Sixty-Five
S IXTY - F IVE
ESTRELLA
The bag clutched in my hand felt impossibly heavy as I ascended the stairs, making my way into the second vestibule of the Temple of the Fates. Filled with the offerings I’d gathered from each of the rivers: the horn from the bull, the hair from the lion, the antler from the hind, the ashes from the hydra, and the apples. This level was far smaller than the one below, cradled atop the cliffside with gaping, open windows that revealed the Cradle of Creation on the other side. The waterfall ran down the opposite cliff on the other side of the valley, the shine of water running through the loose forests of trees that surrounded the gardens at the center. They were teeming with life, all things natural flourishing within the valley in a way that made me think of all the seasons coming together. Of all the places and times in the world condensed into one garden that somehow pleased everyone.
In a single corner, winter reigned. The plants were encased in snow and ice, the cold descending to freeze the water of the stream and the lake where it sprawled out between the four corners. Human figures moved within the valley, their bodies tiny pinpricks on the scope of what I watched. But there was no denying the man who stood before the lake, shadows surrounding him like the midnight of a galaxy. His eyes gleamed with gold as he met my stare through the open window, raising a single hand to hold it palm out.
It felt like a mockery of everything I’d left behind, of the mate I’d tried so desperately to touch through that barrier as it slammed closed between us and locked him out. Medusa stepped up beside him, wrapping her arms around his waist and tilting her chin to stare up at him. I couldn’t make out her face from this distance, her features too lowly contrasted to travel through the space between us aside from the writhing serpents in her hair, but something in that posture was familiar.
It was a look of love on her face, I was certain, because that was how I looked up at my mate to tell him I loved him without words.
She too raised her hand into a still wave, her head turning to face me. The noise of footsteps behind me made my heart catch in my throat, the reality of what I’d come here to do pressing down on me. Would they watch, when the Fates killed me? Would my parents bear witness to the end of my life in this temple that promised nothing but pain for me.
Death was my price. It was my salvation and my end, and I could only bring myself to regret what it would do to my mate if and when it came to pass.
I spun slowly, my hands curving in a sweeping motion as the gold of my dress moved with me. It cascaded over the floor, a liquid energy that I could not quite contain. The Fates stood before me, neatly arranged into their group of three in the same positions as I’d seen them in that meadow in the river.
“Aella, we have long awaited this moment,” the woman at the center said. Her half-rotted face moved grotesquely, her fingers constantly fiddling with the spool of thread she held in her hand. Even now, even in these moments, the three of them worked to knit a new tapestry, sewing the threads of life together bit by bit as if they were simply unable to help themselves.
“I am Clotho, and I stitched your name into the tapestry long before the night of your birth,” the woman at the center spoke, that spindle twirling to give her sister more thread. To allow her to take more of the magic of the Fates and spin it into creation and destiny itself.
“I am Lachesis, and I have guided you through all your names and all your lives,” the one to the left said, her fingers working over the new tapestry with a speed the likes of which I’d never seen. She did not need needles to tie the thread into knots, her deft, calloused fingers doing the work alone.
“I am Atropos, and I am the cutter of threads and ender of lives. I am the one that meets the living when their destiny has met its end,” the one to the right spoke. She cut her scissors through the air, as if she could not stop the motion that was endless. There were no threads to be cut in this moment, no lives to bring to the end of their days, but still she cut.
“You’re the one who will kill me when I’ve served my purpose here,” I said, keeping my voice calm. Even as I looked for confirmation of what was to come, I would not show them fear. Fear for the afterlife, fear for any pain that I might feel in my final moments. Fear that I might live and have to go on forever changed.
Silence was my only answer, a refusal to give me the gift of knowledge. I swallowed, nodding in acknowledgment. I should have expected nothing less. I raised the bag I had brought, the gifts I’d worked so hard to gather for these women so that they might grant me passage into the Cradle. So that I might find the answers I sought in the family that waited for me there. Atropos reached out and accepted it, never bothering to open the pack and look at the items I’d gathered. I supposed they didn’t need to, for these women knew every step of my trials. They knew what gifts I’d brought long before I ever brought them.
“Do you think yourself worthy? Of what you will become after you enter the Cradle?” she asked, the words catching me off guard. What did it matter if I thought myself worthy of my fate? Fate did not care for my wishes or wants, my insecurities or faults. It only saw how to use them to its advantage, only saw a being that could be manipulated to suit.
“How am I to say if I am worthy when I do not know what it is I will become? I don’t think there is anyone who is worthy of the kind of power the Primordials and Gods possess. All I can do is endeavor to be fair and just, to give those around me the best life possible and not allow my magic to corrupt me in the same way it has so many others. Does that make me worthy, or does that make me blinded by my own idealism that I might be different than those who came before me?” I asked, sighing as I spoke the words. It felt like blasphemy to insult the Primordials and the Gods, especially in this place, so near to where the Primordials had chosen to hide away from the world they’d created like cowards.
