The Fates (Book I) - 2014 Watty Award Winner!

1.3 - In the Cave

Dear Readers: So this scene takes us to another time and place... as you can see ;)  Thank you to everyone who's reading, voting, commenting etc!!   It truly means the world to me!

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Scene 3: In the Cave

2020 B.C.

In the Cave, nothing ever ended or began.

There was the Loom. There were the threads, too many threads. And that was that, and that was all.

If anything began, it was by Clotho’s hand. Spawning new life with each turn of her spindle. But she knew nothing of the lives she spun. The threads were strangers to her—born of blind necessity, not love. That kind of birth did not feel like a beginning.

If anything ended, it was with Atropos. Her lethal scissors sliced through life without a second thought. Death was a very final thing. But there was no end to her deathly task, for always there were more threads to cut.

And Lachesis handled everything in between. She laid the lives out on the Loom, ensuring that nothing was tangled or lost. She measured them out, and she managed their paths, on the earth far below.

To these three, that earth may as well not have existed. For these three girls, three gods, could not be farther from humanity.

“That one almost put up a fight,” Atropos grumbled, scowling at the last thread that had withered by her shears.

Lachesis pouted slightly and tilted her head, pale gold hair glinting in the dim torchlight. “You must have just imagined it.”

Atropos shot her sister a sharp glare. “I don’t imagine things,” she snapped, then rolled her eyes at the rough stone ceiling. “None of us even could, in this stifling place.”

Clotho had imagined many things. But none worth mentioning, she mused, for they were based on nothing.

“What would happen if we suddenly just…” Atropos thought aloud, “…stopped.”

Lachesis sighed. “You ask that every day, Atropos.”

“And there’s never an answer. I say we just try.”

“The answer Mother gives is that the world would fall apart.”

“But what kind of answer is that? What does that even mean?”

“Well,” Lachesis responded levelly, “the humans would stop being born, living, dying.”

“And what’s it to us?”

Lachesis bit her lip and tended to the Loom.

Atropos turned toward the youngest sister. “What’s it to you, Clotho? Have you any care for the humans?”

Clotho paused briefly. “I’m not sure what caring feels like.”

“Oh, that can’t be true!” Lachesis gently objected. “You care for us, as sisters. For our mother.”

“That’s love. Not caring. Love among gods doesn’t call for care. None of us needs it—for we live forever, need no looking after.”

“Unlike these little runts,” Atropos uttered, gesturing toward the myriad threads. “Though maybe if I stopped cutting, and the two of you continued with your business, then the humans would be fine. They’d live forever too, without a care.”

“And what would you go do?” Lachesis asked her elder sister.

“Anything I damn well please.”

“Such as…?”

“Get out of this bunghole, then who knows?” Atropos answered, shrugging a sheet of raven hair over her shoulder. “Maybe visit the humans. And if I don’t like them, then I’ll come back to snip again.”

She kept on snipping, always snipping, as she spoke.

“At least then there would be some excitement behind what I do.”

“But that should hardly be cause for excitement…” Lachesis began to protest.

“And why’s that? Because death is horrific and sad? Because I was stuck with the worst task of the three of us—maybe of all the gods?”

Lachesis was silenced again.

“Well, excuse me if I have no qualms,” Atropos muttered, her shears seeming to snip more aggressively now. “Qualms are a luxury I can’t afford.”

Clotho looked up for a moment from her spindle and saw a fleeting glimmer in her sister’s deep green eyes. A glimmer that looked quite a lot like a qualm.

A while’s silence followed.

Lachesis broke it. “I’ve no interest in visiting the humans. I think that would just be a big mess.”

Atropos rolled her eyes again. “Just as Mother always says.”

“She’s right, though. If we were to get mixed up in human affairs, we would put names and faces to these threads. But we would have to stay detached, to work the Loom. Imagine how hard that would be.” Lachesis shook her head in horror at the thought.

“Like I told you,” Atropos scoffed, “I don’t imagine things.”

A distant shaft of light pierced through the shadows of the Cave.

They had a visitor.

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