Nikolas Psofios was a broken man with a shattered dream. Once tall and strong, he was now hunched with pain and hollowed out by hunger. His hair was buried beneath a layer of grease, ash, and dirt; his eyes to dry to weep. Once he was the young eligible bachelor of his fishing village, spending his days on the sea and his nights ashore eyeing the girls and wondering which to take for his wife. Now plague, famine, and the Sea People had reduced all of that to ash and ruins. Nikolas hadn't the strength, tools, or usable wood to arrange even a meager pyre for the last of his fellow villagers. A part of him wanted to simply leap from the cliff into the sea, to pass quickly into the land of the dead instead of facing death by starvation. Another part of him was as stubborn as that same cliff, adamant in its refusal to fall to the waves and time, at least for now.

Nikolas sat in the ashes and watched the sun set low over distant islands. He wallowed in despair and clutched his empty stomach. The chill sea breeze brought to mind one old sea story, the cave that even the Gods feared to tread in. It was an old story, passed from lips to ears and memory to memory down the generations. In the heart of the northern mountains, where the fiery blood of the earth seeps and smokes, there is a cave. It is one of many, fang-mouthed by black rocks of frozen fire, unique in that it does not stink of soiled eggs and rotting meat. For in it dwells The Trio of beings that not even the gods can escape: The Mother, The Maiden, and the Crone. In their nimble fingers they wove the beginning, the path, and the ending of each life tethered to the world. They had seen the birth of Gods and Titans and spun their endings into the tangled threads of fate.

They also had the power to change the fate of any being willing to visit them and pay the price. No thread could simply be cut away and replaced, each had to be but hey could be spliced to a new thread or dyed a new shade. Nikolas sighed. His choices were to throw himself to the sea and hope that the underworld was not as harsh as the world of the living, pray to the Gods for salvation, or try and find the cave of the Trio.

Nikolas coughed weakly. It was no choice at all. He had fled the Sea Peoples instead of dying in honorable battle so the honorable portions of the underworld were denied to him, leaving only the plague-lands of the cowards or the barren fields of the dishonorable. He had nothing to offer to the Gods should he even manage to gather their attention. At best they would grant him a swift death. At worst they could make his time left alive an endless torment. The northern mountains it would have to be. Nikolas coughed again and tasted the copper tang of blood at the back of his throat. If nothing else he could make an offering of himself into the molten blood of the world instead of the heartless seas.

“He has chosen to come.”

“You knew this would already come to be granddaughter. You spun it yourself, did you not?”

“It is not an absolute grandmother.” As you should well know. “Mother knows where each begins, and you where each ends, but I must knot and weave them together: in between there are only paths and choices.”

“As we agreed daughter, despite how mother thinks of these things. We chose to know our successors instead of ourselves, thus we are blind to each other. Have you decided what to offer?”

“You first grandmother”

“Very well. The Scrolls. The Gods of many peoples could use a willing champion; It has been an age since they had one.”

“A fine choice. The Dice I think. If he wishes to change his luck, then let luck guide his fate. What have you chosen mother?”

“The Wheel. It has been an age indeed, though man will not remember it; the blood of monsters flowing as thickly as the blood of man. Both should have their chance as well as he does.”