Twist of Fate

There’s a restless itch just beneath my skin. I can’t seem to shake it, no matter how much I shift and fidget. 

Cam and I sit together in our little office, working away and doing the usual–working out where people’s souls should go after they die.

It sounds like something you shouldn’t be able to get bored with. But it also makes us sound like we’re judges, doling out verdicts or all-powerful deities. We should have fancy robes, at the very least. The truth is, we’re more like analysts. Cam is a karma weaver, looking at the challenges a soul has faced in their lifetime, and I’m a fate weaver, looking at the choices and the forks in the road they took, as well as all the options they had. Sometimes there aren't that many.

We’ve been doing the same thing every day for two and a bit years now and… I’m going slowly nuts. We need to get out of our hut. While neither Cam nor I are exactly social people, we can only go so long with just each other for company before we grate on each other. 

I need something beyond these four walls.

“Look, just go and see if Soren will let you tag along the next time he goes reaping,” Cam says with a roll of her eyes as I sigh and grumble under my breath.

I shoot her a flat look. Soren’s the soul reaper for our garden. He is the one who brings souls to the afterlife. And he’s not exactly known for being lax around the rules, and one of the big rules is that we don’t leave the garden. It might be an unwritten one, but it exists all the same.

It means we’re focused on the job, but so damn isolated I could scream. 

“He might even drop you off so you can go shoe shopping,” she adds, grinning as she uses my weakness against me. 

I waver. The desire to add to my collection along with this need I have to just do something different, both swirl and merge inside me until I push to my feet. 

Luck seems to be on my side as I leave the hut and traipse across the garden until I reach the center where Brogan is getting ready to leave on another soul reaping trip. I flash him my biggest smile as I ask to tag along with them, and Brogan’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise and he looks at me like a stranger has taken control of my body.

Okay, okay, maybe I’m laying it on a bit thick. I’m not exactly known for smiling. Cam’s all snark and my natural state is to be a grouch. It’s just how we’re made. 

“Look. A change of scenery is what I need. I don’t care where it is and I don’t care what I do. I just need to go somewhere.”

Brogan looks at me appraisingly for a long moment, as I try not to sweat and fidget and look like a bad bet to go with them.

“Yeah, okay, Wren,” he says eventually and I release a sigh of relief.

We wind up in a human city, which is perfect for me. Humans do two things well, shoe stores and coffee. And I’m going to make the most out of them both.

“We’ve got two souls to reap. One is here and the other is a few cities over, so we’ll drop you here and be back in maybe ninety minutes. Meet us back here then,” Soren says. 

I’m pretty sure he’s unimpressed with me coming along, but it’s hard to tell because he’s a cold asshole at the best of times. I don’t care though, I’m going to act like a regular person, like I have a life beyond fate weaving and obsessing over other people’s afterlives.

I spend a whole glorious hour wandering around heaven… aka boutique shoe stores, finally having time to use some of the money I’ve stashed away. 

After that, I head to a coffee shop and head into a quiet corner so that I can people-watch. I’m there for maybe ten minutes before I notice a guy sitting a few seats away, his attention focused on me.

He’s cute… in a floppy-haired, kind of preppy way.

He notices my attention and gives me a slow grin and I remember there’s another thing I’ve missed by being shut up away from any and all people. I have needs, itches that need to be scratched, and as this guy’s eyes sparkle with mischief and he slides over until he’s at the next table, I decide he might just do to meet those needs. 

Temporary. Fun. Stringless.

“Hi, I’m Andrew,” he says. 

I’ve only just introduced myself when I spot Soren looking mighty pissed off at the window.

“It’s midnight and I’m about to turn into a pumpkin,” I tell my new friend.

He grins wide, sliding over a piece of paper with his number. “Maybe I could take you out, or you could come over to mine and we can hang out the next time you’re in town.”

I smile back and nod, like a normal girl.

Later, I’ll wonder if it was at that moment I secured my fate, or if it was in one of the many times over the coming months where I’ll head back and meet up with Andrew.

Fun. Temporary.

He wasn’t. Wasn’t either of those things.