Clotho moved, breaking free from their triad to take a step closer to me. She touched a hand to my chest, that bundle of threads rising within me as it recognized her touch. Her head tilted to the side, studying the thread intently before her eerie eyes rose to my face once more.
“When we knit the threads, we see only facts. We see actions, but the thoughts behind them are lost to us. We have long since stopped understanding the facets of human emotion, if we ever had the ability to begin with. Do you not wish to have everlasting life and power? It seems so many of your kind would give anything or anyone to have such things, and yet you seem angry that we have presented you with them.”
“No,” I said, scoffing as I considered how I could make them understand. If it was true that they did not understand human feelings and things such as love, then how could a choice that was purely rooted in emotion ever make sense to a being like that? And what business did a being with no concept of love have determining the fates of men? “I do not want either of those things. I want to live my life in peace and not be consumed by the knowledge that my decisions carry the weight of the world. I don’t want to live for an eternity knowing that I could make a difference, and wondering if it will be for the betterment of man or the downfall of everything I love. I want to be no one and nothing in the grand scheme of this world, and when I die, I want my memory to fade into obscurity. So if that isn’t the answer you wanted, if it does not serve your purpose or make me worthy, then just kill me now. I tire of these fucking games that are never-ending. I am worthy or I’m not. Make your choice already, because I have made mine.”
Atropos grinned, handing back the bag I had given to her. “The trials were never meant for us, Estrella Barlowe. Our choice was made so many centuries ago that they have always been irrelevant to us and the knowledge we have. These were the events that were necessary for you to be in the position to make the choices that aligned with the path we chose. These trials were so that you could come to understand your own worth and the weight of that worth on the world,” she said.
“You mean they were your manipulations to get me here, because I did not want to come here on my own. Without those trials, I would not be the woman you need me to be for whatever reason. You did what was necessary to serve your purpose and get me here, but it was never about what I needed to discover. Do not frame it as such when you could not even begin to understand the damage you have done. You have spent so long manipulating these fucking threads like we are all puppets on a string, and you’ve forgotten that we are real people. That we want things you will never understand. We love and we hurt and we feel the pain you cause us for your sick amusement.” I paused, waiting for an answer I knew I would not get. They would not feel sorry for the things they’d done, for the lives they’d ruined.
“You do not even begin to understand how deep our manipulations go, Estrella Barlowe,” Clotho said, her face shifting and morphing as I watched. Her skin knitted back together on the rotten side, her cheeks filling in as her features shifted around into a magical glamour that became far too familiar. My anger dissipated, my lungs sagging as I expelled the air from them in surprise.
Macha stood before me, her face twisted into a sad sort of smile as her sisters shifted at her sides. Where Lachesis had stood was Badb, her raven hair gleaming. Where there had once been Atropos, there was Nemain, her throat healed from the damage they’d let me believe Khaos had caused.
It was Badb who finally spoke as my jaw clenched, fighting back the sting of betrayal in my throat. “I warned you that even we had our own reasons for aiding you, Child of Fate,” she said, acting as if it were my fault that I’d come to care for the three women who had served as my guide. Their distance after Medusa came made more sense now, if she did not know the truth of the Morrigan’s identity, they probably wanted to keep it that way.
“And what were yours?” I asked, forcing myself to push through the hurt to get the answers I needed.
“Curiosity,” Nemain said, and her voice sounded so strange after so much time spent in silence. I’d barely gotten to hear her speak before her voice had gone, and now here she stood, speaking as if it had never happened at all. “We were impatient to meet you.”
“You told me the Fates appeared to me because something shifted, but you’d been there all along. You didn’t need to make yourself known. Why bother?” I asked, hating the need to understand.
“It would have been expected of us. You stole your power back from Tartarus and chose to stay anyway. You chose forgiveness over hatred, and that is not a trait we would expect from any of the Primordials. To not appear to you would only have raised suspicions to Medusa, and we were not ready to reveal ourselves yet,” Macha said, her face twisting as if she felt the tiniest sliver of guilt for their deception.
It wasn’t enough.
“You are my reason. You are why I will never want the power you have. Because I will never allow myself to become like you.”
“You are far more like us than you could possibly understand, Tempest. That is why you are here, about to enter the Cradle when we grant no access to others of your lineage. We are not your reckoning, Estrella,” Lachesis said, her voice tinted with something dark and almost angry. It never struck the point of feeling like emotion, but the window behind me opened to the Cradle, the Fates pressing closer to force me to take a step back toward it if I wanted to keep my distance from the monsters approaching.
Clotho finally opened her mouth again, her lips tipped up into an arrogant smirk as she watched my face fall. As one they reached up, touching a hand to my chest and that knot of thread there. They pushed, shoving me back through the open window so that I staggered over the edge and my feet touched the grass of the Cradle. I stared at the Fates in shock, realizing that they’d granted me passage. But it was Clotho’s last words that hung in the air as the glass rebuilt, shards snapping together to seal the temple off once more. “You are ours.”