Who: The Fates [closed narrative] Where: The girls' apartment, above the shop. When: Simultaneous with this.
The echoes of destruction shuddered through the Loom, and the emerging patterns rattled even its three caretakers.
Lachesis, who was ever the most diligent and manipulated the threads with a deft touch, worked cautiously tonight, checking and double-checking with each measurement as though she did not quite trust herself or the picture she saw emerging. Atropos was grim-faced, and looking more her age than ever. She would never admit as much, but she was feeling it, too. For the first time in a long while the Crone experienced the aches and pangs of her chosen body's seventy-year-old joints. An hour ago she had relinquished her customary place, standing at the head of the trio, and pulled up a chair. Neither of her sisters commented - from the fierce look she gave them, they didn't dare - but they both knew that small concession for what it was. They, like all the others, were weakening.
And Clotho, poor Clotho - once, her hand slipped, nearly tangling the unspun threads disastrously; then twice again after that from pure nerves, which had earned her a growl of "Get it together, girl," from Atropos. Fate, she might be, but she was also Creator: destruction had always pulled against her nature, and this was not simple mortal death or material defacement. This was the destruction of an entire pantheon. Of thousands of years and the fruit of hundreds of thousands of believers - of gods, acquaintances, friends.
Presently, Lachesis leaned closer to examine a thread. She ran her fingers along its length, measured it against her rod, then studied it again. Then she held it taut, with a nod for Atropos.
"Not another one!" Clotho exclaimed in dismay. "That's the third this hour."
"Fucker's nothing if not efficient," Atropos grunted.
Lachesis said nothing.
The Crone raised her shears and somewhere, half a mile away, a noted mythographer took two bullets in the chest during what police would later conclude to be a home burglary. He died almost instantly.
"They can't take everyone," the Spinner said in the silence that followed. "They can't."
Nobody replied. Lachesis was already separating another thread.
Clotho's eyes widened when she saw it. "No," she breathed.
"Let her work." Atropos' voice was sharp.
The thread was long. Centuries long. The Measurer handled it with ginger fingers as she held it to her rod a second time, already knowing the answer.
In a small apartment in Brooklyn, a woman who was a shade of the Naiad she had once been huddled in her bathtub, pale and gaunt. The lake in the park would have been better, but it had taken all her strength merely to get from her bed to the bathroom. And so she clung to this pale, artificial alternative, turned the tap on as far as it would go and waited for the water's embrace, and the vitality it had always lent her in the past.
In the past, that had been enough. The water - and in recent times, the fervour of the environmentalists. And, more than either of those, the few aging scholars who still remembered her name. It had always been enough...