4.1 In Achaea

In which Atropos waits and walks.

Atropos had found a cave to sit in. In the time that followed her arrival the people of that place came to look at her, silently. They left offerings in woven grass baskets. She felt uneasy, and moved off quietly in the night, leaving the crumbling baskets outside the cave where they had been set. The same happened in the next place where she stopped to sit, and she observed a new pattern forming that she did not know how to unweave. These humans came and went like sandflies, and she did not properly understand what they wanted from her.

The shears had left an ache in her hands. Gripping rocks to climb helped ease the pain of longing, and she moved along the coast, looking for the roughest cliffs.

The humans spoke to her when she could not help but listen. After long years of this, whether she liked it or not, she found that she was learning to understand their languages.

‘I am not a goddess,’ she said truthfully to a human who came with a gift. But she ate the bread, and asked a sea god whose name she remembered to keep those seas calm on the next fishing night.