come from every culture imaginable. Each frieze portrayed a scene from life. Every part of life, every celebration, every tragedy, every mundane moment seemed to be pictured on those walls. As my gaze passed a bloody battle scene, a rearing horse’s front leg moved, infinitesimally. I blinked. The rider’s mouth opened, so slowly that the casual glance would miss it.
I was about to say something to Eve when the floor began to turn.
“An audience has been granted,” Eve muttered. “About time.”
The floor rotated until we were faced with an open space at least as inconceivably huge as the one on the other side. Across the expanse, vines hung from the ceiling, thousands, tens of thousands of them, suspended from every inch of space. The sight was so incongruous that I blinked and rubbed my thumb and forefinger over my eyes. When I looked again, I saw that they weren’t vines at all, but pieces of yarn, colored every shade in the rainbow, and all exactly the same length.
“What the—?” I began.
“Shhh,” Eve hissed. “Let me talk, remember?”
It was then that I saw the woman. She stood on a dais, behind an old-fashioned spinning wheel. Neither young nor old, ugly nor beautiful, thin nor fat, short nor tall, she was a perfect average of everything female, a middle-aged matron with skin the color of honey and long graying dark hair.
Her head down, she pumped a length of yarn from the wheel until it looked the same length as those hanging all around her. Then in a transition so fast and seamless it seemed a trick of the eyes, the woman aged fifty years, becoming an elderly crone, back bent, long hair as coarse and gray as wire, the simple mauve dress now white with the palest hint of violet. Her sunken eyes gleamed, dark and quick, like a crow’s. One wizened hand lifted the length of yarn. The other, wrapped around a pair of black scissors, reached up and snipped it off. A man—so pale he looked albino—appeared from the jungle of dangling yarn, took the newly cut piece, and disappeared back into the dark depths of wool.
I looked back at the crone, but in her place stood a child no more than five or six, so small she couldn’t see over the spinning wheel. Like the others, she had long hair, but hers was gleaming golden brown, and her eyes were cornflower blue. Her dress was an equally vivid purple.
The girl threaded the wheel, standing on tiptoes to reach it. Once it was ready, she changed to the middle-aged woman, who began to spin the yarn.
Beside me, Eve sighed loudly. “See? Even the Fates aren’t above petty sadism, making us sit here and stew.”
The woman, now the old crone, pinned Eve with her sharp eyes. “Petty? Never. We’re enjoying a rare moment of peace, when we don’t need to worry what you’re up to.”
She clipped the yarn. As the albino man retrieved it, the girl appeared. Before she could load the wheel, she stopped, her head cocked, a frown flitting across her pretty face. The albino appeared, holding a length of yarn in his hands. The girl nodded gravely, then morphed into the middle-aged woman, who took the yarn. She slid it through her fingers, then closed her eyes. A single tear squeezed out as her fingers slipped up the yarn nearly to the top. The woman became the crone, who looked at the tiny length of yarn pinched between her fingers.
“So young,” she murmured, and clipped it off.
She handed the tiny piece of yarn back to the albino, who took it and walked into a hallway to our left. The old woman turned into the girl.
“So this is the problem we heard about,” the girl said, her voice high and musical. “And you’re involved, Eve? Shocking.”
“Hey, I didn’t—”
The girl smiled. “Didn’t do anything? Or didn’t cause the original problem? We’re well aware of your innocence in the latter, but we’d beg to differ on the former. Exactly how many rules have you broken today, Eve? I’m not sure I can count that high.”
“Sarcastic deities,” Eve muttered. “Just what every afterlife needs.”
The girl changed into the woman. “We’ll discuss your transgressions later, Eve. Right now—” Her voice softened as her gaze moved to me. “We have a more distressing situation to contend with. Not that you’re to blame, child, but we must fix this immediately. We’ll send you back, of course. You’ll still remember your visit. We hate to tamper