Wings of Fate: The Lost Ones
Chapter 20

There was no telling how many hours passed when she awoke, lying on a stone floor, too frozen to move. Somewhere within the shadows, shuffling feet moved around the room. When she twisted her head to the side Raven could almost make out darkened shapes of strangers against the wall but when she cried out to them there was no response. Her tongue was thick inside her mouth and no tangible words escaped her lips. Her words, to her own ears, sounded like inhuman mewling, but even that small sound brought no one closer.

She closed her eyes and shifted her face away from the people against the wall, rolling the back of head against the rough cracks in the stone floor, and drifted to sleep.

As soon as she awoke Raven glanced up to replace a woman hunched over her body. Seeing she was awake, the woman kneeled on the floor and began poking at Raven’s stomach, sending fire shooting through her insides. Raven’s body trembled under the gnarled fingers of an old woman whose white hair fell around her shoulders, cascading over her torso to drape, forgotten, across the stone floor.

The woman’s appearance was cloaked by darkness but her voice flowed around the room. Raven listened, unable to comprehend the words passing through her cracked lips as they shifted across blackened teeth. The woman’s whispers echoed over themselves in the silent room, circling back until it seemed there were a dozen voices instead of one. Trying to pull away from her, Raven found herself frozen to the floor.

She glanced around the room. This is a nightmare, she thought. Wake up, Raven, wake up!

But still, the darkness invaded her senses and the whispers filled her ears. She tried, again, to move away from the old woman and though only the fingers of her left hand twitched on the floor, the old woman leaned towards Raven and snarled at her to keep still. As the woman leaned back, she pressed her fingers against Raven’s side.

Pain exploded through her body -- shrieking through her head. Raven screamed until the old woman ceased her torment and moved away, leaving Raven to close her eyes and gasp for breath in an attempt to fight the darkness enveloping her. “Please…” she whispered.

The stranger didn’t respond to the plea but, after a few silent moments, returned -- whispering. After a minute of trying to understand her, she realized the old woman wasn’t speaking a familiar language. Sinking into the cold floor, again, Raven allowed the words to dip and flow over her. The pain in her side swelled, piercing her body and, thick tongue or not, Raven screamed until she had neither breath nor sound left in her body.

She awoke again some time later to replace the old woman still seated beside her. The pain in her side was gone and, with all the sleep, Raven felt rested. Half a dozen white candles burned alongside the walls, giving no evidence as to whether it was day or night. Shadows swayed beneath the leaping candles, glowing hot against the well-worn cheek of the old woman. Silver streaks spiraled through her hair, highlights illuminated by the candles.

The cloaked people who hovered against the walls were nowhere in sight, having left some time while she slept. If they had even been there, she thought, worrying about the hallucination.

The old woman held Raven’s left hand in hers, turning it around in her palm, pulling it close to her face while she stared and muttered to herself. Under heavy lids, Raven watched in silence, wondering if the woman was putting a spell on her but too tired to care. When the stranger bent forward, a terrible stench wafted over Raven’s face. Forcing herself to not grimace, Raven stared at the woman -- wondering.

Thin bones jutted against translucent skin with an old-age milky quality, which allowed view of the individual blue veins running in parallel lines through her arms and neck. The stringy hair was gray instead of white and it hung against the woman’s back until it disappeared from sight.

The lines crossing her face ran in every direction beneath sagging folds of skin beneath surprisingly bright blue eyes. Her gray dress was wrinkled; filthy as though never washed, and threadbare -- stretching over slouching shoulders and falling to the floor where she sat on her knees like a schoolgirl, inspecting Raven’s hand.

“You have markings on your hand.” The old woman croaked in a voice hoarse from disuse. She darted a glance over her shoulder at something behind her, lowered her voice and whispered the words again.

Raven frowned. “What do you mean -- markings?”

“Lines, there are lines across your hands.”

“Everyone has those lines on their palms.”

The strange woman nodded, impatient. “Yes, yes…” she continued, nodding still, “but not -- not like yours.” She leaned forward then, bringing the sharp smell of sweat back over Raven’s face. Turning Raven’s hand around painfully, she pushed it into Raven’s face so she could see which lines the woman referred to. “See -- see here?” she quizzed, pointing to one of the white lines crisscrossing Raven’s hand.

Raven glanced at the white line on her hand and then met the stranger’s gaze. “That line has always been there.”

