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“The stacks are organized alphabetically from Achlys to Zeus. I suggest you get to work, young lady,” she said, peering down her nose at me. “Sounds like you’re already far behind.”
“You have no idea,” I muttered, walking off.
As promised, I found the Moirai section easily.
I took down as many books as I could carry and brought them to a table behind the stacks. Squashy armchairs scattered around the table, each lit with a bright, glowing orblight.Choosing a book at random, I dropped on the chair and settled in to read.
“The Moirai, or the Fates, are three goddesses who decide the destinies of mortals,” I began. “Clotho, the Spinner, Lachesis, the Alloter, and Atropos, the Inflexible. It is known that these three beings reign supreme over past, present, and future. Clotho spins the thread of life. Lachesis determines how long the thread of a life shall be, and Atropos ends that life with a single snip of her indomitable shears.”
I flipped through, skimming the pages. Seemed the book only covered the goddesses’ history, and their influence on events before they scattered.
I put the book back, chose another, and opened on the first page. “Evanthia Theo, child of the Fates. Taming your gift of the present,” I read. “Nope.”
Back it went to be replaced by another. Then another. Then another. It didn’t take me long to realize the majority of the books were like the first—the history of the Moirai when they were whole. So far the book written by Evanthia was the only one about a demigod with their power.
“Selene did say we were rare.” Sighing, I closed the last books and returned to the shelves for more.
It took much longer than I anticipated, but finally, I openedThe Threads of Time,written by Loukia Galanis. I read the first line on the first page and didn’t stop.
The power to control the past is not the gift it would seem to be. We think of the thread of our past as one straight, singular rope, but that is not so. Life is chaos. It’s wonderful, terrible, unpredictable, and acrimonious. To look upon the thread of our life is to witness a tangled and confusing, intricate web.
I frowned, thinking of that dark and quiet pocket of time.
What we chosen and cursed few must remember is that we have been given the tiniest seed of power from one goddess.That does not grant us the power of all three. A limitation that means little for other demigods, but ruin for children of the Fates.
“Ruin? Why?”
“Read it aloud,” Selene said.
“Can’t you see what I see?”
“What I do is not true seeing. Read it aloud.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I didn’t see a reason why not.
“My power is thread looping,” I read quietly. “In their wisdom, the goddesses gave me the gift of banishing others back into their past and looping the thread. Essentially, trapping them in a single day, week, month, or year of their history.”
My eyes were huge. “That’s an incredible power. The tiniest seed of power from one goddess allowed her to do that? Amazing.”
“It is indeed,” Selene admitted. “But would she call herself cursed if all was rosy in her garden? Read on.”
I did.
“I had little control over this power. I could not control where on their thread they returned. Two or ten years into the past. To their childhood or to infancy.” I lifted my head. “Reading the threads must be another power. That’s why they all look the same to me. It’s why I went back thirty minutes the first time, but only three seconds today.”
Selene hummed. She seemed to agree.
Cold realization dawned. “It also means I could accidentally choose the wrong thread one day... and wake up inside the locked ward of Sunny Breeze, forced to relive the restraints, the pills, the attacks, and the gaslighting all over again.”
Selene didn’t reply, nor did she deny.
Swallowing hard, I read on. “I also could not control the length of the time loop. As a young and foolish girl, I did not careabout this. I had the power to banish my enemies from my sight. Why should I have a care what was happening to them in their time prisons? They were no longer my concern.
“It never occurred to me that in the twisting, chaotic weaves of our lives, our threads are never solitary. Never alone,” I read. “It never occurred to me that when I banished my unwanted betrothed and former childhood friend back in time, I was sending him back to our childhood with full knowledge of what I could do.”
I sat back, digesting that. “I see. It’s the same with me. The two times I went back, I remembered the future that was. She threw her ex back into time, but he remembered all of it. Remembered that he was a grown man, now a child, and he knew exactly who did it.”
“From the tone of this story, she comes to regret this choice.”
