A slow, rhythmic pulse vibrated through the stone beneath the Moirai's feet—like a heartbeat not their own. The strands stretched and curled with unnatural motion, as though some unseen hand were playing with the weave while they watched.
Clotho let the spindle stop in her fingers. For the first time in memory, she didn't add a new thread to the world.
"That war…" she said quietly, "was never part of the design."
Lachesis didn't respond immediately. Her measuring rod hung limp at her side. She was still watching the crimson-gold thread—the one spiraling in a direction none of them had laid out. Akhon's thread. It curved upward and outward, changing everything around it.
Even now, it wrapped around gods that should've never crossed his path. Entwined with Hesperia, Zagreus, Hermes, and now—the war itself.
Lachesis exhaled through her nose. "I've run every permutation. None of them include this battle."
"We wrote an age of slow decline," Clotho murmured. "Not collapse."
