Chapter II: The First Without a Thread

Act I- The Weaving 14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgDGUsOZtlH

"The First Without A Thread"

For the first time since the beginning of the world, the Loom was silent.

Not quiet.

Silent.

There was a difference.

The Loom had always possessed a sound, though few beings could ever hear it. It was not the sound of wood or thread, nor the turning of a wheel. It was something deeper—the whisper of lives unfolding, the faint pull of countless destinies moving toward their appointed ends.

Clotho could hear it.

Lachesis could hear it.

Atropos could hear it.

And now, for the first time, they heard nothing.

They stood before the place where the new being had been created.

The darkness remained.

But it was no longer empty.

A child lay within it.

He appeared impossibly small beneath the vastness of the chamber. His body was still and peaceful, his hands resting at his sides. His eyes were closed.

There was no thread upon him.

No strand of destiny.

Clotho approached first.

She did not speak.

Her hands hovered above the child, fingers trembling slightly.

She had created countless threads throughout the ages. Some had belonged to kings. Some to beggars. Some belonged to heroes who would be remembered for generations. Others had belonged to lives so brief that their threads had vanished almost as soon as they had been spun.

Every life had begun with her.

Every life had carried something she had placed within it.

But this child was different.

There was nothing.

Clotho reached toward him.

The moment her fingers came close, the Loom shuddered.

She withdrew her hand.

Lachesis turned toward her.

"What happened?"

Clotho stared at the child.

"I cannot touch him."

Atropos frowned.

"That should be impossible."

"I know."

Lachesis stepped forward. She studied the child carefully. Then she looked toward the Loom.

The countless threads surrounding them continued their endless movement. Thousands upon thousands of lives were being measured.

Every birth.

Every death.

Every choice.

Every consequence.

Yet the child remained untouched.

Lachesis reached for the measuring rod she always carried.

She lowered it toward him.

The rod stopped.

Not because something physically blocked it.

It simply refused to move farther.

Lachesis pushed harder.

Nothing.

She slowly lowered her hand.

"There is nothing to measure."

Atropos looked at the child.

"Then perhaps there is nothing to cut."

Clotho turned toward her.

"You think he has no life?"

"No," Atropos replied. "I think his life has no ending."

The words lingered in the darkness.

Clotho looked back at the child.

"No beginning."

Lachesis added quietly.

"No measure."

Atropos finished.

"No end."

For a moment, none of them spoke.

Then the child's eyes opened.

The sisters froze.

They were not the eyes of a newborn. There was no confusion within them. No fear. No recognition.

Only awareness.

The child looked at the three sisters.

One after another.

Clotho.

Lachesis.

Atropos.

He did not cry.

He did not reach for them.

He simply watched.

Clotho felt something she had not experienced in an age.

Uncertainty.

She knelt before him.

"What are you?"

The child remained silent.

Clotho glanced at her sisters.

"He cannot speak."

"He has only just been born," Lachesis said.

Atropos continued staring at him.

"Perhaps he has nothing to say."

Clotho ignored the remark.

She extended one finger toward the child's hand.

This time, he moved.

His tiny fingers closed around hers.

Clotho's expression changed.

For an instant, she saw something.

Not a vision.

Not a prophecy.

Something else.

A possibility.

She saw mountains.

Then a city.

Then a battlefield.

A ship moving across a dark sea.

A crown falling.

A temple burning.

A man standing beneath a storm.

A woman holding a torch.

A sword raised against something ancient.

Then everything disappeared.

Clotho gasped and pulled her hand away.

Lachesis immediately stepped forward.

"What did you see?"

Clotho struggled to answer.

"I don't know."

Atropos narrowed her eyes.

"You saw something."

"I saw possibilities."

"That is what we always see."

"No."

Clotho looked at the child.

"These were different."

"How?"

"They were not connected."

Lachesis understood.

The possibilities of every life were connected to the threads around them. Even uncertainty had a shape. Even chaos had consequences that could be traced.

But what Clotho had seen had no structure.

No beginning.

No progression.

No conclusion.

Only fragments.

Possibilities without a thread to bind them together.

Lachesis slowly approached.

"Let me see."

Clotho hesitated.

Then she nodded.

Lachesis touched the child's hand.

The chamber went dark.

