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The Moirai were not precisely goddesses, since even the gods were subject to them. Their names varied from place to place, culture to culture, time to time, but many knew of them. They were those who made fate what it was, hence why they were called the Fates. No one was beyond their reach, not even Zeus, though he tried time and again to thwart them.
In this time, people hardly spoke of the Fates much. They still knew of the ideas of fate, but they often used fancy philosophical terms, like determinism or free will. Sometimes they used religious language, like predestination. The Moirai minded not what people thought; the words and arguments and beliefs of mere humans were not necessary for them. Nothing would change the inevitability of what they did.
In Ancient Greece, the Moirai were worshiped. Temples were built in their honor, though they were gone now. Some of these temples contained beautiful art, imagining them as spinners, weavers, artisans of what was to be. Some of the temples eschewed images all together; after all, how can one make an image of something so inherent to reality. In other places, existing temples had altars built in their honor. A place otherwise devoted to a lesser god would put one corner aside for those who truly controlled the events of the universe.
The Moirai also cared little about this. They were not offended by images or altars or the lack thereof. The truth was that they were not in their temples. They were not contained by altars. The place to reach the Moirai was an open grove, an olive grove specifically. It was not where they dwelt, precisely, but it was the place where they could be heard and where they could hear.
The grove was where the Fates listened.
Year after year, for eternity, they kept their ears open. Humans came, and humans went, and the Moirai shaped their reality and determined their fate. They did not care, exactly. They were not like the compassionate mono-God that some humans imagined. They were not part of a pantheon, as if they could be considered equals to other gods, with each one concerned with a certain aspect of life. They were not the tripartite God some thought was bound by love. Shaping, determining, and ending human and divine lives was what the Moirai did. It was simply a fact. It was not a mission of love or care or anything else. It was how things were, nothing more and nothing less.
Sometimes, however, a human drew their attention. Perhaps, she was particularly good or bad. Maybe, he was especially smart or capable. Other times, they simply amused them.
For whatever reason, in the year that the humans declared as 1814, the man who caught their attention was Colin Bridgerton. He was, in a sense, nothing special. He was smart enough, a good writer, kind, a tad awkward, more excitable than was fashionable for the time, and someone whom human women would term handsome. He made mistakes, to be sure, and he could certainly be foolish. But overall, he was simply a man.
That day in 1814, he was a man who wandered into the right—or was it wrong?—olive grove, speaking quickly and honestly with his companion. And that day, the Fates were listening, and maybe feeling a bit more playful than usual.
Colin was stunned by the beauty of Greece. He would say he did not have the words to describe it, but he was certainly trying. In his letters to his family and Penelope, he hoped he could give them a small taste of what it was like here. Of course, only Penelope answered his letters back in anything resembling the same level of detail. She also asked questions and wanted further descriptions of what he had mentioned in previous letters. Consequently, he wrote longer and longer letters to Penelope and shorter and shorter letters to the more indifferent members of his family.
As he entered the olive grove that day, Colin catalogued as much as he could. He noted the smell of the fresh olives, the way the Mediterranean sun felt on his skin, and how everything appeared so vastly distinct from his homeland.
To his companion, a young man he had befriended a few weeks before, Colin explained his habit of writing letters with the most evocative descriptions he could manage.
“Nikolaos, you have been to England. You understand how different my homeland is from yours. Of course, I wish to put into words the wonder that fills me around every corner.”
Nikolaos laughed heartily. “There is much that can only be experienced, and writing is a waste of time, my friend. They will never see it as you do.”
“Hmm, perhaps, but what is an experience when it is not shared?”
“Is that why you write?” Nikolaos asked. “To share?”
Colin shrugged. “I suppose. And to be known. My friend Penelope and I have written for years, ever since I went away to school. I wonder if anyone knows me as well as she. She has certainly abided enough of my rambling to last her a lifetime.”
“And yet she continues to tolerate you? She must be a special young lady indeed.”
Shaking his head at the teasing, Colin began to describe Penelope. “Special does not begin to describe it. She is the cleverest young woman of my acquaintance, though several of my sisters would take offense at that statement. She is kind, but she is also perceptive. Aloud, she can almost seem timid, but from reading her letters over the years, it is clear she sees the world more clearly than most of us, myself included.”
By the end of his impromptu speech, Nikolaos was smiling widely. “Ah, you are young and have already found your one true love. The gods must smile upon you.”
Colin shook his head in confusion. “I apologize, Nikolaos. Perhaps something was lost in translation between my native tongue and yours. Penelope is my friend, not my wife nor my fiancée.”
Nikolaos scoffed, a knowing look on his face, even as he let the matter drop.
The Moirai paused in their spinning and weaving as they listened. Colin Bridgerton’s fate, such as it was, had already been spun. But fate was more complex than the philosophers and theologians could comprehend.
The idea that fate was bound up with time was widely known. Indeed, in the understanding of some ancient Greeks, the Moirai themselves were the daughters of one of the goddesses of time and inevitability. But even that was not entirely true. It made it sound as if time and fate were separate, as if there was any way to consider one without the other. But what was time other than fate come into being?
They also assumed that there was only one time, one reality, one truth.
Fate was multifaceted, true in many ways, all at the same time. Some were inevitable. Some were not. Some were true in one timeline and not others.
For Colin Bridgerton, it was already woven, already true, inescapable that there was no time and no reality in which he would not love Penelope Featherington, and she him. In fact, she would always love him from the moment they met.
The other details, however, were mutable. In three timelines, their mutual love was realized—and twice consummated—when Penelope Featherington was merely five and ten while taking shelter in an abandoned hut from a rainstorm the Fates themselves had foreordained. In one of those timelines, it led to the birth of their first child well over a decade before some of the others. In yet another timeline, Colin Bridgerton was about to enter his fifth decade of life before he understood the central truth of his very being.