The old woman nodded again and pulled Raven’s hand back towards her own face. “Yes, of course, since birth -- that is how the markings work.” Raven didn’t know where this conversation was going, or if she should even ask what the markings meant because, while she was curious, she wasn’t sure she even wanted to know anymore. Instead, she kept her silence, watching the blue eyes staring at her hand.

Callous fingertips skirted across the face of her palm and Raven found she was surprised her hands no longer ached from getting scraped. Only hours ago they felt raw and bleeding. She mulled the thought over as she waited for the woman to continue.

The old woman wasn’t her first experience with a palm reader. Her sophomore year at Baltimore State University began with a girls-only trip to see a palm reader, who charged them each ten dollars to read “their future”. Having never believed in predictions, Raven scoffed at the idea but joined her friends anyway. The palm reader hadn’t been able to tell her anything more than that she would graduate from college and one day fall in love.

A prophecy that could pertain to anyone.

That was not to say she understood the purpose of the white lines dashing across her hands, because she didn’t understand their purpose at all, but palm reading? It wasn’t real.

Eyeing the woman, Raven waited while she fingered her palm and muttered to herself. If she didn’t know any better, she would think the woman was a witch. Did they have witches on DeSolar?

“This line here,” she pointed now at a line Raven couldn’t see from her position on the floor, “it means ‘warrior’ or ‘strength’.” Raven kept her silence and waited. “This other line here means ‘destroyer’. Those are nothing all that remarkable, though. The small one that runs off the side of your hand means ‘gone’ or ‘gone astray’ or ‘lost’,” the witch’s eyebrows grouped together in vexation, “which is an odd one to have,” she whispered and glanced over her shoulder again.

“But this one, this thick one that crosses your entire hand and then branches off twice,” she hissed, turning Raven’s hand backwards so Raven could see which one she was pointing at. “This line travels across your entire palm and is your Spirit Line -- the path of your spirit. You should not have any lines deviating from your spirit line, but you have two.” She turned her palm over and traced the line with one of her own fingers.

“What does that mean?” Raven asked, frowning.

“Something, I believe, to do with your heritage.”

“My heritage?” Raven asked, confused. “What would my heritage have to do with my having two of these so-called Spirit Lines?”

“Not ‘so-called’,” the woman answered, annoyed. She leaned closer to Raven’s face and whispered. “You were born of two people -- man and woman. Do you know which of them you favor?”

Raven stared into the bright blue eyes inches from her own and considered the murky memories she had of her parents. She had never been given any pictures of her parents; nothing to take with her to the foster home. Because of the lack of them, Raven spent most of her teenage years growing up with a disregard for which parent she resembled more. It hadn’t been until her brief stint in a genealogy course in college that she became almost fanatic about learning about her family’s history.

She hadn’t known where to begin her search, as there were no grandparents to ask -- no cousins to approach. In the end it was her professor whom suggested pulling old newspaper records from the night of her parents’ accident. It took over a week of searching to replace the article and it only turned up a small photograph of her parents smiling over her own cherubic face.

Once she had their names, it was easy to research the rest of the family. Her grandparents died many years prior to her parents’ accident, but more newspaper clippings turned up, including a small magazine article on her maternal grandfather’s pizzeria, which afforded her a few black and white photographs.

Raven copied, cut out, and saved every photograph and article she came across -- compiling the lot in a small scrapbook. She spent hours staring at the laughter in her mother’s green eyes and it was the only reason Raven knew the answer to the question.

“I look like my mother.” She answered.

“And she? Does she favor her mother or father?”

“She also looks like her mother.”

“Are you the only child of this union? Your mother is the only child of her parents?”

“Yes and yes, what’s your point?”

“I imagine all the women, in direct descendent order, look much alike and could be almost identical to their own daughter. You are your mother’s daughter, not your father’s -- and the same is true for your mother. The women in your family, I imagine, have much strength. Perhaps they are all beautiful -- even mesmerizing. It is in your blood, this thing passed down, from generation to generation, through the women of your family.

You are both the child of your parents and the child to something much more powerful than anyone realized. You are an heiress.” The woman forced the words past her lips as though the effort were painful. The bright eyes glowed with interest, standing out in the shadowed room.

“Being an heiress requires having parents with a lot of money.” Raven responded.

“Or power.” The witch whispered fiercely.

