Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
Bloom
The Factory of Fate
“And who are you?” I demanded, the question carefully balanced between defiance and the wide-eyed ignorance they expected.
Clotho’s gaze, smug and pitiless, flicked downward to her hands. I followed it.
My threads.
Clotho’s fingers moved in a blur, weaving with vicious focus. Around her, the threads of the masses flowed on an endless, indifferent current—automated, impersonal. A factory of fate.
But mine? Mine she wove by hand.
Lachesis waved a hand over that automated river, assigning measure through some arcane calculation—a cold, magical program that dictated the length and quality of lives without a second thought.
Then Atropos moved in, cutting at random. Her shears snipped thread after thread without her even glancing at what she ended. Snip. Snip. Snip. Lives concluded with less care than a human trimming their nails.
My eyes widened as the truth sank in. The Sisters of Fate did not tend to each individual thread as the myths claimed. For the masses, it was factory work—an assembly-line with mass-produced deaths.
Millions. All the ordinary lives of ordinary people who would live and die without the Fates ever truly looking at them. Yet they still held every fate in their grasp, guided by the relentless, unfeeling machines of their craft.
“Always playing the innocent,” Atropos mused, a mocking smile touching her crimson lips. “But you know what we are, don’t you, Bloom Aurelius? From all those books you devoured in your academy library?”
“It’s a lie,” I replied, keeping my voice level despite the disgust churning within me, “that you weave every thread with care.”
“The task would have driven us mad,” Lachesis tsked, her amber gaze distant. “We tend only to the threads of those who are significant. The masses follow patterns we designed long ago. Even so, the work is never done. We are trapped here. For eons, we have not left this cave physically.”
“We can only appear in dreams and visions,” Clotho added, her fingers never stilling. They moved in patterns I recognized—patterns I used when I wove my own threads.
The realization settled cold and clear. I had something in common with them.
That was likely why their power did not blind me. Why my mind remained my own. Why I could stand here, seeing what no mortal or immortal was meant to see, and walk away with my sight intact.
I’d felt their probes the moment I entered their territory—three distinct presences trying to slip past my defenses, searching for weaknesses, looking for secrets.
Each one had met my mental defenses and returned empty.
I’d caught the slight flinch in Atropos when her attempt failed.
She was the most aggressive of them. The cutter.
My gaze located the threads Clotho was weaving with unwavering skills. This section of the harp held not one strand but many—an elaborate tapestry telling a story across time.
The threads of my life. Lives, plural.
Not one lifetime, but ninety-nine. Ninety-nine reincarnations displayed before me.
To another, it might have been an indecipherable knot of light and color. But I was a weaver. Their secrets could not hide from me.
The realization struck like lightning. Images began to bleed from the threads, streaming forward in a relentless sequence—my past lives, rendered in devastating clarity.
All of them centered on Hades. Different versions of him. Different eras. Different red-haired women who wore my face, my gray eyes, dressed in the garments of their time: Greek chitons, medieval gowns, Victorian silks, modern linens. My face, again and again.
The images shifted faster, and a cold horror gathered in my chest. They were not showing me lives.
They were showing me deaths.
My deaths.
And Hades was there every time.
Darkly gorgeous and utterly devastated, he held my corpse, rage and grief warring across his features.
In one life, I lay stabbed through the heart, blood soaking a Renaissance gown.
In another, I was drowned, my hair streaming wet over his arms as he lifted me from the water. Always, he arrived one moment too late.
In one thread, poison scorched my veins. Hades begged me to hold on. In another, he had to breathe death into me himself—the only mercy left—to spare me the agony as my body was torn apart.
The God of Death could not save me.
Because of the curse.
A curse woven into the fabric of our very souls.
By the Fates.
By the twelve Olympian gods.
Including my mother.
I saw the truth in the one long, central thread amidst the others that were severed and knotted into a chain of endless rebirth.
The ancient blood curse was an unbearable weight in my veins, the fog that had clouded my mind for lifetimes.
It had stolen my awareness, my memories, forced me into cycle after cycle of death before I could fully wake.
Now, the Fates’ own threads laid it bare.
Wrath tore through me, a white-hot inferno.
“She can see them!” Clotho gasped, her hands stuttering on the spindle.
All three sisters fixed their predatory gazes on me, reassessing the threat.
“Of course she can see them,” Atropos said, her voice a low blade. “We watched her weave with blood magic.”
“Twice,” Lachesis added, cold admiration in her tone. “After he finally woke her power.”
“Unacceptable!” Clotho hissed. “It is forbidden!”
“She is like us,” Lachesis said, her amber eyes narrowing. “Which makes her dangerous.”
“You know who you are now, don’t you, Bloom?” Atropos taunted. She still followed the rules—even here, the cosmic law held. She would not speak my true name.
The final mortal thread—my one hundredth life—still moved through Clotho’s spindle, but it was drawn taut, thinner than the others, fragile as a breath. I feared it would snap before Atropos ever lifted her shears.
My heart turned to ice as the full truth sank in. They had brought me here to make that final cut. To end my hundredth life and ensure there would never be a hundred and first. Then the long, central thread—Persephone’s existence—would unravel completely.
