“Is a soul a man or a woman?” Morta wondered as she worked and watched the storm out her window. The Siege of Port Marigold raged above in the world of mortals. Men, women and children died by the scores and descended in a deluge. Their disembodied souls flooded the five rivers. The rivers overflowed their banks and mixed with tempestuous violence. All the souls swirled free of their bodies and made her wonder. Without a body, what were they? As they floated down the turgid Styx for judgement, they were little more than concepts. They would go to their eternal homes and remain as an essential echo of their former selves. Without their bodies, what were they. She suppressed her own troubling echo that followed that line of inquiry - “what was she?”

She picked up her golden shears and opened the blades. She studied her reflection in the mirrored polish. A gold headdress and exaggerated sewing needles secured her black hair into a neat bun. White makeup to connote that deathly look. Red eye shadow for the blood and intensity. She had to look the part for tonight’s presentation on Olympus. She wished she felt like it.

“Work to do, Sister. I need more dark colors.” Decima reminded her as her middle sister stretched over a rack and worked. Decima wore a simple but lustrous chiton. The loose sleeves gave her plenty of mobility. A bronze belt girded her waist. Her signature measuring tape, a long strip of worked leather marked with precision increments, draped around her neck. She had stitched countless pockets into the sleeves and along the waist. She had not even begun to get dressed.

She stretched her body over the massive wooden frame that dominated the floor of the work room. With a mouth full of needles, she wove the threads together. She pulled the vertical warps tight together. Her fingers dove and danced as she secured them with the loops of the horizontal wefts. Her dark eyes flicked up. As was her nature, she saw everything. She was about to say more, but Nona interrupted.

“We also need to get ready, Sister.” Nona chimed in from behind the wooden dressing panel. Rejected garments and accessories draped over the top of the panel. Three dressers and three closets that dominated the far wall of their villa. Nona’s had exploded in a flurry of finding the exact right look.

“It will take me 15 minutes and 36 seconds to get ready, Nona. You could have spun an entire new dress by now. You have been getting ready for three hours, thirteen minutes and nineteen seconds. Where is the next batch of threads?” Decima asked.

Nona popped her round face, youthful with a tousle of short black hair out from behind the screen. “I’m ahead of quota, actually. Not too many people giving birth these days. They’re all too busy killing each other,” she said, stuck her tongue out and withdrew.

Morta ignored the heightened quibbling of her sisters. These appearances on Olympus were always tense. Her sisters spat like territorital street cats at the best of times. Their imminent icy reception in the Palace of Jupiter always increased their squabbles. Then, there was all the extra work.

The war famine and pestilence trebled the work for her and her sisters. The deluge of souls flooded the River Styx and kicked up the massive storm. massive backlog of threads for Nona to spin, for Decima to measure and for her to severe. While her practiced hands grabbed another thread, she remained fixated on question. What was a soul freed of its body?

Her two sisters, Nona and Decima, were too busy to hear her musing. They clattering around in the background of their vast cottage’s work room. They getting ready for tonight’s presentation of the Grand Tapestry on Olympus. With the siege of Port Marigold in full swing, . All those deaths made swelled the rivers of the underworld and made the Soul Storm rage. All those souls freed of their mortal bodies. They were cons

She looked out her dormer window and watched the storm. The vortex where the lavas of the Phlegethon and the River Styx combined. Black clouds choked the bowers of the Underworld. Her and sisters cottage was perched atop a basalt promitory where the lava flows of Phlegethon and Styx came together. Waters from the five rivers of the dead mixed with the lava flows and boiled upward. The cinder and steam mixed and condensend on the vaulted cavern ceilings and formed an acid rain that fell in sizzling torrents. Lightning flashed and the thunder clapped as another soul descended. More forks followed and a mighty gale ripped through She grabbed another spool of thread - another thread of fate for her to end. Wars in the world always brought lots of Soul Storms and lots of work for her and her sisters.

She spun the spool between her long skeletal fingers and held it above the basket of fates in her lap. Each one the life of a mortals and the destinies of the divine each spun, measured and severed by her and her sisters. For they were the Parcae, she just could couldn’t figure out why they were women.

“Waxing philosophical are we?” Decima asked through a mouth full of needles. Her stooped over a wooden frame and wove the processed threads into the next section of the Grand Tapestry.

She spit a needle out and slipped it around a warp. Her fingers were a blur as she wrapped it around each vertical thread and formed another weft - a horizontal winding shaping a block of color. “He certainly makes enough noise for one. Especially after the seafood buffet.” S

Her sis

Her skilled fingers found the knot of a man’s measure. The thread was brown, mottled, ugly and coarse. She traced the events of his life as she wound the thread around a slender spindle. Her golden shears hovered at the ready.

