2001, Yggdrasil, Uror Branch

It looked like any old witch finger: the excess ashy skin sagged from an emaciated skeletal rod in curtain flaps of vellum, interrupted by a swollen knob of a joint. Starting at the callused knuckle, florescent blue veins popped out of the translucent skin and twisted their tendrils along the length of the wrinkly finger, reaching tenaciously towards the sharpened tip of a long, jaundiced talon. The slight scent of rotting corpse — her very own fetid cocktail of eau de toilette — emanated from the bone marrow.

Sky had studied her mother's finger, the one so good at delivering punishment, with a curious and horrified wonder. As a young girl, she had learned to avoid her mother at all costs, pitying the object of her fleeting attentions. Even now, hiding in the shadows of her mother's tree house as an adult, Sky wanted to be subsumed into the walls. She feared for the worlds at her mother's fingertips, the ones that would be subject to the same warped sense of justice that had once admonished her.

Sky had scars, both physical and psychological, proving that one flick from the fickle finger of Fate packed one hell of a wallop. No, her mother wasn't any old witch: she was the first and the most powerful witch that ever was or would be. Her mother was the Norn, Uror. Some called her the origin of Fate, others a Wyrd, others still, a Moirai, some a goddess and some a hag. Whatever else she was, Sky's mother was one hell of a witch with a capitol B. Next to her, Sky was nothing more than a fly on the wall, her powers paling in comparison.

Uror's fingerprints were all over every major event that had occurred since the dawn of days. To Sky's embarrassment, her mother used to joke that it took two to Big Bang. She'd also bragged about her involvement in Lucifer's downfall and the devastating war and bloody extermination of the Lepidoptera race at the hands of the violent Unicorns; her doing as well. Mayhem was her favourite past time. The lives of mortals meant nothing to Sky's sociopathic mother.

So, when Sky, on a mission to renegotiate the terms of her curse, observed her mother's abnormally chipper demeanor from her vantage point by the doorway, it chilled her to the bone.

There was a slight straightening of Uror's crippled hunch, a shiny gleam to her generally lacklustre white locks, and a miraculous disappearance of the sallow gullies and deep ravines in her weathered face. It appeared that overnight she had aged backwards – from a woman who looked each and every day of her ninety-eight trillion into a youthful hag with vigour and vim reminiscent of a botoxed billion-and-thirteen-year-old.

Sky noted that her mother was hobbling impatiently around her stone tower, distracted. Her lofty turret room of the treehouse, currently projecting her very own citadel, was usually surrounded by whatever pervaded her mercurial imagination: the Milky Way, rubber ducks, or a cloudy heaven painted by Raphael himself. This day, however, the room was submerged in an inky black void, lit solely by the blue glare from her massive televising screen.

Fate hadn't noticed the presence of her daughter at the doorway, watching her with avid golden eyes. Most of the time, Uror's witchy alarm usually went off by the time Sky reached the roots of the Yggdrisil tree, the tree of life, as if she had some sort of tracking system alerting her to her spawn's whereabouts at all times.

Stranger still, her mother's left eyeball was not in its eye socket. This by itself wasn't unusual - it tended to pop out. But, never before had she been caught twirling her eyeball around by the severed optical nerve and ping-ponging it back and forth as if she were playing paddle-ball.

Her blind eye was her tool for divining all of the possible trajectories and outcomes that could occur after one of her alterations: she could make a volcano erupt or send a bird flying into the propellers of a plane, she could give someone cancer or snuff a life just because. She could not, however, affect free will or how mortals might react to her catastrophes. Fate could only guess what would unfold after her divine intervention.

But, with a finite set of possibilities she could convince her magical colleagues to gamble over the outcome and reactions of those down below. Uror's only loves other than betting and chaos were mystical favours and the realest reality telly of all: actual reality. She'd serve snacks, Pegasus wings, candied corblecub, and perhaps some cobbled dwarf, and they'd bet as lives ended, heartbreak occurred, and worlds collided.

It was her mother's prophetic eyeball that allowed Uror to become the bookie of the gods, generating all of her wealth, disposable income and magical IOUs. Callous behaviour with her eye of divinity — personal ping pong with her second most precious body part (the first being her aforementioned witch finger) — was reason for alarm.

