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

5.11 - No Words

Dear Readers: Here is the second-to-last scene!!! :D

__________________

Scene 11: No Words

2020 B.C.

For the first time since she’d placed it on the Loom, she pulled it off.

Swiftly. Without a second thought, without acknowledging the scar it scored across her human heart. She knew her heart was human now. No matter whether she took mortal or immortal form, at any given moment, Clotho’s heart would always harbor something human. She wondered whether it would maybe fade with time. Wondering even while she knew it never would. There was no such thing as time anyway, in the Cave. Leastwise not the sort of time that healed.

She rolled her own gold thread awhile in her cold immortal fingers. Cold from lack of blood, from lack of life—for Clotho couldn’t help but feel, somehow, that living here and now as a deity, so faraway from humanity, was not living at all. She ached for earth again. The Cave had never felt so dark, so lonesome, so unlike a home. And yet it was the only home she’d ever known. Where she belonged. Wasn’t it?

“What troubles you, love?” cooed a voice close by.

Clotho turned to face the stormy greys behind her. A familiar gaze, by now, although it still felt foreign every time.

Love, she echoed in her mind. A funny thing for Chaos to have said—since Clotho hadn’t thought that the primordial goddess felt any such thing toward the Fates, and also since it seemed that love might be the answer to her question.

It wasn’t the answer she gave. “Many things,” Clotho sighed.

She refocused on the Loom, setting her golden thread aside. The thread she would set elsewhere, for her next visit to earth, so that the morrow would take her to someplace new. Someplace far from any familiar face. To stay true to her duty as a daughter. Never falter, never stray. It was the only way.

Just the thought of him, his ever-presence in her heart, nearly made her forget all else. His presence in her life would be her undoing, she knew. A distraction from all that she had to do, which thus might seal her mother's doom. So she had left. So she would stay away, as long as necessary, till Ananke's safety was assured.

Though the man would be long dead by then, she mused. The span of his thread scarcely an instant compared to her gilded eternity. An eternity through which she'd have to bear the heavy burden of a broken human heart.

The golden shade of her immortal thread had never looked so dark.

At any rate, before she set her thread upon the Loom again, there was of course the same old task to tend to, in the Cave. Clotho took up her spindle. Always more threads to spin. More mortal lives to begin.

Hopefully she could spin them without darkness in their hearts. Though she hadn’t the faintest idea as to how. She spun blindly, mindlessly still; there was no surefire twist of the fingers or flick of the wrist that resulted in virtue or vice. Not as far as she knew. And her time among the mortals had not taught her how to spin a human soul immune to darkness.

Nonetheless, all of the darkness that plagued humankind was her fault, she concluded. Her mistake to have spun them that way, with inborn evil, or with the potential for it, at the very least. The Book of Fate probably held all the answers, as to how to do her job. If only she could read the thing. If only she weren’t such a miserable failure at everything she touched…

“Clotho…” came the coo again, a cool palm on her shoulder.

The Fate’s spindle fell to the floor at the sudden, startling contact. She cursed herself, bent to retrieve it. Chaos’s hand was so damned cold. If Clotho had felt that her own immortal form was bloodless, lifeless—it was downright boiling, compared to the frigid primordial beside her.

“You’re shaken,” Chaos observed. “Is it because you’ve lifted your thread from its path on the Loom, for the first time since placing it?”

Clotho did not recall having invited those grey eyes inside her soul.

“You know that you can always set it back in the same place—”

“No,” Clotho blurted, darting a glance toward her sisters at their respective stations, worried whether they had heard. It appeared that they were far enough out of earshot for now. “No. I can’t, and I won’t. And that’s not all that troubles me.”

“Well, I am here to listen, if there’s anything you’d like to say…”

“There isn’t,” the Fate declared, returning to her task. “Trust me. There are no words.”

Chaos paused only for a moment, after which Clotho finally felt herself freed from the omniscient shadow of her gaze, as the goddess walked away.

She realized now that her own gaze was lingering on Lachesis, standing by the Loom, entwining lives. Smiling, a smile faint yet bold and bright, somewhere inside her sky-blue eyes, coursing from her immortal soul. Unwilling to lift her own thread from its present path. Staying. Staying the night. In the same place, in the palace by the seacliffs, set for marriage on the morrow. Following the same urges that her little sister had so bitterly forced herself to deny.

Clotho almost said something, just then. Almost. But she did not.

There were no words.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As always, would just love to hear your thoughts! :)

For the next and final upFate of Book I... I won't give any hints as to what time or place we're visiting ;)  But I do hope you'll enjoy! And if you liked this one, please don't forget to vote! :)

ALSO - a big thank you to everyone who has been joining in the Fandom fun over at FFHQ!! I hope you'll check it out if you haven't yet! We would love to have you sign up and hang out with us ^.^  Much luv always to my Fatefuls! ♥