I know that now. 

Definitely not stringless either. There were plenty of those involved when he acted like my puppet-master, twisting and tugging at the strings of my fate.

Now, I’m all twisted and tangled up by them, trapped in a web I can’t seem to escape.  

It’s raining yet again. It’s always fucking raining. 

The bear and I trudge along, our feet squelching on the mud and fallen pine needles. After years of controlled, mostly balmy weather back in the garden, it’s pretty damn miserable to be stuck out here. Our fur is wet and bedraggled and I’m tired, even though it’s not my body being lugged around. 

The poor bear doesn’t seem to have a lot of survival skills, building a den or whatever the fuck bears usually have. I wonder where exactly Andrew got her from when he trapped me inside her body. Was she frolicking in a field somewhere with her family of other bears? Did he create her out of nothing? Was she an oversized child’s stuffed toy he gave life to?

I have no idea.

And while I used to think I was pretty tough–I mean, I grew up with a bunch of minotaurs that had zero care for personal space and no idea about their own strength. But camping? Living off the land? They’re a whole different thing, and especially now I’m stuck in this body. I don’t know what I’m doing.

I used to have a job I was pretty good at. Friends, a place to live and to sleep on an actual bed that was cozy as shit. I had an entire closet of shoes.
My personal favorites were banana yellow to go with my sunny personality.

… just fucking with you.

They are yellow. But they’re stomp-kicker boots with a big ol’ tread. Yellow and black, like a wasp, like a warning. I’d like to be wearing them when I kick Andrew’s fucking teeth in. 

I had a life. A body that was my own. I helped to work out where people’s souls should be delivered into the afterlife. I spent every day looking at the details of people’s lives and I was pretty good at it, too.

I even had a little side hustle going with my best friend so that I could afford my shoe collection. But I guess I got bored. Needed to get out. It was on one of my little trips out maybe eight months ago that I met Andrew. That smarmy piece of shit that destroyed my life. Tried to destroy me. 

Fuck. That.

I didn’t even like him all that much when we were dating. He scratched an itch–not all that well, but that was by the by.

So we hung out, we had sex, sat around and ate takeout, and then Soren would pick me up to take me home. The entire thing lasted a few hours. 

Cut to a few months later and it turns out that not only did he have a steady girlfriend; he was also draining a little of my weaver powers every time I visited. 

And to top off the icing on the shitty cake that was our relationship, he abducted me and stuck me in a cage, steadily draining my powers and not feeding me much at all. 

For weeks.

Then when I finally escaped him, I discovered all my powers as a fate weaver were gone. And then I got taken to a safe place to start a whole new life, and I turned into a motherfucking bear. 

It’s been a tough few months. 

I can’t say that me and the bear have got much better at the survival thing. We’ve survived, sure, but I’m pretty sure the bear has lost weight in that time.

And me? I’ve just got madder as the days have gone on. We’ve walked miles through this forest and I do not know how far we are from the village where Echo dropped me off. 

On bad days, I wonder if this is my fate, to wind up caged and helpless. 

That only makes me even madder, even though being angry at fate is pointless. You might as well rage at water for being wet.

Fate doesn’t hear you cursing it out. It doesn’t care if you’ve had a shitty enough time of it already and would just like a break now, please. It would have to have ears to listen. 

I always used to think that we, the weavers, were the hands of fate. But it turns out, we don’t have any control either. When I was training at the weaver academy as a teenager, I thought we’d be able to do more, to have more influence. But more often than not, even when there are supposed choices between two actions, neither would make a difference to the ultimate outcome. Which means you might as well have no choice at all.

I know more than most how useless it is to be mad.

So why am I still raging, practically foaming at the mouth, at the general shittiness of it all?

Because the rage is all I have.

I know that, in the story, after all the chaos and shit floods out of the box, all that’s left is hope. But I’m still trapped in the box, so I’ll stick with the anger, thanks very much.

There are voices up ahead, so the bear and I go a little deeper into the tree line, away from the path. It’s only slightly more sheltered here since the trees are missing most of their needles and leaves.