For one heartbeat, she saw nothing.

Then—

A forest.

A golden city.

A monster with a serpent's gaze.

A man carrying a shield.

A lion falling beneath human hands.

A great war.

Ships upon a wine-dark sea.

A man wandering beneath unfamiliar stars.

A musician descending into darkness.

A house stained by blood.

A ship filled with heroes.

Then the images fractured.

Lachesis pulled away.

She stumbled backward.

Atropos caught her.

"What did you see?"

Lachesis looked shaken.

"Nothing."

Atropos stared at her.

"That is not what you saw."

"I saw possibilities."

"Whose?"

Lachesis looked at the child.

"I don't know."

The silence returned.

Clotho looked between her sisters.

For the first time, their creation frightened them.

Not because he was powerful.

They did not know whether he was powerful.

Not because he was dangerous.

They did not know whether he was dangerous.

He frightened them because they could not place him anywhere.

The Loom knew every life.

Every god.

Every mortal.

Every creature.

Every star that would one day burn out.

Every kingdom that would rise.

Every empire that would fall.

Everything had a place.

Everything had a thread.

Except him.

Clotho stood.

"We cannot leave him here."

Atropos looked at her.

"Where would we take him?"

"The mortal world."

Lachesis frowned.

"You want to send him among mortals?"

"He needs a world in which to grow."

"He has no destiny."

"Exactly."

Lachesis stared at her.

"That is what makes him dangerous."

Clotho's expression hardened.

"It is also what makes him useful."

Atropos walked slowly around the child.

"He will need a name."

The sisters looked at one another.

Names were important.

A name was more than a sound.

It could become part of a destiny.

Kings had been named for greatness.

Children had been named for ancestors.

Heroes had been named for gods.

Names could carry expectations.

Names could become prophecies.

But this child could not be given a prophecy.

He could not be given a destiny.

He needed something that belonged only to him.

Clotho looked at him.

"Aion."

Lachesis repeated the word softly.

"Aion."

Atropos considered it.

"Eternity."

Clotho nodded.

"Or something beyond a single lifetime."

The child stared back at them.

Aion.

He had been given his first possession.

A name.

And unlike everything else in existence, it had not been written upon a thread. 14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJuHBikxSgw

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Far above the hidden chambers of the Fates, Olympus continued as it always had.

The gods knew nothing.

The sun rose.

The seas moved.

Mortals prayed.

Kings ruled.

Wars began.

Children were born.

The world continued according to the patterns that had existed long before the three sisters had created their impossible child.

But something had changed.

The Fates could feel it.

Every thread seemed slightly more distant.

Every future slightly less certain.

Aion had not done anything.

He had not spoken.

He had not walked.

He had not chosen.

And yet his existence had already created a disturbance.

A blank space.

A place where no prediction could reach.

Clotho watched the tapestry from the edge of the chamber. She had never understood how much of the world depended upon the certainty of destiny until that certainty began to weaken.

Lachesis stood beside her.

"Do you regret it?"

Clotho did not answer immediately.

"Do you?"

"No."

Atropos approached them.

"Then why are you both afraid?"

Lachesis turned.

"I am not afraid."

Atropos smiled faintly.

"You always lie when you are afraid."

Lachesis said nothing.

Clotho looked toward Olympus.

The city of the gods shimmered in the distance.

Golden halls.

Immortal rulers.

A kingdom that had survived ages.

A kingdom that believed itself eternal.

"They will never know what is coming."

Atropos looked at her.

"Neither will we."

Clotho's eyes narrowed.

"That is the point." 14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡggqPOHeuy9

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Aion's first experience of the mortal world was rain.

Cold rain.

It struck the leaves of an ancient tree and gathered upon the ground beneath it. Hidden among the roots, beneath the shelter of the branches, was a small woven basket.

Inside it lay an infant.

He was wrapped in a cloth unlike anything found in the nearby village. The fabric was pale and impossibly smooth, almost silver beneath the faint light that filtered through the clouds.

The infant did not cry.

He simply slept.

Upon his chest was a strange mark.

The mark of the Sister of Fates.

The mark of those who had created him.

Yet beneath it, there was something that should not have existed.

Someone with no thread.

No strand of destiny emerged from the infant.

Nothing connected him to the Loom.

