Binding Threads: A Short Story ✔️

I

Like any other creation of threadwork, one's life was also spun from thread—omnipresent but largely unseen. At birth, only a set amount of string was gifted by the Norns—powerful, divine thread workers. What the three mistresses of fate did not design was up to one's will to manipulate. Creation was not the sole domain of the divine.

An abandoned child, familiar with the teeth of hunger and cold, continued the harsh, simple pattern that their life had followed thus far with what was available: a small, whittled stick of blackthorn, a spool of unevenly dyed red yarn, two small sets of fingers bitten ragged by hunger and cold.

The child worked with those three. Pulling and pulling, twisting and twisting, looping and looping. Building. Stitch by stitch.

"Come! The maidens are arriving!"

Villagers poured down the lantern-lit cobbled road toward the village center. The child finished working and joined the stream of traffic toward a crowd assembled inside of the town center. Anticipation of the annual ceremony thrummed in the air. A small body slipped through the crowd but not toward the festivities at the center of the town. Instead, the child ducked away to the east woods near the town center.

Veiled by the lacy screen of barren trees, the child slunk toward a gathering of maidens. They, adorned with decades worth of embroidery and intricate silver jewelry winking like distant stars, fussed over their clothes. When the child padded forward, they took notice of the strange child in the outskirts of the torch light and murmured amongst one another, wringing their hands. The child's eyes picked apart the gathering, looking for eyes shining in wary curiosity, for hands restless with persistent worry.

The girls regarded the child with suspicion and eyed the clothes unfit for winter, the silent tongue, and the watching eyes. Black. Not a shade lighter.

"Get on now, girl!" One of the maidens stamped at what seemed to them a bad omen. "You'll ruin the Binding!"

Tensions flamed high, threatening to thaw the frozen, tranquil woods around them. The child dodged each wave of their swatting and maintained a persistent, safe distance from them with lupine endurance. The child's presence made them anxious, more anxious than tonight would already make them. The child did nothing but watch them with expectance, this silent ominous figure clutching red and white knitted bundles in hand. It terrified young girls, who experienced the same routine day after day in their isolated villages, on the most important night of their lives.

However, some were drawn to this. Magisk had its terrifying allure, authentic or otherwise.

"What do you want?" a maiden trembled as the child singled her out from where she stood on the outskirts.

"A deal." The voice that came out was small and rough. The child held out a white pouch with a red symbol woven into the front. "Place three pine needles inside before the Binding for luck. Ten örtugar."

She stared down at the mysterious thing which stared right back.

A discreet whisper of metal into the child's hands preceded a performance of chasing off a pest to cover up her illicit transaction. The child went away at once, clutching the coins tight to the chest. Others' fear and curiosity were what the child lived on. Their fear of fleeting fortune and fickle fate. A curiosity over what may come of the unknown.

These vague conceptions of luck and fate were what everyone else lived by. What was the harm if they believed the child to be exactly that? As far as the child's patrons knew, they had done business with the fae—creatures capable of just as much benevolence as malevolence. For now, they'd cheated a little more luck than what they were dealt. A flicker of free will in the face of blinding fate.