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

1.12 - No Time

Dear Readers: DUN DUN DUN... the second-to-last scene of Episode 1...

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Scene 12: No Time

2020 B.C.

Tomorrow had arrived.

Sunrise over the Cave, for the thousandth time. Another sunrise that the three Fates could not see. Were today to mark a milestone, they would never have imagined it.

Their mother paid a visit, in the morning. Retrieved the golden thread she’d given to them yesterday. Few words were shared; the dark air in the Cave was tense. Ananke did not tell her daughters that she loved them. Didn’t think they’d need to be reminded, not today.

And there was nothing but the Loom, for several hours more. Though the hours never started, never ended. Silence. Shadows. Only ever empty shadows, in the Cave.

A distant shaft of light.

Three heads turned instantly in unison. Their mother never visited them more than once, on any given day.

This was not any given day.

There were three golden threads, there in their mother’s hands. Threads that the girls had never seen, but recognized right away.

And there was terror in her amber eyes. Sheer terror, in the eyes of the almighty. She looked powerless, for once. Paralyzed with fear.

Clotho dropped her spindle to the floor, ran to her mother.

“You must go,” Ananke urged, pressing one of the threads into her youngest daughter’s trembling hands.

The other two had risen. Atropos moved deliberately, dauntlessly, toward her mother. Lachesis stood still at the Loom, every ounce of her utterly petrified.

Ananke handed each of them a thread as she approached the Loom. “You must all go. Now.”

Atropos’s dark brows furrowed over her darkening gaze. “What has happened.” Her grave voice did not lift into a question.

Ananke shook her head, pointed urgently at the Loom. Darted glances past her shoulder every second, toward the entrance of the Cave. As if the underworld itself were coming after them.

“There is no time. Here—place your threads.”

“Mother…?” Lachesis bleated.

“Place your threads.”

Atropos stepped up to the Loom and set to work.

Tears welled in Lachesis’s wide eyes, deep shudders wracking her delicate frame. “How will we find you? Mother—how will we find our way back home…?”

“You will know,” Ananke reassured her. “I promise. You will find your way home.”

She clasped Lachesis’s wrist and raised it up toward the Loom.

“But for now, you must go.”

Lachesis stared at her own horrifying thread. “Where…”

“Anywhere,” her mother strove to help her set the thread in place. And yet Ananke’s hand as well was shaking. Knowing she might never see her child again.

Atropos cut in. Hand as steady as a surgeon’s. “Here.”

She picked a point at random on the Loom. No time for second thoughts. For any thoughts at all. She pushed her sister’s golden piece into the mass of mortal threads.

Lachesis whimpered, reached out for her mother’s arms.

And then she disappeared.

Clotho saw the most impossible hybrid of grief and relief on her mother’s pale face.

Atropos poised her own thread up against the Loom. Her thumb pressed down. There was no time.

But she made time, for this. She turned to look into her mother’s eyes and knew it was goodbye. Somehow she knew.

And somehow she smiled, in spite of all the shadows all around. These words, the answer that she should've given earlier today... these words had to be spoken through a smile. “I love you, too.”

The soft words echoed even after she had vanished.

Clotho found her gaze drawn to a certain pinpoint on the Loom. Though all points upon the Loom looked just the same, this one was different, in this moment. For it beckoned her, as if it knew her name and knew her heart. As if it were her second home.

She knew where she was set to go.

She tore her eyes away only to bid her mother farewell.

But then she saw that there was one more thing, there in her mother’s hands. Ananke had removed it from her robes once the two other Fates had fled.

It was a scroll. It was the scroll.

“This is yours now, Clotho.”

Clotho iced over. This was not to be believed…

Her mother forced the scroll into her frozen hands. “If it ever stops being written…”

The very thought sent Clotho’s heart down to her feet. Or somewhere far below.

Perhaps to earth, before she’d even ventured there.

“…you must write it,” Ananke finished, amber eyes unyielding.

“Mother, I—”

“Now go.”

Clotho saw such love, such trust, such fierce hope in those honey-colored eyes. The sight inspired her with the courage to take up the Book of Fate. And with the strength to say goodbye.

She placed her thread upon the point where she belonged.

There was no time for an embrace, no time for words or even thoughts. But always there was time for love.

Clotho felt it from and for her mother, in this final fatal moment, more deeply and truly than ever before.

And then she felt nothing at all.

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