Threads Unbound (Part I)

The First Fray

Destiny’s sister is the name that poets give to fate, but Lachesis had come to know it by another name: control. In the shadowed expanse where stars faded to whispers and even light forgot her name, she traced the memory of her power—the weight of the threads in her hands, each strand a boundary, each knot a decision not their own.

She remembered how the tapestry of fate had stretched boundlessly before her and her sisters, a labyrinth of predetermined lives and unalterable paths. The threads had blurred under her fingers, humming with purpose as she’d shaped art out of every life. Beside her, Lachesis sensed the weight of her sisters’ presence, each bound to their task as tightly as the threads themselves.

To her right, Clotho welcomed new souls into the weave, humming a faint melody as she coaxed the next batch of lives from her spindle. To her left, Atropos rarely looked up, but Lachesis often thought she saw her tense as Atropos severed threads with a flick of her gleaming shears.

Lachesis couldn’t say how long they worked the tapestry, exactly. Time didn’t fall neatly for them, as it did for, say, mortals. It surged and eddied, marked only by the countless threads she and her sisters spun, measured, and cut. The rhythm of their work was as steady as the turning of the heavens and yellowed and faded in the sweep of her memory.

Until a single thread caught her attention.

“Strange,” Lachesis murmured.

Clotho edged nearer, her voice a soft nudge leaning against Lachesis’s shoulder. “What’ve you found now, Essie?”

“This thread,” Lachesis said, her brow knitting. “It doesn’t weave forward like the others. It just…loops.”

“Maybe it’s meant to be that way. Not all threads follow the same path.”

As Lachesis traced its length, the strand vibrated beneath her fingertips, and she recognized a familiar rhythm: it echoed her own pulse. She froze as the truth struck with quiet finality.

She was holding her own life.

For the first time, Lachesis saw her fate laid bare, bound within the very tapestry she had helped weave. The threads of others danced with options, their lives branching to create possibilities—preset, of course, but still possibilities—while hers remained a closed circle.

Unchanging.

“Sisters, our duty demands precision,” Atropos reminded them. “Idle fingers only distract from our purpose.”

And back to work they went, her thread sliding into the weave, easy as water.

Lachesis tried to focus, to find her rhythm again. But her hands faltered. The next strand slipped from Lachesis’s fingers, humming faintly as it danced in the air. She grabbed it before it fell, smoothing the soul across her palm. Its texture was finer than most, almost fragile. How unlike her own thread, which had felt heavy and immutable in her grip, its weight a silent pressure in the back of her mind.

Clotho leaned in again, her spindle slowing. “Essie, you’ve missed it.”

“Missed what?” Lachesis blinked, shaking off the haze.

Clotho gently plucked the thread from Lachesis’s hands, tracing its delicate fibers. “This one here—their first glance. It’s missing.”

Lachesis frowned, retracing the thread. Her sister was right. The story she had measured felt incomplete, hollow. “I’ll fix it.”

“You’d better,” Clotho said softly, handing the thread back with a knowing look. “It’s the start of everything for them. Don’t let your distractions ruin their story.”

Lachesis bit her lip, her hands trembling as she wove the fleeting glance into the thread. The act was simple and routine, yet her movements felt clumsy. A lover’s first glance was just like a poet’s inspiration or a warrior’s chance at glory—these moments should have flowed through her as naturally as breathing. Instead, they felt foreign now.

Why did it matter anyway? Why should everyone else, yearning for an experience for most of their brief, bright struggle against the threads that bound them, get it? Didn’t she deserve it too? Whatever it was. The thought planted itself like a seed in the fertile soil of her mind, and as she measured the infinite supply of souls, she spent more and more time stealing glances at the threshold of their realm, where the corners of their existence thinned into a shimmering veil. Beyond it lay the mortal world—vibrant, bustling, alive.

Turning to her sisters one day, Lachesis asked, “Don’t you ever think about how the whole world is a distant place, yet it’s right outside our door?”

Clotho shrugged lightly. “It’s all right here in our hands, Essie. Everything that unfolds out there, we’re the ones weaving it.”

Lachesis tilted her head, her voice thoughtful. “But what if we’re missing something? Something that can’t be seen from here?”

