by John Tures
Atalanta of Lineage Zass had lived through one hundred and two solar-cycles, and she had many regrets.
She sailed to where the Rings slipped into the sea. All around Atalanta, the endless shallow waters were stained lilac and pink from a dying sunset, but the planetary Rings above her head were alive with light and power. Solar fires burned the curving fields of stone and ice, and they sparkled in a spectrum of gold, white, and blue. In the myths of the Vinx, the first colonists on the planet Moirai, the Rings were said to be a bridge between the ordinary and the supernatural. Though she’d scoffed at those legends once, Atalanta smiled grimly to herself now – there had been truth to them, after all.
Even though she’d lived longer than a century, Atalanta had the sharp eyes of a woman forty years younger and strength twice that of her sons. For three days and nights she’d speared the reefs below and pushed her gondola over the silent doldrums. She’d follow the downward path of the Rings, and what had started as a gray speck against her horizon and now become a gnarled, sprawling tree growing out of the shallows.
Atalanta stabbed her pole down and stopped the gondola before it reached the outermost branches. White petals, fallen from the temporal blooms that covered the tree, floated languidly on the water.
“Days are deep and life is vast.”
Atalanta’s eyes darted between the labyrinthine branches.
“All is yet and all is past.”
Behind the pale petals, three men sat on low-hanging boughs that twisted out from the tree’s trunk. All of them were beautiful, and shared the same copper-brown skin and ice-blue eyes. They each wore flowing white tunics, and although there was no wind in the doldrums, their clothes billowed around them like curtains caught in a storm.
“All is now from first to last.”
The old woman lifted her chin, and her gaze narrowed.
“The Fates,” Atalanta rasped. The men shared amused looks. One of them even chuckled.
“That name has not been spoken since the days of planet Earth,” he said. “Millions of years ago.”
“We are variants of the Fates,” said another.
“An echo of them,” added the last. “Rebounding between the stars.”
Atalanta studied the brothers, surprised to find that she could easily distinguish between them. She’d spent so long pouring over the Holy Holograms and the Asteroid Murals that she could tell the oldest of the three – the man to her right, with the shortest hair and shortest beard – was Future. Present sat on the branch in front of her gondola, his eyes glinting mischievously, and Past sat on Atalanta’s left. Past was clearly the youngest, with jet-black hair that fell in waves down to his shoulders. Of the three Fates, he was the only one not smiling. He just stared at Atalanta with a solemn, heavy look that sent shivers trickling down her spine.
“Why have you come?” Present asked.
“Have you come for me?” Future asked, his voice like a low rumble of thunder over the sea. His lips curled into a knowing smile. “Most come for me, wanting to know how they will die or how they should live.”
Atalanta didn’t answer. Instead, she stooped down and pulled up a heavy bow from the bottom of her gondola.
In the long lost days of her youth, Atalanta had fashioned the bow out of debris from a ruined Dyson Sphere. She’d heated the iron of the weapon and curved it into shape herself. It had only been used twice since its creation, but now, with an arrow she plucked from a satin bundle by her feet, Atalanta was ready to wield the bow one last time.
She knocked the arrow and pointed its quantum tip at Past.
“Kill the past,” Atalanta whispered to herself, voice trembling as the metal of the bow creaked. “Change what was.”
Past slid off his low-hanging branch. His boots barely made a sound as they sunk into the shallows.
For decades, Atalanta had regretted the ruins left in her wake. She was haunted by the lives she’d taken and the life she’d given up. The guilt had become unbearable with each passing day, and the days had turned into years that poisoned her peace. Atalanta knew that nothing, not even the Fates, could stop her final days from coming – but this was her only chance to chisel away her history carved in stone.
Past started to step towards her. Atalanta adjusted her aim, and the charged proton core in the arrow’s shaft glimmered a threatening blue.
She’d taken so many lives. What was one more now?
“Atalanta –“
She let the arrow fly.
It whistled through Past’s chest, and scarlet blossomed on his white robes. The young man toppled and swayed for a moment, lips parted in soundless pain, but the rest of the world stood still and breathless. Moments likes centuries passed before he finally fell backwards, and his body hit the water.
#
White petals floated languidly on the shallows under the tree.
Past sat on his branch. Present and Future turned to him and nodded solemnly, and Past’s hand drifted down to his chest. His tunic was white again, but his skin remembered the warmth of his own blood trickling down it.
Atalanta’s arrow had fulfilled its purpose, and then some. The arrow had gone right through Past, and it hadn’t stopped. It flew until it pierced yesterday, and then yesteryear, and then every year long-lived and hard-won kept in Past’s shadow. Atalanta’s arrow struck memories and timelines, and she unknowingly even sent the shaft flying back into her own long life.
When Past had fallen, and all that had ever happened fell with him. Atalanta murdered her own history and shot a lethal blow into her journey to find the Fates – so there Past sat, unhurt from an assassination that had just occurred and yet never happened.
The Lord of Paradoxes sighed and turned to the place where the gondola had been, moments ago and never before. The reflection of the Rings glistened in the water.