Allen1996
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Rage against the heavens: chapter 20: Oedipus in the sanctum
🕑 Added 2025-04-19 01:24:19 +0000 UTCIn a sanctum where time's essence wove its intricate patterns, the Moirai convened. Before them stretched the vast loom of existence, each thread a life, a destiny, a story unfolding. Yet now, an unsettling transformation marred the once harmonious weave. Threads that had long intertwined with purpose began to fray, their ends unravelling into uncertainty. Some severed themselves entirely, drifting away like lifeless tendrils cut from the vine.
Clotho, the Spinner, whose hands had drawn out the threads of life with meticulous care, observed the disarray with a furrowed brow. Her spindle, once steady, now trembled ever so slightly, betraying her unease. Lachesis, the Measurer, whose rod had gauged the length of each existence, found her measurements skewed as if the very fabric she assessed had become volatile. Atropos, the Inexorable, whose shears had always cut with precision, now hesitated, sensing that the ordained endpoints were no longer clear.
They watched the threads—their threads—twist and writhe like living things. One by one, the strands shuddered, fraying at the edges, their once-gleaming lengths dulling into dissonance. Some snapped outright, severed by an unseen hand. Others unravelled slowly, inexorably, as if the very essence of Fate itself was coming undone.
They were the Moirai.
The Makers.
The Judges.
The Seamstresses of What Was, What Is, and What Must Be.
It was not merely a role. It was not a throne to be seized nor a name to be claimed. It was law incarnate. Their will was not a suggestion—it was existence’s blueprint. They spun gods into kings, whispered wars into waking, bred revolution in a widow’s womb and silence in a tyrant’s last breath.
It was their divine mandate.
It was their divine right and it should have never changed yet it was. Things were changing and the worst was that they didn't know why.
It should not be.
It could not be.
But it was.
They didn't know how. It should be impossible, all of this should be impossible yet the fact accomplished was before them.
The fates were losing control of destiny slowly but surely, perfect order transitioning toward shows when again, it should not be.
It should not be yet it was.
“There must be an origin, a root to this infestation! This is a corruption!” Atropos rasped.
Not a voice. Not truly. Her words were the sound of silk tearing, of reality fraying at its seams. Her syllables were laced with the stench of ozone, with the edge of finality.
It was undignified, inhuman, completely out of character for her but with how disastrous the situation was, her sisters would not blame her.
After all, they more than understood her anguish, her anger. This infection, this malignancy could be akin to having your perfectly planned chess match, each piece moving only in a certain way, one that was of course planned in advance only for an asshole to come from nowhere and purposefully spill black coffee on half the game and the pieces.
The infection was real.
And if the Loom was a garden, it was as if it had been salted without their knowledge.
It meant that what they had planned for decades, centuries, millennia was more than likely at risk.
It was wrongness. A foreignness that did not belong in their weave.
Their plan—woven with a patience that beggared stars, a calculus spanning wars, loves, betrayals, and births—now frayed like ancient cloth in firelight. Their dominion over what should be, corroded. Not undone yet, but rotting.
They had choreographed history like a ballet of knives.
Their plan was akin to well-placed dominos that due to their divine authority would fall precisely in the way the fates had wanted them to do.
They have planned for more than a millennium. They had been patient and because of this infestation on the world, on their garden, on their dominion, they would have for the first time since the beginning of their existence adjust.
Many thought that they could choose their fates, that they were free, that their choices in the end were what mattered when it was not the case at all.
Mortals, half-bloods, gods, they all were the same. They were what they were, thought the way they did, acted the way they did because of them.
A woman would be enslaved and raped by men growing a hatred in her heart. This hatred will make sure that sooner or later, at the first occasion, at the first chance, no matter how small it was, she would try to fight, kill for her freedom.
The experiences that would have marked her would have made the way she interact with the world change and be different.
It would make this woman want to keep this freedom of hers at any cost. To do so, she will free other women like her, turn them into a genuine threat, army so that what happened will never happen again.
This woman could call herself free. The woman who raised her blade against the world, who carved her name into the flesh of history with every defiant step—who believed in her own will. Her disciples, clad in the same iron pride, would swear they chose this path, that their rebellion was born from desire, not destiny. But the truth lay coiled beneath their skin, written in the marrow of their bones long before they drew their first breath.
The Moirai did not whisper their designs; they spun them, silent and inexorable. Every scar that shaped the woman’s resolve, every pulse of fury that beat behind her ribs, every strand of her black hair that caught the wind like a battle standard—none of it was hers to claim. Each scar on her back, each guttural cry for vengeance, each trembling hand gripping a sword—it was written long before she learned to speak. The Fates had measured the cloth of her life before her fingers ever closed around the hilt of a sword.
