Chapter 39 #2
I could hear their voices, I could feel the soft fabric of the sofa underneath my face, and I could smell my mother’s cooking in the kitchen, but my mind was blank.
Back then, sleep had enveloped me like a veil, quieting my thoughts and gently pulling me into a blissful sleep.
But I wasn’t sleeping now and I wasn’t surrounded by my family.
I didn’t know how long I had been here, but I knew it was not where I was supposed to go. There was something I needed to do, but I couldn’t remember what it was. So I closed my eyes, a feeling of peace and calm surrounding me once more.
* * *
Little pin pricks ran softly over my skin.
The white smoke around me latched onto my skin, tickling and teasing me to ease out of my dreamy state.
I tried to resist, the quiet calm of the never-ending river of thoughtlessness was calling to me.
I didn’t want to think or hurt or feel, I just wanted to lose myself in the endlessness that had become my reality.
But there it was again, this sense of something tugging at my skin, my bones, my hair…
I opened my eyes for the first time in Fates knew how long.
A string of thoughts ran through my head, so quickly passing me by that I couldn’t be sure it had been there at all.
I sat up abruptly, realizing that I was surrounded by the white smoke and countless mirrors.
There was no reflection in the mirror, as if I simply did not exist. I was air and smoke and nothingness and nothing more or less.
Behind the mirrors, I spotted a young woman, she smiled at me.
“Hello, Maelis, the wordsmith. Come and sit with me for a while.”
I got up on shaky legs, but there was no sign of any part of me in the mirror. I walked over to the woman and sat down on the ground opposite of her.
“Who are you and why am I here?” I asked.
She smiled. “I am not a who, nor are we truly here. We are somewhere in between. And neither are you someone, right now. You just are, until you aren’t anymore.”
I was feeling awful, my non-existent limbs were stiff, my head was hurting, and I had no idea what to do with that answer.
“I am sorry, but I don’t understand. I was at the court of dreams and I think I died and now I am here. Is this the afterlife?” I asked.
She smiled again and I truly wanted to punch her in the face for it.
“I am sorry that you are confused. Let me try again. I am not a person, I am a concept, a patchwork of creatures and essences and stories, I am what you call The Fates.”
I sucked in a breath. I had never thought about what the Fates would look like or who exactly they were, but this was unexpected.
“So… I did die, huh?” I said.
She shifted slightly, as if my question made her uncomfortable.
“You did. The harnessing was too much for your body to handle. You weren’t supposed to do that.”
Annoyance rose in me. The prophecy had been more than a little confusing, how was anyone supposed to know what to do with the jumbled, ominous words? I got up, the anger in my stomach making it impossible to sit still.
“Well… you weren’t exactly clear about what I should or shouldn’t do,” I said defensively, “the prophecy was vague at best and it caused a lot of pain. So I think you should take a look at yourself and next time you issue a prophecy, be fucking clear with your instructions.”
I was more than annoyed. I was incredibly tired and the heat in this space made me feel sleepy again.
The Fates just smiled at me softly. “Putting things into motions that will change the course of the world isn’t an exact science. It’s like baking bread: you can have all the right ingredients and know all about the right temperature, but still sometimes the dough will not rise.”
I thought she was going to say more, but she remained quiet.
“So what are you trying to say? I am a dough that hasn’t risen up to your standards? Thanks for that, I think you could have just left me dead. No need to insult me in the afterlife.”
I turned to leave, even though I didn’t know where the Fates I was even going.
“No, Maelis, you are not a dough. And if anything, you have exceeded the hopes we had for you. You both did.”
I turned around to look at her. “Both? Do you mean Theo?” My voice got softer then and the anger in my stomach dissolved. It was replaced with longing and sadness and happiness, because he was finally free.
“Yes,” she smiled, “we had the right ingredients, and we knew what your hekas would be. We had the perfect timetable and the right temperature, but we did not factor in one important detail: that since the beginning of time, people have fallen in love in the most beautiful ways and under the most unexpected of circumstances. Love was not part of our plan, but when it happened, it changed the way this story was to play out.”
Tears were rolling down my cheeks, because I knew they were telling the truth. Everything that had happened changed the moment I realized I was falling for him.
I wiped away my tears with my sleeve.
“What was supposed to happen then? Can you tell me or is this some cosmic secret?”
She shook her head and held her hand out, so I would sit with her once more.
“It is no secret, not anymore. The two of you were supposed to train together and learn together, just like you did at the beginning. If he hadn’t been so scared to fall for you even more than he already had, Auretheos would have understood that only your joined powers could defeat the Heralds and the Gods with their dark magic.
He would have found the spells in the Book of Long, and you would have been able to avoid the war without a single life being lost.”
The words sliced through me like a blade. My throat tightened, and a sob tore loose before I could stop it.
