The Sixth Life of Medusa

52. The Last Titan

Someone was handling her body gently, but the dizziness wouldn't let Medusa make sense of her environment or figure out where she was. They laid her on a cool stone surface and swept her hair from her face to feel her forehead.

She vaguely noticed how hard she was gritting her teeth. Despite the beads, the pain was climbing in leaps. An awful taste spread in her mouth, like blood and ash.

They pushed up her tunic and briskly unclipped the bandages. A drawn-out groan escaped as they pulled apart the bandages.

They tsk-tsked. "Bear with me, child."

"Clotho?" Medusa blinked languidly as she strained to make out the shadowy shape above her, but her sight remained stubbornly blurry. Even in her weakened state, she moved to push her hands away. "...no," she slurred.

"Rage at me all you want, but stay awake." She patted Medusa's shoulder before resuming her ministration.

"You..." Medusa wheezed. She forced the words out with great effort. "You left me."

Clotho's hands stilled, but only for a second. "Hold on and hate me after you're fine."

Medusa clutched those words and gritted through the pain as needle after needle was pulled from the wound. There was the vague sense of the wound getting cleaned and stitched; after a harrowing stretch of time, the pain ebbed away, and her vision finally cleared up.

The sky was a pale blue that intermittently warped into colourful swirls like the surface of a soap bubble.

"They saw my disguise fail," she whispered. "If you knew it would fail before so many eyes, why raise my confidence in your methods?"

A heavy pause. The sound of her staff tapping stone ground. Her clothes ruffled as she pushed to her feet. Medusa still wouldn't directly look at her.

"Well, in my defence, I thought you'd get here sooner," she said. "And Atropos doing what she did with that boy ruined my calculations. I had to guard this place."

Medusa finally looked at the Moirai. She appeared much the same as the day they parted—embroidered cloak draped from slender shoulders, slim staff gripped in her right hand—but now a bobbing spool of golden thread hovered at her side. When Medusa glanced down at her wound, she realised the neat stitching had been done with that same thread.

"You could have died no matter the methods they used." A frown formed on her brow. "A possibility I didn't foresee." She began muttering in theos tongue, appearing caught in thought.

Medusa faced the sky again. Whatever treatment Clotho offered worked wonders. The pain had vanished, her mind was clearer than it had been in weeks, and she was beginning to sense aether. The air was dense with it to the point of feeling it like static against her skin.

She took in the rest of the place. There were no trees despite the illusion she had seen outside; instead, it was a stretch of stone ground as far as her eyes could see until she caught a shadow at the edge of her vision.

Craning her neck, she first gawked, then pushed to her feet in a disbelieving daze. "This...how?"

Clotho said something, but she could hear nothing past the ringing in her ears.

His kneeling form was a hill before her, but he was made of stone like the rest.

"How?"

He said I should find him, that he's alive. He said he's alive... or did he? Medusa began to doubt her sanity. "What's happening?"

"Seems different from the rest, huh?" Clotho said as she observed the statue as well. "When I found you on that cliff, another existence vaguely registered in my consciousness. Similar to yours but with the faintest flare. I followed their thread here and remembered... many things."