The Moirai had decided.
Her followers made to be fierce as winter winds, would move as though their bodies were their own. They would not see the strings. When one laughed, sharp as a dagger’s edge, it would not be her joy but the echo of a moment already etched into the loom. When another fell, blood pooling like spilled ink, her last gasp would not be a protest but the final stitch in a pattern older than the gods themselves.
Men would call them Amazons, and the Amazons would call themselves free. But freedom was a story told to children, a pretty lie to soften the weight of the yoke. The woman who led them—who stood atop a mountain of shattered crowns and called it liberty—was no more than a figure in a tapestry she could not see. Her defiance, her rage, her very breath belonged to hands that had already woven her end.
And so the world would turn, obedient to the spindle’s hum. The Moirai would not argue. They would not gloat. They would simply be, as inevitable as dawn, as patient as stone. The Amazons would fight, would bleed, would roar their triumph to the sky—but the threads held fast.
Choice was an illusion. Will was a phantom. And the woman just like every other mortal or immortal who thought themselves the architect of their fate was merely a character in a a story whose last page had already been written for aeons.
It could be said to be in a way a question of determinism. You were you because of your nature and your experiences A.K.A nurture but when all those things were controllable, when nothing you could have done would change anything of the designs of the Moirai because whether you recognized it or not, you were made to follow their plans no matter what, then it becomes quickly clear that self-determinism was but a lie.
What is a soul, after all, if not a vessel bound by cause and effect? What is fate, if not gravity? A stone thrown into the air must fall. A child born into fire must burn. The question of why is moot. The Moirai ask only: When?
The Moirai did not calculate. They did not predict. They declared. To them, the concept of “will” was as fragile as a candlelight in a hurricane. What the Olympians called "destiny" was merely the reflection of the Moirai’s decisions, cast long and low upon the cave walls of divine ignorance.
There were no accidents.
There were only scripts, and the actors too blind to see their stage.
Prophecies were not glimpses of some unknowable future. They were edicts, cast down in riddles and verse, not to protect mortals from the truth—but to protect truth from the mortals.
It was not that the Fates were cruel. Cruelty implied emotion. No, they were precise. Unflinching. Cold, not because they chose to be, but because the stars are cold, too.
They gave the gods what they wanted—narratives. They gave demigods what they craved—meaning. They gave mortals what they could never admit they longed for—structure.
And in return, they took everything else.
Even freedom.
The Moirai, though seldom speaking, felt as one. A thought passed like thunder:
“This was not planned.”
The words hung in the sanctum, heavier than death.
Clotho, serene and ageless, let her gaze fall on a single thread—a girl born in chains. Her thread should have been brief. Tragedy-laced. An efficient arc of pain to fuel a war that would fuel a hero that would fuel a downfall. But it flared. It screamed defiance. It refused the cut.
Thousands of years ago, the gods won against their sire titans as the Moirai had declared, had intended because they had found the current king of Olympus an entertaining and interesting fool.
The Olympians had won yet they had realized after the fact that while the results had been acceptable, satisfying even, it would not be false to say that they could not be better.
The moirai as fate weavers held total Dominion over gods, titans and mortals. The same could not unfortunately be said with the primordials.
Some of the primordial were older than them, stronger than them, stranger than them like the great third surrounding the world asleep with dreams of madness and horrors were unable to be swayed by them.
There were after all Primordials and Primordials.
Others, weaker, lesser while being beings they were unable to absolutely control still fell in some way that could be actioned, used by them.
Ouranos had been one of the later primordial. The reason why the Titans had ever had a chance to succeed was that they had been backed not only by their divine mother Gaia but also by the daughters of Ananke.
Had it not been the case, the Titans would have horribly failed. After all, a primordial, even one of the weakest of them was still a primordial, a god to gods the same way deities were to mortals.
The Titans had been useful and when their usefulness passed, they were dethroned. One day, it would be the same with the Olympians, their children.
It had been something they had been planning before Hestia laid dormant in the womb of her mother.
Still, the goal had been to use them and their half-blooded children as bait in some way, as traps not only for Kronos but for the true target that was the Earth mother.
The prophecies given, the one the gods of Olympus and their spawns obsessed so much over were worded in a way to give hope to the Titans and the Giants, to let them spring the trap, to try to make it realize making them fall further into their threads.
The thread of Luke Castellan had long been measured. Ambition laced it like copper veins in granite. Betrayal soaked through it like oil in cloth. He was crafted—not born—to rebel. Molded to be a spear hurled at Olympus by its own inertia. A casualty foretold. A pawn masquerading as a prince.