Sky watched as her mother's mouth turned upward at the corners. She parted her bloodstained lips just enough to let a devious cackle reverberate through the gaps between nubbin teeth that weren't blocked by decaying dwarf morsel. Sky knew, the way she knew things others never would, that her mother hadn't smiled the day she had been born. She hadn't smiled for millennia and generally only did so when she was planning something particularly malevolent.

She pulled Oogle Maps Universe up on her sixteen-by-six-foot touch screen (the Old Crone always made a distinct point to keep up with The Times so as not to become superfluous) — she had given up yarn and spindles years ago in favour of sewing machines, cellphones and computers. Now "hanging up on someone mid call" was her favourite mystical metaphor for when she prematurely ended a life.

She gave her index finger a test waggle and moved to touch an icon of a virtual twin world on her monitor. The symbol of a double world helix was unmistakeable: it was no other than Earth Htrae. Sky, understanding what her mother intended, flew across the room, her feet carrying her towards a tackle.

Her mother, unlike the octotrilarian she appeared to be, pivoted swiftly and pointed her finger towards her beautiful daughter, freezing her in her tracks. Sky's shiny long black hair and the down of her feathered gray Valkyrie wings were all that swayed as her dancer's body stood rigid in a running pose.

"Ah, yes. You're here, Skuld. I was so hoping you would see this."

In the cage of Sky's body, her eyes still moved and saw and pled. But if her mother wanted a war to end all wars, Sky knew she was too late to stop the first domino from falling.

      "Please," she wanted to beg, but the words were trapped at the base of her larynx, dying before they even hit her tongue.

      "I will continue to teach you this lesson until you learn, my girl," her mother said, pushing the words out like a creaking hinge. As she turned back to survey Sky, the weakness and pity in her daughter's honey-hued eyes only fueled a low sizzling anger in her own gut. "This will be you one day, you'll see. You'll stop loving them. I'll make you suffer until then, if I must." She tsked as she used a yellow nail to clean out what was stuck between her teeth before continuing. "Such an embarrassment for a daughter of Wyrd. So like your father."

      The father she knew nothing about.

Sky's hands wiggled and she concentrated on melting the spell that held her throat in a vice grip.

"Never...be ...like you," she spat out. And whether it was due to her unknown father's blood searing in her veins or her mother's callous behaviour towards lesser beings, Sky really and truly believed it with her whole heart.

Her mother cackled as she clicked on a small icon of a man. A guttural hum creaking from the witch's abdomen, forming words to an ancient but altered hymn. "Double, double toil and trouble; Avatar burn, and life be rubble," she chanted as she dragged the likeness of a leader of men, a king, over to the digital garbage can.

"No!" Sky screamed. But it was too late. Uror scowled at her daughter.

Sky finally managed to shatter her mother's freeze spell and fell to her knees. Knowing what was to come, the pain ricocheted through her body. Her curse, it seemed, would not be lifted. Not until there was nothing left of them and nothing left of her, but a broken heart.

Standing, Skuld held her emotions in check, trying to breath despite the lump obstructing her throat. Turning her back on her mother, she walked out. Tears leaked from her ducts.

"You can't save them now," her mother yelled to her retreating back.

"Watch me," she whispered into the air, knowing her mother would hear. The Witch would watch her, at the edge of her seat, as Sky intervened again to keep the destruction her mother intended to cause at bay. Like many of the gods and goddesses, her mother was heartless and cared little for anything outside of herself, but Sky had always hoped that one day her mother might display some sort of empathy for her own daughter. A foolish wish.

Sky knew Earth Htrae was about to be taught a lesson by Fate's finger, as her mother would say, "not the measly middle, but the far more perilous pointer." And though it wasn't her fault, she couldn't help but feel like it was. And eventually, it was inevitable that Sky would stumble and her mother would get her way.

Sky refused to think about the future or about how much she was going to lose, how much this was bound to hurt -- again. She pushed it out of her head as she started down the wooden steps, hewn out of the tree in the heavens.

Sky had a battle to prepare for and a sacrifice to make.

***

So Sky may have some mommy issues. If you enjoyed the chapter, please vote! It'll encourage me to keep posting on Wattpad. Thank you!