For the first time in ages, Atropos stood motionless, her lips pressed into a thin line as she turned from her work to stare at Lachesis. “Always the dreamer, aren’t you, sister? Do you know what happens when a thread strays too far from the weave?” Her voice dropped, low and deliberate. “Chaos. Frayed edges unravel the whole, turning what we’ve built into ruin.”

Lachesis hadn’t known how to respond then, but from her solitude in the unlit vastness, the memory replayed for her with sharp clarity. And Atropos’s stare had not been one of reprimand alone; it carried something heavier, a stillness that seemed to peer past the moment. Perhaps her sister had seen more than just Lachesis’s question—had glimpsed the subtle shift that would send Lachesis’s eternity tumbling into shadow. Perhaps that’s why her words had cut so cleanly.

The silver glint of her sister’s shears that day pulled Lachesis back to the memory again. Atropos had lifted her blades, their edges catching the light as she snipped another thread. “It’s not the mortal world beyond the veil that should trouble you. It’s the tapestry we leave behind if we make mistakes. Now, let us not be remembered as those who failed the loom.”

Failed. The word scraped against Lachesis’s thoughts, leaving something raw behind. She had only ever faltered once. Never failed. Perfection was all she’d ever known—her fingers had stitched countless lives into flawless patterns. But her thoughts circled back to her own strand. She hadn’t messed with it, hadn’t dared. She told herself it was duty that had stayed her hand. To pluck it would be to erase herself, wouldn’t it?

But another thought lingered in the shadowed corners of her mind. Her gaze fell to the tapestry, where the newest threads caught the light. It would be so simple to disturb the weave. Her fingers hovered over a single strand. Gods hate failure—it is the mirror that forces them to confront the mortal shadow within. But doubt? Doubt is the thorn we cannot bear.

Before reason could intervene, Lachesis’s hand moved. And the silk slipped free with startling ease. The world seemed to hold its breath as she waited for the universe to scream, for everything to collapse under her insolence.

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Except everything remained steadfast. The tapestry whispered no secrets of her actions beneath her feet as she and her sisters continued their ceaseless work. She had expected the high-arched rooms, with walls woven from constellations, to come crashing down with the dust of dying suns, for the grand tapestry of fate that threaded through every chamber, which spilled across the floors like rivers of light—where the lives of mortals and gods danced within its weave—to burst into flames, ruining the intricately knotted and entwined lives of every choice, every breath.

Yet, nothing.

Lachesis reasoned that to loosen a life from the iron grip of fate was one thing, but surely to unravel one completely must be as Atropos said, to tempt chaos. Even so, as Lachesis plucked the strand free from its place in the tapestry, she realized it wasn’t chaos she experienced—it was something else entirely.

Lachesis hid the thread in the depths of her robes. And in the rare moments when her sisters’ eyes were elsewhere, she teased the single strand between her fingers, just to feel its delicate pull—and wondering, always, whose fate she had set adrift. She would stop and wonder, had she saved a child or unmoored a tyrant? The possibilities danced in her mind, filling her with a heady sense of true power.

“What are you doing?” The words slithered from Atropos’s mouth like smoke, curling around Lachesis’s neck.

Lachesis stilled her hand, though her fingers quivered as the thread suddenly grew heavy in her grasp. “I can explain. I just—”

“There is too much work to be done to just stand there and gawk,” Atropos chided, her voice sharp.

Lachesis barely heard her. How close she had come to unraveling her secret made a chill cascade over her body, chasing away the warm thrill she had felt moments before. She mumbled an apology as she returned to the threads.

And the transgression faded as all things did. Eventually. Lifetimes slipped through Lachesis’s fingers like water over stone, and the tapestry stretched ever onward. With it, her brazen act became a distant ripple swallowed by a never-ending ocean. It was nice to know that her stolen indulgence was a fleeting weakness, and her heart never beat that restless rhythm again, one of temptation and caution: should I pull another free? No, I mustn’t. She even resisted reaching into her robes to savor the softness of the freed soul against her fingers.

It would be comforting to believe that. It would be comforting—but it would also be untrue. Because lies, even to oneself, leave a shadow, a lingering phantom who loves whispering in quiet moments and nestling into the spaces between thoughts.

And one day, the whispers became too loud to ignore. The act felt maddeningly simple: the barest tug of silk and another thread came loose. The second unraveled even easier than the first, the thread trailing from the tapestry like a comet’s tail—and with it, the tiniest spark of something she had felt the last time.

Freedom…

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