A gust of forced air skirted across her body as the door across the room opened. Raven’s hand smacked the floor hard. The old woman found her feet and stood. A large man wearing the same uniform as her abductors ducked beneath the low doorway and moved into the shadows draping across his path. In the dimness of the room Raven held her breath, wondering if it was Logan who came to visit her, but when the man straightened she realized she would have no idea if it was Logan staring down at her, or not. The visitor’s face was expressionless but the darkness in his eyes spoke of unleashed menace.

Raven looked away.

“The Queen Mother requests a visit with the guest.” Guest…yeah right, Raven thought as she looked up at the woman standing over her. She wondered if their conversation was of such import the Queen Mother may be given the results but the old woman glanced down at Raven dismissively, stepped over her body, and strode from the room.

The woman whom all referred to as the witch strode swiftly on silent feet through the stone corridors of the Queen Mother’s castle, intent on her quarters within the far wing of the castle.

How can this be? She wondered, ignoring the shadows along the hallway in favor of staring hard into the past. Her past. What her father told her so many years ago about the possibilities of his plan.

The blonde woman should not exist on DeSolar. She should not exist anywhere and for her to exist, means surely she is not from DeSolar. There was no doubt in her mind that her father did not plan for this. The bloodline was supposed to be dead.

Crossing through an empty sitting room, the witch, glanced through an open window at fields of summer grass sparkling with early morning dew. Sunlight beamed off the hills, creating a dance of shadow and light reflected by the tall green stalks bowing beneath a rampant wind.

Passing through the room hours earlier had provided none of the same enjoyment. Everything has changed, she thought.

Soon the view was beyond her sight and she returned to her thoughts. It was such an old conversation and yet she could still hear her father’s laugh in her ears. Please, daughter, that family is dead! It was one of many times she questioned various aspects of his plan -- little things that seemed uncertain. He resented being questioned and she knew it.

But that was when she thought she was helping his cause by pointing out the flaws in his reasoning. She did not want to help him anymore -- that ship had sailed many months ago. Long months had passed in his company before she realized how crazed he truly was.

And then there was the Queen Mother. The witch grimaced. A truly horrid woman.

Her father told her, when she questioned about the family line who could ruin him, that the family was dead. Each of the women as far down the line as it went until it was ended completely almost thirty years ago.

Someone screwed up, she thought, turning a corner.

Soon he would know how badly someone screwed up but he would have to learn it by some other means because she would not be the one to tell him. The existence of the blonde girl offered so much promise that the witch wanted to slam her door closed, instead of lightly pressing it into place, so that she could scream and laugh into the dark confines of her stone room.

She wanted to dance! The fight was not over!

With the swiftness of thought, the candles lining the wall of her room bounced into flame. The orange glow sparked along the stone wall illuminating the barest of rooms -- a cold room without the smallest of personal belongings -- a bed and an empty wooden nightstand.

Mulling over the steps that needed to be taken next, she considered her father. It was going to be impossible to escape him. The man was insane. With as much power as he amassed he was now able to control people without her help. But, that didn’t mean he would let her go.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

No matter where she was, he always seemed aware of it, and anytime she moved even one foot too far away from him he would call for her.

She knew him well enough, as well she should. He demanded her presence at his side and with every passing day, with every new atrocity, she became more and more disgusted with him. And she was having a difficult time hiding her thoughts from him. He sensed her pulling away from him, rejecting him -- turning away from the plan he made.

His dream.

She didn’t care for his dream and wanted no part of it. The sacrifices to his dream had been many. Should anyone argue with any step of his plan, they wound up dead. If anyone posed a threat to his plan, they wound up dead. Time and time again she watched him grow quiet as fear welled within his breast -- as he met some new authority who challenged him. Challenged him and stood a chance of destroying his plans.

He would grow afraid and then whatever or whoever that authority was, would disappear. There was no room for any authority but his own.

But that was before he stopped telling her things, before he stopped including her in all his plans. Because she pulled away from him. Rejecting him.

And he was afraid.

Raven was led, by four soldiers, through a hallway as wide as a lane in a road back home. The guards wore tight fitting blue jeans and dark green vests, just as the men who abducted her wore. The muscles in their arms gleamed with dirt and sweat, flexing as they marched through the hallway. Heavy boots vibrated on the floor with drum-like thuds echoing along the length of the corridor. Their presence contrasted with the halls’ pristine cleanliness.

Though the sounds of life in the castle filtered back to her, Raven saw no one other than these four men. Her mangled tennis shoes moved across the gray stone floor with nothing more than a whisper, leading her towards a dreamlike sense of doom.

