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

5.5 - Why

Dear Readers: Let's pick up where we left off with #Cloder in the palace :) ♥

P.S. This soundtrack is one of my favorite sad/epic scores ever: "The Truth" by Audiomachine. The title and the song itself just suit this scene sooo perfectly... Hopefully you can give it a listen ^_^

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Scene 5: Why

2020 B.C.

She had hoped to go to sleep. To never see the man again.

Against her human heart, she’d hoped. Against the passions that she feared, for how fiercely they burned—for it was fearsome to feel bound to him, a fleeting soul upon the mortal earth. Even more so to feel rapture at the thought of her immortal soul somehow entwined with his. To think that their paths had been fated to cross, and to feel that nothing mattered more, on the entire Loom, than one grey thread the life of which she’d touched, and wished she never had to leave…

But there was much that mattered more. She would always remember, even and especially when her heart forgot. Before she had been human, she had been a Fate. Would always be a Fate. The daughter of a deity. The force of destiny, in dire need of aid, her doom assured unless her daughters focused ever on their task. It was a duty from which Cloe knew that she must never stray. To light the darkness in the heart of humankind.

Even if it meant extinguishing the flame within her own.

She had hoped to go to sleep. But here he was. Already in her mind, she’d bidden him goodbye. Her heart had protested; perhaps he’d heard the thunder through the halls, calling to him across the palace, all across the world unto its end. Perhaps the sound had summoned him and he was here to silence her mad heartbeat, to remind her that she had no place beside him in this life. In any life.

It would be good, to hear him say it. Easier to leave him, knowing that he wouldn’t have her anyway.

At any rate, she had to speak. He didn’t seem about to say a word himself. Not yet. His eyes were speaking volumes, but she couldn’t really bring herself to look, from where she stood still at the doorsill.

She inhaled, more deeply than humanly possible. Spoke in a strained and tortured sigh, struggling to be above a whisper. The air in here was all too heavy. Hot. It hurt. “Thank you.”

Cloe braved a glance up into his bay-blues. She shouldn’t have. The floor was safer, or the wall behind him; anything to anchor her to solid earth. She feared what she might say or do while drowning.

“…for saving us today,” she continued, focusing just above his brow, hoping that it would give the illusion of eye contact. “We owe you our lives, the would-be sacrifice and I. As does this entire city.”

He came a little closer. Slowly. Not slowly enough, or fast enough. By all the gods, the lost gods and the few who remained, she was dying.

When he spoke, she could have wept. To think that she could never hear his voice again, after this hopeless, heartless night.

“You owe me nothing, Cloe,” he claimed. “I’d do the same a thousand times. It was the only thing to do.”

She struggled to stay focused on his forehead. To speak with some semblance of sanity. “That’s true. Saving a victimized maiden, a city of innocent people…”

Had she dropped her gaze below his brow, she might’ve seen an answer in his bay-blues. Saving you.

But she did not. She kept on speaking, scared of what might happen should she stop. “…I’m glad that you did—Perseus. I do thank you.”