Dear Readers: Onward to Episode 3!!!! Thank you soooo much to all who have been following The Fates - I really hope you will continue to enjoy it :D
Back to B.C., with Cloe held captive in Rider's tent...
EPISODE 3 - BELIEF
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Scene 1: Hunger
2020 B.C.
The stronger the hunger, the more human she felt.
And it grew stronger every second. The food lay by her feet, no longer hot, but no less tempting. Funny thing—that a beast slain, sliced, and seared by man could taunt the human tongue so viciously, from where it sat upon a platter out of reach.
What a sad, twisted form of revenge, Cloe mused. She wondered whether this sort of thing was part of her mother’s grand scheme for the universe. One of Ananke’s ways of striking balance between victims and victors on earth.
If so, then maybe this attempt at cosmic balance—Cloe’s temptation by this vengeful side of meat—signified some hope that her mother was alive. Alive and active, safe and sovereign in Olympus.
Or maybe not. Maybe it signified nothing. Maybe she was just focusing too fiercely on her hunger, in an effort to forget another newfound human urge of hers. A quite different source of temptation.
“Rider doesn’t want you to starve,” a familiar voice declared, breaking through Cloe’s distant thoughts.
She turned to see Chrysaor reentering the tent.
“And yet he doesn’t want another fellow feeding you,” Chrysaor continued, crouching beside her and untying her bonds. “So it’s your lucky day—you’ll get to feed yourself.”
She blinked. “He sent you to unbind me?”
“Temporarily. Eat up.”
“What an ass—prideful and possessive,” Cloe muttered as she eagerly shook off the loose ropes and reached for the plate.
It made her feel better somehow, to speak disparagingly of Rider. As if such spiteful words offset her urges toward him.
Not that the insult wasn’t well deserved, of course. He was an ass. Too prideful to unbind her himself. Too possessive to let her eat out of another man’s hand. What did it matter to him, anyway?
“Perhaps,” Chrysaor acknowledged with a shrug, followed by a provocative smile. “Though you do seem to bring it out of him.”
Cloe rolled her eyes. “You would blame the innocent captive.”
She swallowed her first ever bite of food. Gratifying, satisfying. But not nearly enough.
“Innocent?” he echoed, green eyes glinting beneath a cocked brow. “No naughty thoughts, since you’ve been tied up in this tent?”
She scowled mid-chew. “Nothing worthy of blame.”
“Worthy of shame?”
“I see no shame in human hunger,” she answered—in all honesty, though deliberately skirting his question.
Chrysaor grinned. “Good. Then you’ll be happy in this camp.”
“And why is that?”
“Because we satisfy our hungers here,” he stated simply. “Why don’t you finish up, and then I’ll take you on a tour.”
YOU ARE READING
The Fates (Book I) - 2014 Watty Award Winner!
FantasyThey walk among us. All three, living normal mortal lives. Cloe is graduating college; Lacey is getting married; Atria is bar-hopping and breaking hearts. Today, they are human. But they are also the three Fates—the all-powerful directors of human d...
