story: thread of life

I was bored and had a random idea, so here’s a thing! It’s basically about . . . doll-people who are living and have emotions and stuff. I don’t really know. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with mythology, although the title makes it seem like it does. Anyway, here you go!

—

She reached for the thread coiled in the center of his palm. It was an assortment of different colors, but the first one was white, from the Times Before.

The boy opened his hand a little more, just for her, making the hole that the thread came out of more visible. The girl held the thread gently, then pulled at it, and it stretched out of his palm with ease. At first it looked like a compressed rainbow, every shade squished into another, but when she observed it more closely, the colors were arranged in beautiful and unpredictable patterns.

The first color after the white was gold, she saw, for happiness. Though the color had never shown up on her own thread, she knew what it meant. Then the gold faded into a dark dark blue, for melancholy — this, too, was a feeling she didn’t understand. She pulled out more, and then there was deep red, for an anger she’d never known, but this color was the rarest on the boy’s thread, dissolving quickly into the light-green of forgiveness.

She could feel the memories of his life pulsing through the frail thread, wondrous and tragic all at once. She sensed them all, every feeling so unfamiliar but so addicting. She knew, faintly, that the boy was explaining each part of his life to her, but she wasn’t listening. She didn’t need to hear any of it, because she could feel it so clearly.

She pulled out more thread.

The colors flashed past, indiscernible from one another, and she pulled more, more, more. The boy watched as she did so, though a panic rose in his expression the longer she went on.

And suddenly . . . suddenly the thread was just gray. For the unlived portion of the boy’s life.

His mouth opened in a gasp, his big button eyes wide. His heavy breaths stopped and silence fell in that house like bricks. But the girl knew he was still living, for now, while the rest of the thread still remained inside him. He was still watching as she pulled that life out of him.

His fingers struggled to curl around the hole in his palm, tried to save himself from the girl’s cruel curiosity. But he could not, weakened because his life thread was under someone else’s control. The girl was creating a void inside of him.

He could still feel, could still understand what was going on. But he could not react. He could not put his emotions into the thread that was being yanked out of him, and so they churned inside of him, ridding him of all ability and sense.

“Stop,” he whispered hoarsely, and the girl looked at him, but said nothing.

And then the thread ended. It stuck in his palm, for a moment, but the girl pulled harder, and then it was free. A glittering, colorful mist came out from the other end of the thread, pouring out, and soon the thread had transformed entirely into the mist.

The boy tried to speak, and it seemed to work, for a moment, though he didn’t know what he’d managed to say. And — and then nothing. Because then he was dead.

The girl reached for her own thread, ignoring that she had killed the boy. She grabbed its pale beginning and stretched it out of her palm until she reached the darkness of her evil. There was no other color. Just the white of the Times Before, and the black of her own After. Her memories pulsed in this thread, as the boy’s had done in his, but she would not let hers escape, no matter what it took.

So she stretched it into the remaining mist left from the boy’s life. Her thread took its colors and its memories, and her mouth parted in a silent gasp with the beauty of it.

And when the colors had settled . . . she felt so very alive for the first time.