Dear Readers: After so many earthbound scenes... finally back to a familiar place faraway...!

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Scene 2: Once Olympus

2020 B.C.

They woke up, in a shadowed place outside of time and space.

All three Fates, all at once. Back in the Cave. As if nothing had happened. They were home, almost as if they’d never left.

The Loom, still just as they’d last seen it. The white robes draped across their limbs. The spindle and the shears upon the floor. The shadows everywhere, familiar as the faces of the sisters to each other.

The Book of Fate, clutched closely in the youngest sister’s hands.

Just as her mother had bequeathed it. Clotho could’ve sworn she felt the lingering imprints of Ananke’s urgent fingers, where she’d pressed the scroll into her daughter’s grasp. The afterimage of that amber gaze, so full of hope, only just fading from her mind’s eye in this moment. Her mother’s absence felt that much starker, more unbearable, for these few fleeting relics of her presence in the Cave.

But then there were her sisters. They were safe and sound for now, and reunited, home again. Didn’t that call for an embrace? Was she not glad, at least for that much—weren’t they? Why were they staring at each other, standing still as stone, as silent as the shadows?

Why were they here? How were they here?

A sudden darkness fell across the Cave, startling all three back to their senses. In the instant they’d returned, the space had still been brightened by the distant shaft of light: the sunbeam signifying that the Cave’s entrance was open. Suddenly extinguished now.

And Clotho knew that it was true—Ananke had only just fled.

“Mother…!” she cried out, hastening toward the corridor that led up to the opening. The scroll fell from her hands to the stone floor.

“Wait—” Lachesis broke in, anxiously grabbing Clotho’s arm, holding her back, “—how could you know that was our mother?”

Clotho’s eyes flared with insistent fire. “It was. She fled just now.”

“How do you know?” Lachesis pressed her, dubious and petrified. “How could you know what’s happened here, since we’ve been gone?”

“I felt her presence. Let me go,” Clotho demanded, wrenching from the desperate grip.

Lachesis reached for her again. “It could be anything out there… Clotho, you can’t—Mother was full of fear, of something terrible…”

“She can’t face it alone.”

“It isn’t safe…”

“Then you stay safe,” Clotho spat spitefully. “But let me go.”

“Stop,” Atropos barked.

Her sisters turned to see her standing by the scroll upon the floor. Slightly unfurled, such that a portion of the inner page was visible.

And on that page, a flurry of figures taking form before their eyes. Letters penned in holy ink, by an invisible immortal hand.

The Book of Fate was being written.

Atropos cast a solemn stare at Clotho. “She gave this to you?”

Clotho nodded, gaze transfixed upon the symbols taking shape. Strode toward the scroll and knelt to take it up. “She bade me write it… should it ever stop being written.”

But it hadn’t. And that had to mean that Mother was alive, for she alone could write the Book. Wherever she was now, she had to be alive and active, spelling out the sovereign order of the world…

Lachesis gaped in awe to see the sacred scroll. She’d known of it, from what Mother had said, but never dreamt of setting eyes upon it. The edict of the universe, the script of all that was and ever would be, from Olympus down to earth. The scroll, small though it seemed, in fact was infinite—rolling in on itself, with no real start or end. It stood outside of time and space, as did the Cave and everything inside of it. The language was not linear, nor legible to those not meant to look.

So Clotho was meant to look, now? And moreover, not just to read—to write it, should the need arise? Lachesis couldn’t fathom it. What had Olympus come to, now that the one Book was no longer in the keeping of the almighty Ananke? Entrusted to her youngest child? Could this be right? How was this what necessity ordained?

Atropos, meanwhile, didn’t pause to ponder on such things. This was no time to question anything—especially not the intentions of their mother, made clear in the final moments they had shared.

“Read it,” she urged Clotho, who had just picked it up. “It should tell us what has happened.”

With bated breath, the youngest Fate uncurled the fateful scroll.