Everything was perfectly planned. The issue of the great Prophecy when only children of Hades could be possible candidates resulted in the death of their mother and the ire of Hades which would result in the oracle of Delphi being cursed.
May Castellan being clear-sighted and made to be in all ways that mattered the perfect match, the only and truest love Hermes would ever have.
May Castellan due to her status as clear-sighted who will try to become an oracle so that she could boost her vision and find and if not make it possible for her son to escape his fate, things that maybe would have worked if they had not ensured through Hades that the Oracle was cursed turning her mad.
Ordering Hermes to not interact with his wife and son at the moment they needed him the most, to make him leave so that Luke Castellan would feel abandoned, angry and more importantly scared, vulnerable.
The boy fleeing from his home, homeless, alone, surrounded by monsters and either uncaring or unaware mortals.
The boy would have met Thalia Grace and Annabeth Chase and the two demigoddesses would realize at perfection the task the fates had given them, become Luke Castellan’s everything.
Those girls would be his everything and by seeing them suffer, by seeing them struggle, by seeing the unfairness of it all, by watching as no gods helped even though in his mind they could, even though they should have, by watching the girl he loved sacrifice herself and turn into a tree, the boy would break even more.
The situations in Half-Blood camp, in how children that were specifically intended to make him turn into a parental loving figure, how those children were neglected, were scared, how camp Half-Blood was more a mix of an army’s base and an orphanage for the gods.
Hermes who would try to fight against Fate, against them by giving a quest that would be backed by the advantages and favours he had planned to use and give in the background so that his beloved son would succeed unaware that everything he did was worthless, by trying to save his son, go against them, he only made things go exactly the way they wished them to do.
A failed quest, friends, family members dead, self sacrificing so that Luke Castellans would survive, a wound so that he would never forget, a ban so that all would know.
All of that to create resentment, to create hatred, all of that to make him more pliable.
All of that so that the rising consciousness of the Titan King would be able to latch more easily, to influence more easily the boy.
They had placed the wounds in him like stepping stones.
It was design.
They gave him charisma, yes, but only enough to damn others beside him. They gave him strength, yes, but only the kind that could not outlive his vengeance. Even his name—Luke—a lightbearer, a herald of dawn, chosen by a cruel symmetry to mimic a certain Morning Star.
His defiance was planned.
His revolt was scripted.
His downfall was ordained.
All of this so that boy, years later, fulfilling his role as the hero of the prophecy would not only allow them to get rid of undesirables, deal with things a little bit differently, completely get rid of the Titan king and thus usurp his authority to reinforce theirs so that their plan to get rid of Gaia would have more chances of working.
Every rebellion, every doubt, every scream to the sky the boy would give had already been scripted. When he will spit on Olympus, it would not be blasphemy. It would be obedience. When he try to cast down the gods, it would not be defiance—it would be worship. Of a deeper, older order.
Everything had been on their side. Everything until this infestation.
Hours ago, the fates had felt it, what could if not one of the signs the source of the infestation.
The Moirai were sure that there were not any beings with a shred of awareness of the world behind the mist that didn’t feel it.
It had been something powerful, primordial and more than that foreign. It was something new when nothing should have been to them yet it was something they could not help but feel as familiar, something that created dread in their heart.
Someone, something was daring to challenge the mandate of the Heavens, of the gods most high and for once, certainty in victory didn’t lay in their heart.
Something more primitive bloomed in their essence. Older than will. Like the silence before the first sound. Like the space between numbers. Like the itch in a god’s spine when they realize, too late, that they are not the apex of their own myth.
For the first time in their existence, the Moirai began to fear, wonder about what would be just like any lesser creature.
They needed to find the origin, the source of the rot, of the corruption. They needed to so that the impossible doesn't become possible, so that necessity didn't lose its inevitability so that the chains of Fate don’t become anything but broken pieces of stardust.
A dark blade pierced the heavens and it was in that darkness that a guiding triumphant light toward something other, better shone on the world.
Once a child asked their father about their future. Would they be good-looking? Would they be happy? Would they be rich?
The Father’s only answer would be that Fate is for no one to see.
It was under a dark blade raging against the heavens that Fate broke.
Whatever will happen will happen.
Comments
allen 1996
The worse is that it is canonically and mythologically accurate. In canon, the fates had already cut Luke’s thread five years before his death because they had always intended him to die. Mythologically, they have powers over immortals and mortals. Everything wrong about the pjo world is directly or indirectly because of them
Anthony Maxwell
So the fates are more powerful than the Olympian gods or Titans.
Jaylon Cain
Garden….. more like a greenhill full of hypocrisy and degeneracy. Good chapter 👍
