Threads Unbound (Part II)

Before diving into Part II, catch up on Part I, where a forbidden thread slips from the tapestry of fate, unraveling Lachesis’s duty and setting destiny on a bold, uncharted path.

Threads Unbound (Part I)

The Shadow’s Embrace

Though the tapestry demanded their constant attention, there were moments—infinitesimal gaps in the eternal routine—when Lachesis could get up without Atropos scowling.

One such time, Clotho surprised Lachesis by following, and the pair of them wandered the infinite rooms of their realm, walking side by side. Lachesis felt the weight of her sister’s gaze before the words came.

“I saw you, Essie.”

Lachesis did not answer her sister at first. Something had begun prickling at her, making her cheeks flush.

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw what you did to those threads,” Clotho said. “I pretended not to see it the first time, but I saw you. And I had hoped that would be the last time, that you just needed to get it out of your system. Once. But then you did it again.”

It had been Lachesis’s sentiment exactly, yet she felt a burst of anger to hear her sister voice it, casting her as some wayward child, not the hand that had measured lives since the beginning of time.

Lachesis acknowledged neither accusation nor accuser and went to the chamber that housed the part of the tapestry with the freed threads. She knelt and delicately restored them to their former places.

Clotho trailed her. “That’s not good enough. I need you to promise me you won’t do it again.”

“Fine,” Lachesis said. “I promise.”

Their eyes met, each gray like mist clinging to forgotten peaks, bound by the same everlasting color. “On the River Styx.”

Lachesis—and her sisters—were not some lesser goddesses whose powers were flickering sparks that scarcely afforded them their immortality. They were weavers of fate, gods among gods, with even Zeus in their threads. Yet an oath by the River Styx, a promise made to the very bones of the world, would hold them all.

“I can’t.”

“I can’t, she says.” Clotho stared at her as if her face were carved in shades of stone and shadow. “You can’t, or you won’t?”

“Don’t you feel it, Clo? This endless game of deciding for everyone—every twist, every turn, bending lives to our will. The lures, the traps, the obstacles we lay to shape their paths…it never stops. Don’t you tire of this? Don’t you yearn for something else?”

“Tire? Yearn?” Clotho’s voice savored the words in her mouth like some novel taste. “Since when do we allow ourselves such mortal afflictions?”

“Maybe we’re not as immutable as we believe,” Lachesis conceded.

Clotho graced Lachesis’s forearm with her smooth fingers—fingers that, like hers, had polished over an eternity from handling the threads of fate. For all the lives Lachesis had measured, Clotho had initiated them all. “Please, Essie. I need you to swear it. It’s the only way.”

Lachesis should never have dared to disturb the weave. She knew that. By all the laws of their ancient duty, she should return to the quiet rhythm of their work and let the world spin as it always has. “On the River Styx, I promise that...that I...” But something strange happened: the words did not connect. The obvious pledge, that Lachesis would promise not to interfere with the tapestry, failed to link each word to the next.

Clotho seized her forearm. “Essie, please, I beg you!”

However, the taste of freedom lingered, sweet and forbidden. And now that Clotho had named Lachesis’s treason, the fear of getting caught no longer hung from everything, sticking like cobwebs. In fact, Lachesis saw it clearly: if her thread could knot, could it not also unravel like the others? Could she not take hold of it, pull it free, and weave something new?

“I won’t promise that.”

Clotho looked at her as if Lachesis had tumbled from the mountain’s edge. Lachesis was in the air, falling, with her sister’s hand coming up short.

Atropos filled the doorway in a single breath, her face gray and pitiless. “I told you this wouldn’t work. We have tried it your way. Now we go with mine.” She stepped forward. “I bind you, Lachesis—”

“No,” Clotho tried to say, but Atropos did not pause. Atropos’s voice surfed to cover their sister’s. “—by the threads you once measured. No harm shall be done by your hand, neither to others, to fate, nor to yourself.” Atropos chanted it repeatedly as she absorbed the light from the room.

With every step closer, Lachesis could feel Atropos’s power reaching for her submission, rooting her in place.

Disbelief lay naked on Clotho’s face, but how could she have forgotten who their sister was? Atropos was unyielding, always she needed to drive someone to her will. Lachesis could picture Atropos laughing at Clotho as they had devised this little scheme. Lachesis is a fool, and she won’t take your bait; my way is the only way, you’ll see.

When Atropos finished the invocation for the Veil of Silence, her eyes flashed. Then the threads came, wrapping around Lachesis like the chains of constellations, burning and unstoppable, tearing into her skin, crushing the breath from her chest. A warm scream filled Lachesis’s throat, but there was no air.

Her sister had taken it all.

As Lachesis was dragged away, her vision burned with aureate sparks until it all went black.

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The past had unfurled itself as Lachesis fell, a never-ending descent into the abyss. Only in the absence of her work did she feel its proper weight, these memories the only thing anchoring her as she drifted deeper into the fathomless recess of the universe.

The dark pressed against her like unseen mountains, and the weight of nothingness crushed from all sides, suffocating and silent. The abyss was not her element, and she knew it. Four or five or a million heartbeats pulsed and passed. Time is a slippery thing, she acknowledged in the cold embrace of the void—let it slip once, and its thread might drift beyond reach, spiraling into an eternity.

The only thing that allowed her to press on was to think of something else. And yet, the only thing she had ever known was controlling fate. Thus, she allowed the rhythmic hum of the tapestry to spring from her memory again and fill the space around her, a vast expanse of fluorescent pewter threads intertwining with possibilities.

Of all the threads Lachesis had helped weave, she’d seldom paused to consider the individual. Most strands flickered and faded, minor glints in the fabric. But then, there were the rare ones, like The Spear that Split Troy, that stretched broader, stronger—defining entire sections of the grand tapestry.

Threads like Achilles.

“It’s time,” Atropos had said. “His life ends here.”

Lachesis remembered how his thread hadn’t just passed through; it had tangled, knotted, and blazed. “Why?” she’d asked her sister. “There could be more to explore. More battles, more tales of heroism.”

“Mmhmm,” Clotho said. “I did feel the potential in that thread from the moment I spun it. Taut and eager for glory.”

“And his life will shine brightest because of its brevity.” With her shears aloft, Atropos’s gaze sharpened, keen as a hawk’s before the strike. “This swift ending will immortalize him, not the start or length of his thread.”

“You are too eager to end his life at the first opportunity,” Lachesis said.

“And you think that glory should last forever.” Her blades snapped shut, sharp and final. “Glory demands sacrifice, sister.”

Moment by moment, the memory leached from Lachesis, and she understood something then: gods and mortals alike drifted on lives tied to nothing, their paths twisting and turning at the whim of a capricious hand. They wandered, their fate bound by no grand design or purpose, but by impulse.

Then, there was only the silent chasm again.

And so, Lachesis waited as time stretched thin.

Who knew how many centuries passed in those depths between worlds, but at some point, Lachesis forced herself to speak.

“Atropos.”

No answer.

“You can’t keep me locked here forever.”

Oh, but she could, Lachesis realized, she could, recalling the scope of their work. They had seen generations bloom and wither, and such a view made mercy feel irrelevant. And she supposed her paranoia of immortality was born in the relentless chill of that darkness…

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