I would be gone forever.
I kept my face blank, even as my pulse ran wild, even as cold panic threatened to paralyze me.
“Remembering won’t lift the curse,” I said, as if discussing a stranger’s fate. I would not let the sisters see a single crack. “You fooled him. You fooled everyone into believing that once I remembered, the curse would break. It was always a ruse. That way, you ensured it never could be.”
“Clever, aren’t we?” Atropos purred.
“Well, where are our manners?” Lachesis waved a hand, and a goblet floated toward me. It hovered inches from my lips. “We offer our honored, clever guest a drink. You must be thirsty.”
My throat was dust. I hadn’t had water for hours. But as I inhaled subtly, the scent of the liquid reached me—Lethe water, essence of poppy, extract of morpheus root.
Drugged. To make me compliant. To erase what I’d fought to remember.
I, Persephone, understood herbs and plants and poisons better than my own reflection. That knowledge lived in my blood, part of my essence as the Goddess of Spring. It was an insult that they thought they could deceive me with something so obvious.
“How kind,” I said, my voice cold. “But I am not thirsty.”
“Now you are being rude,” Lachesis scolded, the goblet still hovering.
“Says the kidnapper,” I replied.
“Now she bites,” Lachesis snickered, finally waving the goblet away.
“She’s in this room,” I scolded.
“Your bite won’t leave a mark, girl,” Atropos snickered, “and your cry won’t reach him. You are already here, outside his protection. You wear cuffs woven with the most potent binding spells in existence.”
All three sisters grinned at me then, and I saw what lay beneath their almost-human facades. Four rows of jagged teeth in each mouth. Ancient, inhuman, and hungry.
They were done playing nice.
Not that they ever had been.
“You’re the most talkative of the sisters.” I angled my chin and trained my gaze on Lachesis.
“Keen observation,” Lachesis said. “I am also the most sympathetic to your situation. That is why I offered the drink. I did not wish for you to feel the agony, not like all the times before. Ninety-nine deaths, Bloom. Some lasted hours. Some, days. I was trying to spare you that.”
She leaned forward, her amber eyes brightening like embers.
“But you had to be difficult. You had to make this unpleasant. So be it. Pain is no stranger to you, is it?”
I stepped back, fear choking my throat. “What are you going to do to me?”
The sisters traded a look. Some silent communication passed between them. Then Lachesis sighed with theatrical reluctance.
“Very well. We will tell you, as a final courtesy. Your thread ends today… and mine begins.”
She smiled while I blinked in confusion.
“Eons ago, we saw the end of our threads. All of them.” Lachesis’s voice hardened.
“Billions of strands, all our work, severed. Because of you. Your power kept growing, far beyond what you were meant to be. A minor goddess of spring—flowers and fragility. You should have remained nothing. Yet you became the greatest threat any of us had ever foreseen.”
“You would command life, death, and fate itself,” Atropos cut in, her red eyes blazing. “You would unravel every balance we have woven. Destroy all we built.”
“We could not allow that,” Lachesis continued. “Could we?”
“No,” Atropos said, her voice final. “We could not.”
“So we crafted this curse. An elaborate cosmic design that required all three of us, working together for centuries. It was our greatest labor, our pride.” Lachesis’s expression shifted into something almost admiring.
“However, we also did not wish your talent wasted. Your weaving surpasses even our own, my dearest. It would be a shame to destroy such a great gift.”
She smiled then, and it was the most terrifying sight.
“And thus one of us shall become you. We will take your body, your power. After much debate, that honor falls to me.”
They wanted to possess me. To steal my body, my power, my very essence. All that made me who I was.
“You would be trapped in my mortal form,” I said. “You would die.”
“Once I take hold, I will seize your divine power. The curse will lift because I will be you, and I will choose to end it.” Her gaze grew dreamy. “I will live as a goddess should. I will relish the pleasures of the flesh. As you have… tasted.”
She meant Nero. Hades. She wanted to fuck my mate.
The thought of that imposter in his bed made my skin crawl, my stomach turn, my blood run cold.
I fought back the nausea rushing to my head. “He’ll know it isn’t me. And he’ll tear you apart.”
“He will never know, dearest.” Lachesis grinned, a sensual, anticipatory light in her eyes. “You got all your memories back before you came here, but you never told him, did you? You hoarded your secrets, as you always do. And it will bite you in the ass, as mortals usually say.”
I swallowed against the icy knot in my throat.
Secrets destroying relationships. The oldest story there was.
“He cannot save you this final time, either,” she continued, clearly savoring the sound of her musical yet sinister voice.
“Just as he was always one step behind when you died. But this time—your hundredth life—I will go to him as you. I will comfort him. Let him believe his queen has finally returned to him, whole and loving.” She sighed, content.
“So take comfort, Bloom. In a way, you will live on. Through me.”
A fool would ask, “Why do you do this to me?”
A fool would whimper, would beg, would appeal to her better nature.
But the Fates had no better nature.
And I was no fool.
I attacked.