Though the old woman healed the wound, small stabs of pain pulsed in her side as she walked. Other than that small pain, there was little else in the hallway to distract her from her predicament.

The time for believing this world was a dream had come and gone. No matter how horrible the experience, she wasn’t waking up and now knew the truth. She was stuck on a foreign planet in the middle of a deadly war and was never going home.

Other than the old woman, whom she suspected was some sort of medieval witch, no one spoke to her. It was obvious her life was in danger and, if she didn’t figure out what was going on with this latest twist, she was going to be in a lot more trouble. Escaping was an option but Raven discarded the idea because there was nowhere to go.

She thought about Logan, wondering if he might help her escape and almost laughed for thinking the man who kidnapped, threatened and hit her would actually choose to spirit her away. She had lost her mind if she thought there was anything redeemable about that man. Get a grip, Raven.

Instead, her thoughts turned to Bael. If she went with Bael instead of the Moirai, she would not be here now. Bael and Austin were far away, a quiet journey of two men traveling to the safety of Bael’s homeland. Allegora was unfamiliar but it had to be better than this. Surely they were almost there by now.

Austin’s face waved in her mind, his dark brown eyes staring up at her with trust as they stood outside Ruth’s cottage. His brown eyes looking at her as though she were an idiot when she suggested they were dreaming, still home, still safe in their beds.

She hoped he was okay -- more than okay, even. She hoped he found happiness in Allegora. It would be too much to hope that he never replace out how she died and that it was for nothing. She was his only link to home -- to Earth. She hoped he never found out how violent DeSolar was.

Raven’s thoughts were interrupted as her guards stopped before a large door fashioned out of wooden planks. One of the soldiers grasped a bronze knocker and tapped on the door with an unbelievably gentle action for a man of his size. All four of the guards stepped back from the door, forming two lines of two men each, and faced each other with their hands clasped behind their backs.

Raven took the opportunity to look into each of their faces. None of them looked at her or each other. It was as though they could see nothing at all. Dark eyes and blazing scars monopolized their faces. She didn’t recognize any of them as being on the forest road where she was taken.

It seemed only a second passed since the echo of the door knocker faded into the silence of the castle before the door was opened by a weasel of a man who looked at Raven as though she were a piece of trash someone dropped on the floor at his feet. She narrowed her eyes at him.

The weasel didn’t seem effected by her opinion -- instead he twisted his thin lips in a menacing grimace and waved them forward. Raven followed, towering over him by a good four inches, and glared at the back of his balding head. His clothing looked out of place. Without the benefit of a belt, brown trousers slouched around his skeletal hips and were overlaid by a breezy, white tunic. He wore brown sandals instead of boots and, as he skittered through the corridor, she wondered what his job was.

The room she was led into was dim, shadows hung behind bars of white light streaming through elongated rectangular holes carved into the walls. Waving grass and forest stretched on for miles outside them. The sun bore down on the land, allowing shifting light to play through the windows, catching dust particles as they hovered in the air. The room lacked furniture.

As barren as the room was, it was sizeable. Raven imagined more than one hundred of the Queen’s soldiers could have fit into the space. The weasel glided across the floor, followed by Raven and the soldiers, and moved towards the far end of the room, which was illuminated by pillared candles set into the walls.

Against the back wall rested a bulky chair where a slender woman sat board straight. When they were within ten feet of the woman, the weasel looked over his shoulder at Raven and pointed to a spot on the floor. He moved to the side of the chair. Raven stopped three feet to the right of where he pointed. His dark eyes glared over a beak of a nose but he said nothing.

Raven glanced behind her, searching out the four guards who accompanied her and found them about six feet back. Turning back to face the woman, the Queen Mother, she thought with a sudden urge to flee, Raven raised an eyebrow in question.

The woman tilted her head to the side and looked Raven over. The Queen’s face was painted with an eye for rosy cheeks to match the lipstick she wore, and the light brown shading on her eyelids contrasted against her pale skin. The woman’s eyebrows arched over eerie black eyes -- a kohl-like color that matched the hair twisted into a bun.

An enormous string of white pearls hung around her neck, offsetting the smaller pearls sewn into the silver dress covering her from neck to toe. The dress was cinched tight around her wrists, elbows, neckline, and waist, to billow out around her legs. The silver headdress stood stiff and almost reached the top of her head but was outdone in sheer height by a red and silver crown.

Realizing she was staring, Raven returned her gaze to the Queen’s eyes, and then averted her gaze again from the solid blackness.

The Queen Mother arched a brow at her. “Where is he?”

