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

3.4 - Fleeting Yet Infinite

Dear Readers: Picking up where we left off in Scene 3.2, on desolate Olympus...

Though as the vortex comes, one of the Fates' minds flashes back to someplace else... picking up where we left off in 3.1 ;)

Hope you enjoy both aspects of the scene :D

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Scene 4: Fleeting Yet Infinite

2020 B.C.

This had to be the end.

The dark vortex swallowed the sky. They were next. The Fates beheld the end of everything, and in that instant they felt nothing, for there was no time to feel.

One of the Fates felt something nonetheless. For in what she feared might be her final hour—as a mortal or a god, here in the heavens or on earth—Clotho’s mind and heart flashed toward one soul that she had spun. The first she’d ever met. On her first day amidst humanity, surely set to be her last, now that the vortex was upon them.

The oncoming force flung them down onto the desolate ground of Olympus, devouring what little light was left across the dim expanse.

Clotho collapsed. In the split second that the end began, her mind swarmed with a million memories: the last few moments she had spent alive, upon the mortal earth…

**********

What did she think? Cloe hadn’t the faintest clue, and she had really not expected him to ask. She wondered what she thought. She knew his heart was set upon this sinful path, but she could not guess why. Nor whether he was headed anywhere. She mulled it over, for a moment. And she found that all her thoughts about this man were contradictions.

In some ways, Rider seemed like the most purposeful person she could ever have imagined, a man born with a mission in his blood. In others, he seemed born to be lost, a thread with no path on the Loom.

He spoke, before she could complete her contemplations. “If you are still mine at the end—”

“Who says I’m yours now?” she objected.

Although she couldn’t see it from this angle, she could hear the smirk that slid across his lips, into his voice. “That rope… for one.”

For one? That phrase stirred up a little panic. For one? What else had given it away? Had her eyes bulged, looking on the lean bulge of his biceps? Was her tongue hanging out of her mouth while she watched him undress? Did he have eyes in the back of his head—or yet worse, in his backside, at which she’d been gawking?

He turned to face her. She stared straight into the floor.

Bit her lip. Swallowed hard. As if to swallow down her wayward tongue, keep it from lolling at the sight of him. She could not grant him that victory, of seeing what the vision of his body did to hers.

She shivered. Then in spite of herself, dared a glance at his face.

Oh, gods—that smile suggested that he saw it all.

He came toward her, smiling still. His bay-blues shimmered as he spoke. “You’ll know the end, if you are still mine when I reach it.”

She didn’t blink. “In this life or the next?”

The shimmer dimmed; his smile sank into a scowl. “There is only this world. No other. One life, for each of us on earth,” Rider asserted, turning on his heel. “Best lived without looking for anything beyond.”