CHAPTER 103: FINDING CLUES (PART 2)

Aphrodite didn’t wait.

The book still clutched to her chest, she left the library behind like it were burning, sandals skimming across the marble as she moved with purpose through Olympus. The grand halls of the divine realm, usually a comfort, now felt eerie — almost foreign. Columns she’d known for millennia, fountains she’d bathed in after battles or festivals, all of it felt like part of a memory that was only mostly true.

If someone had rewritten the past... what else might they have touched?

Her destination was a narrow temple on the far edge of Olympus, set apart from the majesty and celebration of the main courts. It was woven with threads of gold and starlight, hidden to most, and only visited when a god needed to ask the impossible.

It was the Temple of the Moirai — the Fates.

But as she approached the silken veils that guarded the entrance, Aphrodite’s steps slowed. The air was still. Too still. There was no whisper of thread being spun. No sound of scissors slicing. No presence at all.

Her heart sank but she entered anyway.

The interior was empty. The loom — usually enormous, its threads glowing with the lives of mortals and gods alike — stood still. Cobwebs formed delicate bridges between its wooden beams. The sacred spindle lay on the ground, dusty, unused.

"No..." she breathed.

Clotho. Lachesis. Atropos. Gone.

Not dead — gods didn’t die so easily. But missing. Erased? Hidden?

Whatever had rewritten the books had come here first.

She took a slow step forward, scanning every inch of the temple. That was when she noticed it — the only thing not covered in dust. A single thread, black as void, stretched across the room. It wasn’t part of the loom. It had been left deliberately, pinned by a dagger to the wall.

A message.

Aphrodite pulled the dagger free and unfurled the thread. It shimmered, revealing symbols in divine script — the kind only born gods could read.

"Not forgotten. Not gone. Cut, but not broken. Time loops. Time folds. Seek the center."

That was all.

She clenched her jaw. A riddle. Typical of the Fates. But it was hope. They had not been unmade. Someone had intervened — perhaps protected them, hidden them from the force that was reshaping the divine history.

She pocketed the thread and stepped out into the golden light of Olympus, now suddenly colder than before.

"Seek the center..." she murmured. But what was the center?

Time... folding? She thought of the library again. Those books weren’t records of a possible future. They were memories from a future that had already happened — and been undone.

Could Olympus have been reset? Could the world itself have been rolled back?

Her thoughts snapped back to Akhon. The strange words he had once spoken. The way his eyes seemed... older than they should have been. His hesitation around people he should have known intimately. His lack of memory wasn’t simple amnesia — it was erasure.

Aphrodite’s pace quickened again. She had one more place to visit before involving anyone else. If she was wrong, she’d make a fool of herself before the court of gods. But if she was right...

Then Olympus was built on a lie.

She descended from the palace’s upper tiers and made her way toward the Cave of Echoes, a deep rift below the surface of Olympus. It was here that the echoes of divine truth still sometimes whispered — a remnant of the earliest days of the pantheon, when Chaos still shaped the bones of reality.

Very few gods ever came here.

As she stepped into the cool, shadowy cave, Aphrodite lit a small orb of pinkish light between her fingers. The cave stretched like a mouth into the mountain. She walked in silence, each step echoing off the stone.

Finally, at the heart of the cave, she found the mirror pool. A surface of still black water, so reflective it showed the soul — not the face.

She knelt beside it and stared in.

Her own eyes looked back... and behind them, memories.

Visions surged.

A flash — Akhon, not in Olympus robes, but in dark armor, shouting something in a language that didn’t exist anymore.

Another — a battlefield. A titan — no, a shadow — crumbling before him.

Another — the Hesperides crying as he left through a gate of light.

She gasped, breaking the connection. Her heart raced. Her hands trembled.

He had lived a different life.

And Olympus had been reset to erase it.

She stood, stunned. She wasn’t just remembering prophecy. She was remembering history that should no longer exist.

And that meant... her memories were returning too.

Even if just in fragments.

"Akhon..." she whispered, realization crashing into her. "You’re the key. You’re the center."

The words of the Fates came back to her: Seek the center.

Someone had rewritten time.

But Akhon had been its anchor. Maybe not by choice. Maybe he had been used.

And now he was walking Olympus, a god without a past, surrounded by friends who did not know they had once fought beside him, laughed with him, perhaps even loved him.