We’ve seen surprisingly few people on our travels. This place is supposed to be home to a ton of shifters, but we’ve avoided them so far. I’m sure we’ve caught glimpses, scented them on the downwind, but that’s all.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think things were avoiding us. 

I’m certainly avoiding them, so maybe we’re just doing a great job, like we’re playing hide and seek, but no one’s seeking. 

We have seen some animals, proper ones, I mean. But that didn’t go all that well. Turns out I don’t suddenly speak raccoon. They chittered and we kind of snorted back. They hissed, and we roared at them, which caused them to turn tail and run off like their ass was on fire. 

For a moment, I chuckled to myself, feeling pretty badass. 

Then the feeling faded, and I was just… kinda lonely, I guess.

Now, we creep closer to the small gathering of witches that are apparently choosing today to commune with nature in the pissing rain. By ‘communing with nature’, I mean that they’re having a picnic. 

It’s a new thing for me, being able to know species just by smell. Then again, it’s also new for me to sniff out a sandwich from half a mile away. 

We pause in the shadows, watching as the three adult witches set out their spread and dig in, making sure the little ones get their fill even though the littles seem more interested in trying to beat each other around the head with fallen branches. 

So much for communing with nature. I chuckle to myself and the bear sends me a blast of her own amusement before her thoughts go straight back to getting her hands… uh, paws, on one of the sandwiches now littering the ground. 

Clearly, we share the same slapstick sense of humor. Weird.

A massive raindrop plops onto our head, and I shudder as it sinks into our fur. 

Me and the bear have come to a kind of understanding though, which is tricky because we don’t exactly speak the same language and I’m just some stranger that wound up sharing her brain space, able to control her body. Mostly we send weird visuals back and forth and that’s all the communication we can manage. 

Like right now, I’m getting images of us coming across a nice, warm cave for us to snuggle down in.

Yeah, we need to get out of the rain. Poor bear.

I feel bad for her. I can feel that she’s trudging along, miserable. And she’s stuck with my raging, grumpy ass inside her, which can’t make things easier.

I can be a little… grouchy, standoffish, rude. Take your pick. But I’m thinking the first one is the one that the bear has to deal with most, considering we can’t communicate with others.

Maybe we could if they were a bear too, but she seemed kind of confused when I tried to ask about it. So either she’s lived a sheltered life or she’s an animated soft toy. 

We are quite the pair. 

The bear’s still got her eye firmly on the witches’ picnic. They’ve been here for hours with no signs of leaving. They’re just sitting there with their umbrella like it’s not a miserable fucking day.

Eventually, the bear loses her patience. She does well, sticks it out for a good while. But then she sends me this image that’s clearer than anything she’s ever sent before, of her charging forward into the middle of the witches. They scatter and she eats up all the food they leave behind.

No, I send back. That’s a crazy idea. We’ll just wait them out until they leave. 

Eat up the scraps.

Of course, she listens to me and stays where she is.

Does she fuck. 

She charges in, exactly as she imagined. The witches scream and scatter, and we chomp our way through the remnants of their picnic. And I’m stuck witnessing the whole thing, shoved to a corner in her mind as she chows down, barely noticing the sheer fucking terror on the little ones’ faces. Even though she barely looked their way, I caught a glimpse. 

Fuck. That’s gonna be one for my nightmares later. Me, trapped while the bear goes on a sandwich-fueled rampage, ravaging innocent children, knocking them clean off their feet like they’re skittles.

After that, she keeps a handle on her body for the longest time since we’ve been stuck together. Most of the time she’s seemed pretty happy to share control of her body with me. I’m the more decisive one of the pair of us and I also have some sense of self-preservation and an idea of what we need to eat to fuel our big body. 

But not today. 

It must only be a couple of hours that go by with her in control. But it’s a kick in the teeth, a firm reminder that I’m a passenger here. I can just get shoved to the side and left with zero control over the body I’m inhabiting. 

It’s a reminder I’ve just switched cages. Both courtesy of that asshole Andrew. 

But I got out of the first cage, I’ll get out of this one too.

And then I’m coming for him and he won’t know what hit him.