In all the timelines, they found each other. In every reality, they loved fiercely until the end of their days. In every existence, they were the best of friends and the most passionate of lovers.
But in this reality, the one the Moirai could see and hear at this moment—if you could call it that even as they were beyond infinity—Colin Bridgerton wandered into their olive grove and claimed Penelope Featherington as a mere friend. He would learn, they knew, but it would take time, such as it was.
Maybe, that would have been all there was to it, a momentary listening in an eternity of spinning and weaving and trimming. But eternity was a very long time. Longer and broader than the human mind could comprehend. Unfortunately, for the Moirai, it could also be very, very boring.
Every so often, every few human centuries, their boredom led them to uncharacteristic mischief.
They had a couple powers they rarely used, of which the gods, goddesses, heavenly host, and primordial deities could only dream.
The Moirai could create new timelines, and they could move humans—and the gods themselves—between them.
It was this power, and this boredom, that led the Moirai to begin to move Colin Bridgerton and Penelope Featherington around within their fated realities. In doing this, sometimes the Fates altered the attached destinies of their son Elliot, or the maid Rae. Some relationships shift between immutability and changeability, depending on factors that were hard to predict.
All at once at the same time they could see the places where the timelines divided one from another. There was the run through the foreordained rainstorm where Colin Bridgerton turned left, and another where he turned right, and everything changed. There was one timeline where they did not meet until Penelope Featherington was nearly seven and ten, and yet another that was even later, and many where they met as younger children, and that meeting and its timing shaped what was to come.
The choices that separated some of the timelines were not always the obvious ones, such as when to ask for a kiss or whether or not to be brave. Some of the choices were innocuous, but they changed everything nonetheless.
The Moirai watched it all.
Then, they began to move the pieces from one timeline to another. Forward and back. Backward and forward and back again.
All at once, at the same time, they saw Colin Bridgerton declare his love for Penelope Bridgerton in a myriad of ways.
Whether it was nearly whispered in an empty house
“I will always stand up for you. Because I love you, Pen.”
or shouted in a drawing room
“Do you think I do not love you? You, Pen. You who are right here in front of me.”
or written in a letter
And so, Penelope, there is nothing more to say but that I love you. I have loved you forever, and I will love you forevermore. I love your wit and cleverness. I love your bravery and stubbornness. I love your kindness and loyalty. And yes, I love your hair, your skin, your body. I love how your lips feel against mine, but I also love how those same lips spill out words that make me smile, think, laugh, and learn. You are magnificent, inside and out.
or standing in an abandoned cottage
“I love you. I never want to be apart from you. I want to discuss books with you for the rest of our lives. I want to walk in the sun with you, and if I must walk in the rain, I want it to be beside you. I want the feel of your hand in mine, and the way your belief in me warms my soul. Lord, help me, but I do not want that to be the only time I undress you because there is so much more I wish to discover of the parts of you I have barely let myself dream about. I love you, Pen. I do not think there is a time in which I have not.”
or printed in a book
To Pen—the girl with the devilishly yellow head covering, who was worth falling for, then and now. Thank you for being my wife, my compass, and my home. I love you more than you know and for all time.
or spoken by way of explanation
“I love you, Penelope. I am in love with you. I do not know when I fell in love, but maybe it was the day we met. But you are the only thing that makes all of this bearable. But I do not love you out of duty or because you are my wife or purely due to circumstance. You are my light, Pen. You are what I look to when I need to see the world. You show me myself, more clearly than a mirror…Your brilliance has shone into the darkest corners of my loneliness and terror from when we were children until now. I love you, Penelope. I kissed you because I am in love with you.”
or declaimed from a balcony
“Therefore, with all of you here as my witnesses, I would like to say—Penelope—I love you. I adore you. I worship the ground you walk upon.”
or murmured in bed
“I meant what I said, Pen. I have always loved you.”
or even in ways that defied time
“I love you with my past, and I love you for my future.”
and recognized the tricks of fate and time
I love you more than you know and for all time, in every time, no matter what fate may bring.
and stating the truth that Moirai had always known,
“There is no version of me who will not fall in love with you, Penelope. Because I am Colin. Loving you is who I am.”
not once but time after time.
“I can do nothing apart from loving you. It is who I am. Evidently, over and over, I will always fall in love with you. There is no time and no reality in which I do not love you. I am sure of it.”
The Moirai heard it all.
They were not angry with Colin Bridgerton. They were too impassable for that. They were not doing this as a punishment or a reward. Playfulness is also too human an emotion, but it is perhaps the best word for actions taken for amusement to stave off the eternal and infinite boredom.
The Fates were aware, of course, of Colin Bridgerton’s pain. The grief for his lost lives and children often threatened to overwhelm him, even as he found love over and over again with the one whom his soul loved.
Because they were immutable, it was not compassion that led the Moirai to stop their game. After all, they could feel no passion, either with or for anyone or anything. But there was only so much heartbreak two souls could bear, and even the Fates were not blind to it. So eventually, after moving Colin Bridgerton and Penelope Featherington backward and forward, back and forth, swapping and swapping back, they turned to each other and said, “Enough.”
The Moirai had now seen two of the true constants of the universe. There was no version of Penelope Featherington who would not love Colin Bridgerton with her whole heart from the day of their meeting. And there was no version of Colin Bridgerton who would not come to love each and every version of Penelope Featherington with all his soul.
These were facts. They were simply true. In all times. In all realities. It was eternal and infinite, the stuff of human poets but far beyond human comprehension.
Colin Bridgerton and Penelope Featherington were bound body, heart, and soul. Forever and ever, again and again.