A Ruinous Fate
The midnight constellations grinned down on the forest with polished teeth. The Fates were in good spirits tonight.
The girl’s captor, however, was not.
She leaned back from the cottage’s open window and watched from the corner of the cluttered room as her liege frantically wove threads across the entire expanse of the ancient map hanging on the wall. The usual dark, inky color of the thread used to track the Fates and their bargains was gone. Instead, tonight the thread was the color of blood.
The energy in the room was odd in a way that was abnormal even for this cottage, and she moved toward the large dining table in curiosity, peering at the delicate parchment that her captor had ripped open only moments before. The letter had suddenly appeared on the table, unannounced—as things often were within the demonic forest—and sealed with gilded wax. Whatever the note contained shifted the mood in the air around them.
She looked down at the messy black ink scrawled over the page. As she reached out to run her fingertips over the paper, her blood began to pulse through the midnight veins that spiderwebbed beneath her translucent skin as it sensed the heavy magic that lingered in the text. She squinted to try and decipher the words and quickly realized it was not a letter at all—it was a contract.
Across the room, her captor continued working the thread with their long gray fingers. It was as if they were trying to outrun a ticking clock she could not see. Over and over, they ran the thread across the map with increasing fervor. From the far corner of Estrella to deep within the Northern Fae Courts, the bloodred thread rapidly pursued across all of Illustros, turning the once-clear map into a jumble of crisscrossing lines. Until finally, everything went still. Not even the monstrous forest around them dared to breathe or shed a leaf.
Her liege turned away from their weaving as movement from the table caught their eye, and it took only a moment for her to realize what had captured their attention. The contract.
There at the bottom, where it had been blank only moments before, four names were now signed in blood.
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