And she did not breathe for a moment, till her heart broke as the gasp escaped her lips. “No…”

Lachesis rushed toward her. “What is it—what did you read…?”

Clotho shook her head. “I can’t…”

 “You must tell us—” Lachesis implored.

“She can’t,” Atropos interposed.

Clotho glanced up and met her sister’s emerald gaze. A gaze of utter understanding—Atropos had deciphered the despair in Clotho’s eyes, and knew exactly why she couldn’t say a thing.

Clotho could scarcely admit the shameful truth herself.

So Atropos did it for her. “She can’t read it,” she explained.

A mosaic of emotions burst across Lachesis’s face. She approached Clotho, who presently relinquished the page, eagerly pressing it into her sister’s hand. She couldn’t bear to hold the scroll a moment more.

Clotho had hoped, truly believed that comprehension would come naturally to her—she’d trusted that her mother never made mistakes. Ananke had commended this to her. How could she have meant for her child to write it, when that child didn’t even know the language? What kind of joke was this? How could the deity of necessity place her faith in such a sorry excuse for a Fate—in such a fucking cosmic failure?

Lachesis blinked her blue eyes blankly at the page, finding it just as illegible as she should have expected.

Atropos, for her part, knew better than to try.

“Well, as long as it’s still being written,” Lachesis uttered in a thin and quavering voice, “Mother must still be alive.”

“For how much longer?” Clotho rejoined. “It can stop any second. And it’s not as if I can write it, to alter anything. To save her.”

Atropos saw no business in this bickering. The Book of Fate had offered some small hope, of finding their mother without having to blindly venture out beyond the Cave. But that hope was now dead. There was no other way, no other choice. And no time to deny.

She started toward the shadowed corridor. “Let’s go.”

Lachesis looked up from the scroll, eyes wide with horror at the unexpected order from the eldest. “What…”

“Stay if you want,” Atropos allowed as she moved toward the exit. A dark path, down which no Fate had gone before. That didn’t stop her for a second, though. Nor Clotho, who went staunchly by her side.

Lachesis laid the scroll by Clotho’s spindle, where it belonged, and loathly followed. Mostly for fear of being left behind alone—of all the dangers that she could imagine, solitude scared her the most.

They rounded a bend in the passageway and saw a steep climb toward the top stretched out in front of them. A long, straight ascent to the mouth of the Cave. The tunnel through which the shaft of light would pierce, whenever Ananke paid her visits to the Fates… None of them could afford to think on that. They forged ahead, in silence.

It would have been a struggle, had they been in human form, Atropos humorlessly mused. Fortunately enough, nothing was ever strenuous for an immortal frame. There was no such thing as exertion or exhaustion. Not in the physical sense, at least.

Yet in all other aspects of existence, she reflected, everything felt more demanding as a god. All loads were heavier on the soul, if not upon the shoulders. Sentiments struck far more sharply: fear more fiercely, hope more heartily. Doubt was deeper, but belief was bolder.

Then again, she’d never felt this way till now. Only after having experienced humanity did she come to feel the weight of immortality.

And then again, this didn’t matter. They were near the top.

And at the top, there was a rock. A giant boulder wedged into the entranceway. All three Fates lent their strength to shift the stone. The first thing they had done in unison, since finding their way home.

Then for the first time, all in unison, they laid eyes on Olympus.

Or what once had been Olympus. Now a desolate expanse of dust and darkness. Mountains cowered in the distance, capped with soot instead of snow. Fallen columns strewn in morbid marble heaps, as though slain in their sleep, no longer towered tall amidst the gods. The gods—where were the gods? They were the only three in sight.

And that was all they saw, before the vortex came.

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...DUN DUN DUN! Hope you enjoyed our return to the Cave! Any theories as to what has happened on Olympus?? More will be revealed very soon ;)

Next scene we're back in the modern day, with a certain bride-to-be ... And if you liked this one, please don't forget to vote! :)