Alexandria Blaelock, author

I have been fascinated by the Fates since I was a child.

My first glimpse of them was watching the Sunday Night Movie on TV.

When cable didn’t exist, and that was still a thing.

It was in my Australian childhood home, with the matching dark green and orange floral carpet and curtains – who does that these days?

And the burgundy three-piece lounge suite that came from England with us. A rocking arm chair each for Mum and Dad, and a three-seater couch nominally for me and my brother, though we were lying on the floor inches from the wood encased television screen.

Convenient when Mum or Dad wanted to change the channels, because remotes didn’t exist in those days either.

A fire was blazing in the open fire place, which puts it sometime between 1973 and 1979.

I think the movie was a Ray Harryhausen film, mainly because it used “Dynamation,” the stop motion photography technique he pioneered.

And I’m pretty sure it was one of the ones with skeleton warriors, but I’ve never checked.

Anyhow, Atropos brandished an enormous pair of scissors and cut some guy’s thread.

Or at least that’s how I remember it, who knows exactly how it was, (except someone who remembers that movie better than me).

I remember, the guy seemed pretty worried about it, and I was impressed by her power. Though at the time, I didn’t understand what it was she had.

Sometimes I think I’d like to track down the movie and watch it again, but seeing it again would probably reduce her mystique for me.

The Fates are sister deities, incarnations of life and destiny, who control of fates of gods and mortals. In the Greek mythology they are known as the Moirai, and their names are:

•  Clotho (the Spinner) who makes the thread. She’s generally represented wearing red, and carrying a spindle and distaff. Or in more modern works, the Book of Life.
• Lachesis (the Alotter) who measures the thread. She dresses in black and carries a measuring staff.
• Atropos (the Inflexible) who determines the method of death and cuts the thread. She wears white and carries the shears. (As I said, enormous shears).

The fates also appear as the Parcae in Roman mythology, and there are corresponding myths of female destiny controlling deities in both Europe and Asia.

In some traditions, they merged to become a triple goddess who shows only one face at any given time. In this context, Clotho is the maiden, Lachesis the mother, and Atropos the crone.

Or more literally, the past, the present, and the future.

In 2011, I watched a hilarious New Zealand fantasy show called The Almighty Johnsons, featuring Norse gods incarnating in Auckland, and it started me thinking about the Fates might be doing now.

So not much in the way of tapestry reading these days – perhaps they’re writers – write, edit and publish? Or more likely, consign to the eternal filing cabinet of doom.

By the time I got to Fate in Your Hands, they’d become bookshop owners. One of those shops you find down backstreets and alleyways – here today, gone tomorrow.

Where you can always find something to read because it contains every single story that ever has or will be written.

And because I’m the kind of person who wonders what characters are up to when you close the covers, imagining they down tools and enjoy a couple of quiet beers at the local pub. Or maybe tea and cake for the heroines, badmouthing the hero’s personal hygiene…

And once the story is over? Do they go home and put their fluffy slippered feet up and rest until the next person opens the book?

They updated their names before I wrote Fate in Your Hands, and since then, they’ve been busy.

They’ve expanded their purview to parallel universes, got deeper in their engagement with humans, and started looking to spend more time apart.

• First, Claudia questions whether she wants to give it all up.
• Then Deirdre begs them to change the circumstances of her fate.
• And just for fun, I’ve included Fate in Your Hands, the story that started it all; in which Erik grapples with returning to Norway to complete his military service.
• The Laura potentially meets the god of her dreams.
• Marguerite escapes a serial killer and is reunited with her first love.
• Finally. Agatha challenges Susan to change her unfortunate fate.

So, grab yourself appropriate beverage, sit back and put your fluffy slippered feet up, and enjoy the collection.

Alexandria Blaelock
Melbourne, Australia
September 2021