If only I’d tried harder. If only I’d seen how afraid he was. I should have reached for him, forced him to stay, begged him to trust me.
All of it, every death, every fire, every scream, was a consequence of my silence.
My vision blurred. I pressed a trembling hand to my mouth, but it didn’t stop the shaking.
The figure in front of me quietly handed me a tissue. I took it, though my fingers barely worked, and whispered, “It’s my fault. All of it. Again.”
The Fates regarded me for a long moment. When they spoke, their voice was neither kind nor cruel, simply inevitable.
“Fault,” they repeated softly, as if tasting the word. “Such a small thing to place upon the weight of eternity.”
I looked up, but their face was unreadable, eyes reflecting a depth that made time itself seem shallow.
“Some threads are woven by choice,” they continued, “others by consequence. Some by love, some by fear. You think this tapestry could have been stitched differently, that one missing thread would have saved the rest. But it is never that simple.”
Her gaze shifted past me, to something unseen. “We are all part of a rhythm: endings and beginnings, creation and loss. You cannot stop the music by refusing to dance. Hurt comes, always. It is the heartbeat of life.”
My throat ached. “Then what was the point of any of it?”
“To move,” the Fates said quietly. “To feel. To keep the pattern alive.”
The room was silent except for the sound of my uneven breathing. The tissue crumpled in my hand. And for the first time, I didn’t argue. I just let the weight of their words settle.
“What is going to happen now?” I asked, while blowing my nose very unladylike.
The Fates cocked their head. “That is the real question here, isn’t it? There is no plan on where to go from here. Your story hasn’t been woven yet.”
I pulled my knees up to my chin. “Is that why we are in the in-between? Because there is no place for me in the afterlife or wherever it is that dead people go?”
The Fates got up then and turned towards the mirrors.
“In a way, yes. And in another way, no.”
Great, more cryptic answers…
“There is a place for you in the world, but it is not here. See, if you hadn’t fallen in love, you would have become Auretheos consort.
Equal to him in every way, eternal and never ending.
But you died a mortal death. No wordsmith has ever given up their heka.
No one has ever forfeited immortality for love.
And no mortal has ever been brought back to life,” they said.
I sighed.
“Could you do that? Bring me back to life?” I asked.
The Fates had stopped and turned around to face me again.
“That is something that we will have to think about. Your mortal body has been burned and there are rules to stick by. There would be consequences for your resurrection, and we need time to confer. You are free to stay here or return to the stream of light, wordsmith. We will be back.”
And with that, they were gone. I didn’t stop crying for a long while.
* * *
A few weeks later, I had a dream. It was rare that I dreamed here, in the in-between. Most nights, falling asleep felt like falling into a deep, bottomless hole. I welcomed it each night, welcomed finally being free of the thoughts that plagued me during the day.
Despite the vastness of this place in-between, being here made me feel like I was entombed. And that wasn’t too far off, because I was dead by all means.
It hurt me to think of my friends, my family, Theo. They were grieving me, had buried me, while I was stuck here, doomed to go over the same things in my head over and over again.
Maybe this was hell. Maybe I was being punished for touching Theo, for leading him astray. Maybe the prophecy had not been fulfilled because he had not remained pure.
It didn’t matter how often I thought about all of it, I never got an answer.
The Fates seemed to have forgotten about me and maybe my family and friends would forget about too.
But that night, something was different. I fell asleep quickly again, but this time there was not just darkness. It looked like I was under the Veil in the Luminaris and was traveling somewhere.
Suddenly, I was a child again, playing in the garden behind our house.
It was autumn and the sun was high in the sky.
I was wearing a red jacket that I had loved so much that I had sometimes gone to sleep in it.
My father had planted the flower garden for my mother, and he had reserved a small part of the flower bed for me.
He had told me I could dig and plant and play however I wanted to with it. I had planted some seeds my dad had given me and made my way down to the stream to fetch water for the garden. A man was standing by the river, his back towards me. As I approached the water, he turned to me and smiled.
“Hello, how are you today?” he asked.
I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, so I just smiled, filled my little bucket and started walking back.
“Maelis, look here. This is my friend.”
The man held out a cage with a little bird inside. I looked back to our house, trying to decide what to do. The man noticed my curiosity and came a little closer.
“This is my friend, he is trapped inside the cage and I can’t open it. What should I do?” he asked.
I shook my head, because how was I supposed to know? I was only a child.
“Is it happy in there?” I asked the man and watched the bird as it chirped and picked up sunflower seeds from the bottom of the cage.
The man smiled. “That is only something the bird can tell you, if you listen.”
His voice sounded familiar, like someone I should know but couldn’t place.
When I blinked, he was gone. I stared at where he had been, but my mother appeared in the garden and called me back to the house.
As I was racing up the hill towards the house, my feet grew heavy and slowly I started sinking again, into the deep black hole.
It was the first and only dream I had for weeks.