The mortal had lived his entire life as an enslaved farmer working on a patrician’s estate. Like so many others, he died violently in a war waged by other men, his fate bound by decisions of others. Meanwhile the Olympians played their games and made their bets. No one would even notice his thread when it was woven into the next section of the Great Tapestry. He would a background color, a weft around a warp used to anchor more important threads. When she found the little little red whorl of accent color, only visible in the light, she snipped her golden shears, cut his thread and ended his life.

She rolled the end between her fingers and felt his right eye and brain had been obliterated by a stray arrow as he fled his farm. She closed her eyes and let the feeling wash over her. She felt no remorse or sadness, but she felt obligated to spend some time with each thread. Every one was important, even if only the weavers appreciated how these little unremarkable thread anchored the entire work.

When she secured the loose end, she threw it into another the basket at her feet. He would be a background color - a shadow on the weave. Like so many others in the basket, he had died in the Siege of Port Marigold. The basket would soon overflow with casualities.

She closed her eyes and let the feeling wash over her. She felt no remorse or sadness - the same way thunderstorms f

She looked out the window of the stone cottage she shared with her two sisters and watched the storm rage on. Dead souls rained down into the River Styx in a torrent. Huge black clouds billowed and roiled around the eaves of the cavernous vaults that carved out the Realm of Death. Wars always made for bad weather and even more work for the Fates.

But it wasn’t the storm that darkened her mood.

She and her two sisters had spun, measured and cut his life to fit into the Great Tapestry. His thread

She looked out the window as she worked and watched the dark skies of the Underworld rain down dead souls in a blowing gale. The Soul Storms were always intense when a war was going on. Somewhere off in that thunderstorm-filled sky of the Underworld, another screaming soul formed a rain drop and joined the turgid waters of the River Styx.

he worked over the latest section of the Great Tapestry. She had a mouth full of needles; each needle threaded with another mortal life - spun, measured and cut to fit precisely into the wefts and warps of their latest piece - “The Siege of Port Marigold.”

worried the thought as she worried her lacquered nails with a pumice stone. She looked to her sisters. Decima poured over the latest section of the Great Tapestry stretched out over the loom that dominated the center of the Great Hall of their black rock cottage perched above the shores of the River Styx. Nona hid behind a dressing screen as she failed to find an appropriate dress for tonight’s courtly appearance. She looked down at her nail. “Why women?”

She stared at the section. Those fingers had traced and cut the thread of every mortal’s life and woven a few divine ends. She looked up from her filing and studied the latest piece of the Great Tapestry stretched out across the loom against the wall. Already, the wefts and warps shaped the Siege of Port Marigold in color blocks of binding threads.

Man, woman and every combination in between - some more rarified than others, some more nebulous, the majority unremarkable. Fat strands, thin strands, curved strands, queer strands - she evened the variety of the mortal beings. Why should the divine be relegated to Olympian archetypes. Yes, they could change shapes and work wonders, but, when Zeus summoned the royal court - she had to perform her role.

She sliced the air with her shears a slow levering, as if she could slice the very fabric of the universe. She wanted to carve it out in a new patchwork of ill-fitting pieces and create a more representative tapestry - a modpoge

How she loathed these mandatory appearances on Olympus and the associated beauty rituals. Weaving the Especially with Zeus’ stringent demands on making an appearance. He insisted the gods and goddesses look their respective part. If he knew or cared about the near-mortal levels of panic it instilled in her and her sisters, he might reconsider the entire performance.

She sat perched in front of the three mirrored vanity in the top room of their cottage. A Out her dormer window, the iridescent green of the River Styx flowed by. The three mirrors reflected her at stepped angles. She had gotten ready long before. Her black and gray hair curled up into tight a tight bun that anchored the gold

Another rejected dressed arced over the engraved panels of the Parcae’s shared dressing room. “Too fat! Too fat! Too fat!”

“You’re not fat, Nona.” said Decima around a mouth full of needles as she stooped over the loom. She looked every bit the crone image used to terrify mortals with their inevitable aging. Her black hair, shot with gray, was Threads of every color and length dangled from the needles. She wove one after the other into the section of tapestry across her lap. “You just never learn to dress for your figure.”

Morta attempted to tune out her sister’s eternal quibbling. The burr on her left index finger’s fake nail refused to budge. She rasped and rasped with an intense meditative stare. Soon, they would need to ascend to Olympus and present the latest section of the Tapestry. She knew one goddess in particular would be displeased.

“… your scissors?” Decima interrupted Morta’s reverie. “And are you trying to file all of your finger off?”

Red blood wept from her cuticle and she just stared the wound, watching it close and go back to the way it was. The way it always was. The way it always had to be.

“May you use your scissors, dear?” Decima said more gently as she sat across the vanity. She held up an non-descript background thread. The winding was exquisite. Every strand was a moment. The tale of an entire mortal’s life spun.

Morta reached into her purse on he