“Where is who?” Raven responded, confused, raising her eyes to the Queen’s face.

The Queen slapped a well-manicured hand against the armrest and shouted. “You know very well whom I mean!” she paused then and took a breath. When she resumed, her voice was calm. “You were seen with my son and he is missing. I want to know where he has gone or what you have done with him.”

“I’m afraid you are mistaken, or misled, because when I was abducted I was with three women -- there were no boys there, least of all your son.”

“I know very well who you were with when you were detained,” she snapped, “you were seen with my son a few days ago and he has not been seen since.”

Raven was already shaking her head. “I wasn’t with your son.”

Cold, black eyes skirted over Raven’s body. “Ten years old, about this tall,” she said placing her hand out, “brown hair, brown eyes. I can see by your expression you know who I am talking about.”

She described Austin to a ‘t’ but he came with her to DeSolar only a week ago and could not possibly be the Queen’s son. He had been with her a few days ago. Four days, to be exact. Raven opened her mouth to correct the Queen but then pressed her lips together. Would the woman send soldiers after Austin? It was possible the woman didn’t even have a son. She could be lying in order to learn where Austin went.

If that was the case, then the Queen Mother kidnapped her for reasons, most likely, related to the prophecy. If she wanted Raven and Austin, then that meant Austin was just as important to the war as the Moirai said she was. And if her involvement in the war was encouraging the Queen to kill her, then she couldn’t tell her anything about Austin.

“I’m telling you, I was not with your son -- if he even exists.” She said, tilting her chin.

The Queen watched her with hooded eyes, tapping one red fingernail against the chair’s wooden arm rest. “Oh, he exists.” She murmured, with a slow glance around the room. “Tell me about the women you were found with.”

Raven frowned at the change in subject. According to Ruth, the Queen Mother was familiar with Atropos, which meant she was familiar with all three of the sisters. It didn’t seem problematic for her to say so. “They are the Moirai.”

“Ah, yes,” she said, “The Moirai, and what did they want with you?”

“I don’t know yet.” Raven answered, figuring the Queen already knew why the Moirai wanted her. In fact, the woman most likely knew more than Raven did herself.

The Queen nodded. “What do you know about them?”

“Next to nothing, I was only with the sisters for a day before your henchmen attacked me.” She said, sliding in the barb despite its lack of usefulness.

With a slight smile, the woman continued. “Oh, yes, well -- sometimes the soldiers can be a little rough but never you-mind them, you have more important things to worry about. But I’ll tell you,” she said, her voice rising in a high, sarcastic pitch, “that there is one reason, and one reason only, why the Moirai sisters would want you, dear girl.”

Raven was uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was heading. Yes, she wanted to know more about the Moirai, but the Queen’s tone didn’t sound educational -- it sounded baiting. Perhaps the Queen did know why Raven was there. It was also possible she didn’t.

“Why would those three sisters want you, my dear, why would -- the fates want you if not for control over your fate, hmmmm?” she murmured, eyeing Raven.

The fates, Raven thought, astounded, of course. That was why the word ‘Moirai’ sounded familiar, it meant three and it referred to the three sisters of fate -- fate of life, fate of birth, and fate of death. Their faces wavered in her mind as she focused on their expressions -- their eyes, their grimness. They were the fates -- the three women who decided all.

Raven thought not to become embroiled in the violent war raging across DeSolar -- but the choice never existed. Atropos said they intentionally brought her to their planet to fight this war, and fight this war she would. Raising her eyes to the Queen; Raven decided to play dumb, which wasn’t too difficult. “The fates?”

The Queen laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh. Her head lolled back as her lips stretched wide to reveal perfect teeth, allowing the insulting guffaws to echo against the room’s stone walls.

Raven kept her face blank.

When she calmed down, the woman’s black eyes bored into her. “You do not even know who the fates are. Those dear, sweet little sisters brought you here to lead their little war, didn’t they?” she asked, smirking. “Why they would choose you, I have no idea. What can you possibly do to help them, hmmm? What powers do you have?”

“I have no powers.” Raven said, frowning.

A slow, feral smile spread across the woman’s face. “No powers. What is your name, girl?”

She hesitated before answering and knew, the moment the name passed over her lips, she just brought herself more danger. The Queen’s fingers clenched the armrests, eyes widening, and she was as pinned to her chair as if someone held her there. Instead the Queen, with bulging eyes, whispered something Raven learned only days before.

“The raven.”