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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 the one spirit .

Maybe they are just a piece of 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 sees everything . 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 a color .

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 is age .

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.

Atropos feels different, moves different. There is a stealthiness to her lithe actions which calls a hum of awareness to the very bones beneath my skin. It banishes the illusion of gentle love I’d felt in the power of presence that poured from Clotho and Lachesis.

Atropos is the inevitable. She is death.

She decides the end and cuts the cord. Her shears have spread tails of fear and devastation throughout myth and legend for eons.

When her shifting age settles, she is an old woman. A crone.

And yet there is still beauty that clings to her, much like the beauty which clings to an ancient gem. It will always sparkle under the light of the moon, even if the gold that surrounds it is tarnished in time.

She has black hair and black eyes.

Together, they are the three Fates. The Moirai.

They are the oracles of the universe. They are law, absolute.

They are stunning and unsettling.

They would look entirely human—humanoid bodies, ears, eyes, and noses—but they’re missing their mouths.

Where there would be lips, there is nothing. Simply skin. It is as though no mouth has ever been.

They all look to me and Hades at once. Atropos sets her hands on the cauldron, and onyx and gold race to settle beneath her palms. The floor beneath our feet rattles a violent quake that pushes through the heart of the mountain. From the depths of the cauldron, two souls rise.

They are colorless.

One would think white would be colorless, but it isn't. There is color in white.

These souls are unlike any other in the cauldron. They glow without substance, without being.

They have not yet been formed, I realize, as Clotho raises her hands to the ceiling. Tipping her head back, her blind eyes wide, she begins to spool from the gold of the stars the very Threads of Fate .

She pulls, and pulls, and pulls, and finally, when the last of the thread falls into her hands, she trains those cloudy eyes on me and Hades.