But he was not part of the Great Tapestry.

He was alive.

He breathed.

His heart beat softly.

But he was not part of the Great Tapestry.

He had no predetermined future waiting for him.

That did not mean he had no future at all.

It meant that whatever future he eventually lived would have to come from somewhere else.

From experience.

From consequence.

From choice.

Aion remained asleep as the rain continued to fall.

Then came footsteps.

An old woman appeared along the forest path, carrying a bundle of firewood beneath one arm.

Her name was Mara.

She had lived near the edge of the settlement for most of her life, and she knew the forest well enough to recognize when something was out of place.

She stopped.

There.

Between the roots of the ancient tree.

A basket.

Mara frowned.

She placed the firewood upon the ground and approached.

When she looked inside, her expression changed.

"Gods above..."

The infant opened his eyes.

Mara froze.

He stared at her.

There was no crying.

No fear.

Only a quiet awareness that seemed strange for one so young.

Mara carefully lifted him from the basket.

He was warm.

Alive.

She pulled the cloth closer around him.

"Where did you come from, little one?"

The infant gave no answer.

Of course he couldn't.

Mara looked around the forest.

There was no one else.

No footsteps leading away.

No discarded belongings.

No sign of a mother or father.

Nothing.

Then she noticed the mark on his chest.

Her eyes widened.

She had seen symbols carved into temples before.

She had seen the signs of gods painted upon shields and woven into ceremonial cloth.

But she had never seen this.

Three lines.

Three paths.

Three endings.

She touched the mark gently with one finger.

The moment she did, the infant's eyes closed.

Mara pulled her hand away.

She whispered a prayer.

"For the Fates..."

She looked at the child again.

Perhaps the gods had left him.

Perhaps they had sent him.

Perhaps the mark meant something she could not understand.

But the old woman knew one thing.

She could not leave an infant alone in the forest.

She gathered the child against her chest.

"You'll catch cold out here."

She wrapped him more tightly in her cloak.

"Come with me."

And so Aion entered the mortal world.

Not as a boy searching for his origins.

Not as a wanderer who remembered nothing.

But as an infant carried into the home of a woman who believed the gods had placed him in her path.

She did not know that the child in her arms had been created by the very beings whose mark rested upon his chest.

She did not know that there was no thread beneath that mark.

And she could not know that one day, the child she had found beneath an ancient tree would become the greatest threat Olympus had ever faced. 14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHqDkAoK8Vc

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Far away, on Olympus, Apollo stopped playing his lyre.

The music died beneath his fingers.

The god of light lifted his head.

Something had caught his attention.

A disturbance.

Small.

Almost nonexistent.

But it was there.

Apollo closed his eyes.

He searched the world.

Cities.

Forests.

Rivers.

Mountains.

Islands.

He could see them all.

He could feel the movement of mortal lives beneath the light.

Then he found something strange.

A blank space.

A place where his sight should have reached.

Apollo opened his eyes.

"What are you?" 14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrZPFA5VgsJ

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That same night, Aion slept peacefully in Mara's home.

He was still an infant.

He did not know the meaning of dreams.

He did not know the meaning of voices.

But somewhere within the darkness of sleep, something reached him.

He was in a vast hall.

Three women waited before him.

Clotho.

Lachesis.

Atropos.

Behind them stood the Loom.

But it was different.

The threads were burning.

Aion could not speak.

He could not ask them why they had created him.

He could not understand what they wanted.

He only heard their voices, distant and strange, as though they were coming from somewhere far beyond the world he knew.

"We needed you."

The words echoed through the darkness.

Then another voice.

"To choose."

The words repeated.

"To choose."

Aion stirred in his sleep.

The dream faded.

The room was dark.

Rain tapped against the roof.

Mara slept nearby.

Aion remained asleep, his tiny hands curled against the cloth that wrapped him.

He did not know what his dream meant.

He did not know who the three women truly were.

He did not know why he had been created.

But somewhere deep within the darkness of his sleeping mind, one phrase remained.

To choose.

And somewhere beyond the mortal world, something was beginning to notice him.

Somewhere far above him, a god had begun searching for the one thing he could not see.

Aion.

The boy without a thread.

The first being Fate could not name.

And for the first time since his creation—

someone else was looking for him.

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