Chapter 3: An Immortal's Mistresses

The sealed white room was my next memory. I guess that "waking" wasn't really what I did. It was more like ... like ... hell, kind of like one minute I was becoming fire and the next second my brain was processing the input of my senses' reaction to that oubliette. Yes, I was lying down, but I don't really remember "waking up." I simply was in that white, white room. My eye lids did not even have to open.

I can remember lying on the mattress for a while, staring blankly at the glaringly snowy ceiling. Since there was no change in anything in that room, trying to tell the passage of time was futile. Having said that, I don't think it was overlong before the women appeared.

"So, this is the one?" a pale skinned woman with platinum blonde hair, black eyebrows over flashing jade green eyes, a gorgeously haughty heart-shaped face, and a killer hourglass figure demanded irritably.

"Yup," replied a blue-eyed redhead with similar features, though leaner, less curvy.

The last of the three had a leanly muscled body, practically no chest, and darker skin with black hair and dark brown eyes. She looked down on me with a raised brow and said in a challenging tone, "Well?"

"Um, who are you?" was my brilliant reply to that challenge.

"We are your new bosses," she snapped back. The she added, "Klotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. The Goddesses of Fate."

Before that horrific day, if you had asked me to describe what I think the Fates would look like, I would probably have describe them as being something like how the haggish three witches are usually portrayed in Macbeth. These three stunning ladies dressed in black leather pants, screen-sprayed t-shirts featuring metal bands, and ragged jean jackets would have been the furthest from that vision as you could get. They looked like groupies of a '90's heavy metal group fresh from a concert.

"Did the transmogrification scramble his wits?" demanded the dark haired sister irritably.

The redhead shrugged and the blonde shook Her head.

"Where the hell is Ixandarius?" She spat angrily, eyes scanning the white expanse of the room as if he were hiding amongst the whiteness.

"Still cleaning up the mess, I imagine," the redhead replied with indifference even as Her gaze bored into me.

"He is sure he got de Boers? I want that perverted sleaze dead! Permanently dead!"

"He is terminated, sister," the blonde assured Her. "Now calm down."

"Don't tell me to calm down! This entire clusterfuck of a-"

Her tirade was cut short by an odd popping sound that announced the appearance of the swordsman. At the time I did not recognize him, only getting a nagging feeling that he was somehow familiar when his golden eyes looked down upon me with ineffable sadness.

"It is finished, Mistresses," the man said wearily, his face drawn with exhaustion.

"What the hell is wrong with his dolt, Ixandarius?" the black haired wom- er, goddess began Her rant, going on for several minutes about my apparent lack of seeming intelligence.

"Lady Atropos, please! Spare us your wrath, I beg!" Ixandarius pleaded, his large, muscular hands spread in supplication. "There are reasons for his state, Lady."

The dark goddess cut short Her inhalation to continue Her diatribe and a wary look came over Her face, exquisite in its fury. "What reasons?"

A sigh escaped Ixandarius' lips and he ran his fingers, crisscrossed with scars, through his glossy raven curls. "To start with, Xavier did about as much psychological damage as possible short of completing what I stopped," he said vaguely, his eyes darting towards my passively attentive and confused face. "Then there was the manner of his transmogrification. I was rushed and I think the gas main was nicked. For that, I apologize, Lady Lachesis," he said to the redheaded goddess, who nodded graciously with an understanding smile curving Her sculpted lips. "I know I was supposed to stop the slaughter, not add to it. Along with the regretfully high body count on this, his body required a massive amount of rebuilding, which was fortunate in one respect when you think about it. I took the opportunity to guide the healing energy into changing his appearance slightly, making his merging back into society easier on our end. On the down side, the whole event scrambled his wits a bit and just because he is conscious again does not mean the brain is done healing. That will take time and effort on his part as well as our aid."

The three goddesses grinned wickedly, showing that They truly were sisters as They flashed the same devilish smile at Ixandarius. "Not Our help, Darius," the blonde, Klotho, retorted. "He is your responsibility. You broke him, you fix him. And when you are done, you relocate him. Make sure it is not anywhere within two hundred leagues of that knotted, ever-branching tribe of his. Xavier managed to miss a few and I don't want him tempted. Try somewhere in the southeast, since we don't have anyone there and the demographic shift will make him less noticeable."

"Not Atlanta, though!" Lachesis warned with concern in Her sapphire eyes. "The guardian there is new and touchy about it. She would think we don't trust her and she still has issues about the last person we had down there. But I do want him close to her in case she should get into more trouble than she can handle."

Atropos scowled, turning Her liquid dark eyes on me with a narrowing gaze. "Try the Augusta, Chattanooga, or Tuscaloosa areas. He could get a job as a college professor in those cities if he feels the need to do something other than our little jobs," She suggested.

"Not Tuscaloosa, dummy! Remember that Tawiskaron pest migrated down there after his falling out with the Mohawk shaman? No anomalies have gone near the place since he set up shop in 1801," Klotho pointed out, rolling Her eyes and giggling.

"I can't send him to Chattanooga either," Ixandarius said wryly. "Koyote has been seen lurking around in Memphis and Knoxville and you know how he feels about my kind, in general, and me, in particular. As things stand, he has been making the Guardian of Nashville very nervous lately."

Atropos shrugged indifferently. "Fine, Augusta it is! See to it he knows the score before you let him loose on his own," the goddess ordered over Her shoulder as She turned away. "Now, if there is nothing else, this idiocy took us away from a Tyr concert." With that, the goddess vanished from the white room.

The other two goddesses smiled at me and turned away, also disappearing between steps as They walked towards where Atropos vanished.

A loud breath exploded from Ixandarius and he scrubbed his face briskly before turning toward me with a measuring look of his own.

"Well, I suppose that could have gone worse," he said philosophically with a plainly false cheeriness. A strained smile crept onto his face, almost rictus in nature. He inhaled and slowly released the breath, its cleansing nature plain as he relaxed visibly.

The golden orbs gazing at me were sad. I am not sure how I realized that; there were no lines betraying the emotion around eyes or mouth and there were no tears. There was just a sudden and ineffable sorrow hanging in the air and it was not coming from me. I was still a memory-less blank who was trying to piece meaning out of Their cryptic babble. Ixandarius watched me watch him for a minute or so before shaking his head.

"Still trying to piece it together, aren't you?" he inquired gently. A white, cushioned chair appeared at the foot of the bed, making me jump and scramble to huddle against the white, wooden headboard. "Easy, Tiernan, easy. As you might have guessed, Kansas went bye-bye."

My face must have been blank because he shrugged and grinned with a touch of embarrassment. "Sorry, could not resist the moment. Of the many bad things I see about modern life, entertainment is not one of them. Motion pictures make up for many ills of modern society and I am something of an addict," he told me, explaining the vague reference I would later remember came from The Matrix. "I would apologize for everything else ... maybe add a justification or three, as well, but you do not remember how you got here and therefore I have to start at the beginning.

"So, the beginning. I guess the beginning would be the three Ladies who just dumped you in my lap, though they had cause to do so. They are the Moirae, better known in modern times as the Fates. As Goddesses of ... well, Fate or Destiny, however you wish to put it, They are responsible for spinning the Thread of each being's life force, weaving it into the Tapestry of History, and then cutting the Thread when that person has reached the end of their allotted life as determined by the last of the three divine sisters. Klotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. They are now your Mistresses," he explained, his accented voice turning professorial and more than slightly pedantic.