Aphrodite placed a hand over her chest.

She had to find the truth — all of it. Before whoever did this noticed her awakening too.

---

Aphrodite didn’t waste time.

The moment she left the Cave of Echoes, her feet carried her with divine urgency, wind curling around her robes as she raced toward the eastern cliffs of Olympus — toward a place so secret that even most gods believed it to be a myth.

She didn’t care if anyone saw her now. Let them whisper, let them raise eyebrows. What she’d seen in the mirror pool couldn’t be ignored. If she waited, the chance might vanish. The Fates were the only ones who could confirm the truth she had glimpsed — the only ones who might know who rewrote time itself.

The cliffs came into view. Jagged white stone jutting over the edge of the world, where stars clung to the horizon like dew. There, just past a twisted olive tree older than Poseidon’s throne, should be a narrow archway carved into the rock — an entrance only visible to gods who had walked between life and death.

She stepped forward, whispering the incantation she had learned long ago.

"By thread, by scissor, by song unheard... let the way to the Loom be shown."

Silence.

Nothing shimmered.

No hidden door.

She tried again, louder this time. "Let the path open! I seek the Moirai!"

Still nothing.

The cliff face remained solid and smooth. Not a trace of an entrance. Not even the old faded chisel marks that once hinted at a doorway.

Aphrodite’s breath hitched.

"No... this was here. I know it was."

She pressed her hand to the rock, willing it to dissolve, to yield, to show the passage that once led to the Fates’ true sanctum — the place behind the Temple, behind the masks. Not the ceremonial chamber others saw, but the source. The Chamber of Threads.

Only void answered her touch.

She began to circle, hands moving across the stone. Her fingertips brushed every inch, searching for even the faintest glyph, the softest hum of divine magic.

Nothing.

It was as if the place had never existed.

"No," she said under her breath. "No, no, no. You were real. I was here."

She remembered it clearly now. The cold stone. The infinite threads. The Fates whispering truths no one else dared speak aloud. She had once come here after the fall of a mortal king she’d loved in secret. She had asked how much was fate... and how much was cruelty.

She’d left with no answer, only more questions.

But this?

This was erasure.

Not just hidden — unmade.

She staggered back a step, wind brushing her hair from her face. For the first time in centuries, she felt a chill that didn’t belong in Olympus. Not a breeze — but the hollow sensation of being watched by something far beyond the pantheon.

Something older.

Aphrodite clutched the black thread she’d taken from the Temple of the Moirai. It now seemed to hum faintly in her palm, pulsing once, then dimming.

They had left it for someone.

Had they known the doorway would vanish?

Had they foreseen this, too?

"Why...?" she whispered. "Why would anyone want to erase you?"

And then it hit her.

It wasn’t about the Fates. It was about control.

Erase the weavers, and no one questioned the new design. Remove the old threads, and there’s no one left to say the tapestry is false.

The past becomes whatever the new gods want it to be while the future becomes a cage.

She sat down on the edge of the cliff, stunned, heart pounding in her chest. Somewhere far below, the mortal world glittered — unaware that their entire history might have been tampered with.

Troy hadn’t fallen. The Age of Heroes hadn’t even begun. And yet... she remembered both.

She remembered mourning Hector. She remembered blessing Paris. She remembered rage and sorrow and gods falling in love with mortals.

But that war had not happened yet.

So how did she remember it?

Something had gone terribly wrong with time.

And Akhon... he was at the center. Not just of Olympus now, but of this impossibility.

He might be the key to restoring the broken order.

Or the anchor keeping this false one in place.

Aphrodite looked to the sky, the stars above Olympus glittering like cold fire.

"What did they do to you, Akhon?" she murmured.

The sound of distant thunder rolled across the heavens. Not from a storm — from deep magic. From unrest. The kind that warned the gods when things were shifting too far.

She stood again. This wasn’t over. The thread she held was proof.

Even erased, the Fates had left clues.

And she would find them.

Even if it meant breaking into the sealed parts of Olympus.

Even if it meant confronting gods who claimed they never rewrote the past.

She would not let their story — her story — be replaced by someone else’s lie.

As she turned away from the cliff, the wind blew hard behind her, lifting her hair and sending it fluttering like a banner.

And though the entrance remained gone, the wall behind her pulsed once — faintly — almost like a heartbeat.

Something was still watching.

And it knew she was remembering.