tells us we have a mission, and frees us. We're teamed up with other familiar people. Despite meeting for the first time, we're all very casual and relaxed with each other. It's a bit disturbing- like we're all very old friends who are meeting for the first time. I remember that a very long time ago the female friend I was bunked with used to hate me.

We're based in a tremendous white tower. The world is high-tech in centralized areas, to the point of casual low-magic stuff being able to occur. Outer regions are less teched, akin to modern technologies. In addition, there's some kind of bizzare phenomenon where you can wish for something and it'll be granted, but at a price. Whatever powers us is capable of making things real, but at reduced power to ourselves, weakening us. This manifests as curses, weaker strength, reduced intelligence, a various number of things. We're unsure of how this works and a first experiment with it ends with less than appreciative results.

Our mission is to take out a target, a religious enemy of whomever has been putting us up. We don't have much choice and it's implicitly understood that while we're not loyal to our commanders, we will obey for sheer lack of anything else to do.

We try and fail, once. We lose somebody, and someone makes a wish to bring them back. It works, at the cost of that other someone's life. We try again, and this time we succeed without any further losses, decimating the base we were sent in to destroy. At that moment an extremely powerful knight appears, congratulating us on our victory, and informing us that our slaughter was against the regulations (despite this being the exact order). We are easily defeated and detained. More of us die in the battle.

I'm locked in the cell again with the old friend. We realize now what's going on. We're being sent out on suicide missions and executed at the end of them, then revived again without memories to perform more missions every time. We're not the only team at work. We're pawns in some great tower, fighting a greater evil than it. I wish for my friend to retain memories of previous lifes. The cost is my own life to power this.

Whatever grants wishes is also the energy that revives us and gives us life- which is why when the power is shifted into a wish, the person is weakened in some other way. The next time around, I am dead upon revival- all the power for my life is now being vested in my friend, who's able to retain vague memories of the previous lifes. She begins, this time, to understand far sooner what's happening.

They don't know why I'm dead and can't revive me, but suspect. It's a race to free themselves before they're trapped again, forced to carry out missions knowing the end result, dying and reviving, fueling and stoppering an endless war with an enemy we don't understand. It's a cycle. An endless cycle they must break.