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I’m looking at my own soul.

Gooseflesh rises over every inch of my body, prickling my skin. I shiver, my teeth knocking under the shock of it all.

Hades moves closer, enveloping me in his eternal warmth. I sink into the comfort of it, and watch as two more souls, both bright white, rise to the surface of the cauldron. They glow with an ancient presence that demands reverence, and from high above, in the mirrored ceiling of crystals that somehow depict sea and sky—stars of shimmering gold begin to burn in a bed of sun.

The walls of the cave around us quiver with gentle reflections like the soft waves of a sun-lit sea casting tendrils of life on the walls. Beneath our feet, the gentle moon-white of the stone floor begins to crackle and vein with threads of black and gold. I gasp as, from the shadows, the three appear. The Fates. The Moirai.

Air lodges in my lungs as they move, their motions eerily fluid like spilled water or the roll of the waves. They come from three separate corners, and yet they move as one toward the cauldron.

My mind struggles with what I see, for they are not old, and they are not young.

They are a shifting mirage of the beginning, middle, and end.

They are youth and age. They are naivete and wisdom. Wrinkles smooth into fine lines that tighten into an ageless youth, before shifting again into an ancient being beyond the bounds of time and knowledge.

I expected that they would all look the same, but they do not.

Still, I know who each is without having to ask or be told. It is a knowing that is simply engraved in me from the very beginning. I suspect it is the same knowing that one would have if they’d found themselves sitting before the throne of God.

Maybe they are God. Maybe they are theone spirit.

Maybe they are just apieceof that one spirit.

Maybe we all are. Maybe, just maybe, we're not meant to have the answers to those questions.

But Clotho,the spinner—her eyes are entirely white. They swim with the clouds of the blind, and yet I get the sense that she seeseverything. She sees lifetimes in the span of seconds as she spins her threads of fate.

Her hair is a crisp, bright white. It is not the wiry white of hair that has lost its color with age. It is alive and youthful. It glows in such a way that and even though it is white, it is acolor.

Her shifting age begins to slow as she steps closer to the cauldron, finally settling into a picture of youth. If I had to give her an age, I would say she looks around ten years old.

It is unsettling to see it, for the power that she wields is massive. Such power in one so small, so innocent looking—it’s rather terrifying.

And yet I am not afraid of her.

There is a compassion in the threads that she weaves. A love she spins into the fabric of the lives she oversees.

She settles her hands—her fingers long and thin, nimble—on the lip of the moonlit cauldron. The veins of black and gold jump from the floor to the bowl of the cauldron. Slowly, like lightning dipped in gold and onyx, they climb the cauldron before finally settling under each of her hands.

She bows her head and Lachesis,the allotter, moves.

She is the one who decides the paths that must be traveled, the web in which fate must be woven. She pushes the souls toward their destiny, willing or unwilling. Her eyes are the brightest blue. Unlike Clotho, she is not blind. Her eyes are sharp and clear.

She sees as I see, and yet she sees beyond what I can see.

She can see through the folds of fate and time what must come to pass, and the punishment we will all bear if destiny is ignored.

Like Clotho, her appearance shifts ages until finally settling somewhere in middle age. Gentle lines crease her face, but there is a touch of youth in the depths of her eyes, even as they command a wisdom that is ancient.

And as her hands lift to connect with the cauldron, another thread of onyx races with gold over the glowing symbol of the moon that is the cauldron to settle beneath her palms.

Her hair is long and gray, the strands silver and healthy, for she is not old, but she isage.

She is life and the allotter of it.

I begin to shift, my body stirring against Hades. He quiets me with a single warning, “Persephone.”

I stand straighter, alert once again as the last of the three moves.