In which Saskia Martinez met Eros, the god of love himself, and got her heart entangled in a major love disaster. Except nobody told her the supposed mythical being was a teenage boy wearing a ripped varsity shirt, who dangled men in the air-by the...
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Humans were like glass. Their lives, fragile. Stories had been weaved over time as to how people came to be, how life started and ended. They all varied and changed, these stories. But there was one which Eros liked the most.
It was the same one he heard thousands of years ago in a small hut. A story a father used to tell his daughter about the three women who were responsible for the lives and destinies of both mortals and gods. They were the Moirai—the Fates, my dear child, he would say to the wide-eyed, little girl as the sound of crickets filled the room. Nobody knew where they came from, or who brought them to the world—they were just here for as long as the world itself. They were three sisters who worked together; one sister spun the thread of life, the second determined how long the thread would be, and then the last sister, the most severe and oldest of them all, cut the thread with her shears and ended one's life.
Eros liked this version most, because it was nearest to how the Fates were in his world.
They were three women who dwelt in the heavens, but the thread they spun and cut were as complicated as the lives of people they represented. The Blue Garden, that was how the Fates' home was called. Lives were balls of glass dangling from threads from the skies, and they glowed blue. They were fragile, in every sense of the word, and yet it was the most enchantingly beautiful place he'd ever seen. Countless orbs glowing in varying shades of blue, like little blue fireflies at night. Like blue chandeliers adorning the blanket of darkness.
Clotho spun the thread, may it be plain or gold, gave it to Lachesis, who connected the glass orb from when a child was born, and then she lowered it down to where Atropos resided under them, another beautiful light added to the countless hanging others around the place. Unlike the stories, Atropos was not always old, but she was as stern as the ominous sound of her cutting shears. Like the stages of the people's lives, she was sometimes a child, a young woman, or someone with a face wrinkled, body bent with age. The length of thread Lachesis allowed was deeply connected to Atropos' form. Atropos' existence revolved around death, ceaselessly going around, back and forth the Blue Garden—her shears had not known rest. It didn't matter if the thread was long when Atropos was a child, or if it was short and hung high when she was tall enough to reach it at the time of harvest in the garden, so to speak. She did not bend nor stand on her toes to end one's life; she just simply cut those which her arms could reach, for that was how their fate were. It was hard to understand how the three worked in harmony. But life was like that, was it not? It was beautiful and inexplicably complicated, because it just was—it just is.
"See those little, twinkling stars in the sky?" the father would fondly ask his daughter as he pointed to the heavens. "They are the lights of life from the Blue Garden, my child."
"But why isn't it blue, Papa?"
He would laugh at this and gently pat his daughter's head. "Because they are so far away, that we can only see the barest signs of them," he'd reply. "So which light do you think is yours, my darling girl? Is it that big one? Or the little, twinkling star beside it?"
