I looked up, but their face was unreadable, eyes reflecting a depth that made time itself seem shallow.
“Some threads are woven by choice,” they continued, “others by consequence. Some by love, some by fear. You think this tapestry could have been stitched differently, that one missing thread would have saved the rest. But it is never that simple.”
Her gaze shifted past me, to something unseen. “We are all part of a rhythm: endings and beginnings, creation and loss. You cannot stop the music by refusing to dance. Hurt comes, always. It is the heartbeat of life.”
My throat ached. “Then what was the point of any of it?”
“To move,” the Fates said quietly. “To feel. To keep the pattern alive.”
The room was silent except for the sound of my uneven breathing. The tissue crumpled in my hand. And for the first time, I didn’t argue. I just let the weight of their words settle.
“What is going to happen now?” I asked, while blowing my nose very unladylike.
The Fates cocked their head. “That is the real question here, isn’t it? There is no plan on where to go from here. Your story hasn’t been woven yet.”
I pulled my knees up to my chin. “Is that why we are in the in-between? Because there is no place for me in the afterlife or wherever it is that dead people go?”
The Fates got up then and turned towards the mirrors.
“In a way, yes. And in another way, no.”
Great, more cryptic answers…
“There is a place for you in the world, but it is not here.See, if you hadn’t fallen in love, you would have become Auretheos consort. Equal to him in every way, eternal and never ending. But you died a mortal death. No wordsmith has ever given up their heka. No one has ever forfeited immortality for love. And no mortal has ever been brought back to life,” they said.
I sighed.
“Could you do that? Bring me back to life?” I asked.
The Fates had stopped and turned around to face me again.
“That is something that we will have to think about. Your mortal body has been burned and there are rules to stick by. There would be consequences for your resurrection, and we need time to confer. You are free to stay here or return to the stream of light, wordsmith. We will be back.”
And with that, they were gone. I didn’t stop crying for a long while.
* * *
A few weeks later, I had a dream. It was rare that I dreamed here, in the in-between. Most nights, falling asleep felt like falling into a deep, bottomless hole. I welcomed it each night, welcomed finally being free of the thoughts that plagued me during the day.
Despite the vastness of this place in-between, being here made me feel like I was entombed. And that wasn’t too far off, because I was dead by all means.
It hurt me to think of my friends, my family, Theo. They were grieving me, had buried me, while I was stuck here, doomed to go over the same things in my head over and over again.
Maybe this was hell. Maybe I was being punished for touching Theo, for leading him astray. Maybe the prophecy had not been fulfilled because he had not remained pure.
It didn’t matter how often I thought about all of it, I never got an answer.
The Fates seemed to have forgotten about me and maybe my family and friends would forget about too.
But that night, something was different. I fell asleep quickly again, but this time there was not just darkness. It looked like I was under the Veil in the Luminaris and was traveling somewhere.
Suddenly, I was a child again, playing in the garden behind our house. It was autumn and the sun was high in the sky. I was wearing a red jacket that I had loved so much that I had sometimes gone to sleep in it. My father had planted the flower garden for my mother, and he had reserved a small part of the flower bed for me.
He had told me I could dig and plant and play however I wanted to with it. I had planted some seeds my dad had given me and made my way down to the stream to fetch water for the garden. A man was standing by the river, his back towards me. As I approached the water, he turned to me and smiled.
“Hello, how are you today?” he asked.
I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, so I just smiled, filled my little bucket and started walking back.
