A Faron & Bane Story
©2026 Misty Evans
This short story is for paid subscribers in my Magic Bites community and can be enjoyed over a cup of your favorite brew or before bedtime. ☕️💜 I add a new one every month.. Check out the Index if you’ve missed any.
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Fate is a tangled thing… and sometimes, it needs a little help.
In the shadows of Chicago, where magic hums beneath the pavement and creatures of myth walk among mortals, Faron—one of the three Fates—works to keep destiny on course.
But fate doesn’t always cooperate, and neither do the things that lurk in the dark.
With her enigmatic bodyguard, Bane by her side, Faron untangles cursed destinies, confronts creatures that defy fate, and deals with the consequences when someone tries to restring the threads of time.
Each month, dive into a new supernatural mystery filled with magic, danger, and a partnership forged in secrets.
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The thread looks like mine. That’s the first problem.
The second is that it’s moving.
Most threads run along a fairly predictable path—birth, choice, heartbreak, pizza, love, disaster, taxes, death. Some have knots. Some have holes. But they’re all unique, no matter how they rhyme.
This one is a near-perfect mirror of my fate-thread, glowing in the corner of my vision, pulled tight in a pattern I don’t recognize. It’s wrong in the way an almost-perfect forgery is wrong. If you didn’t live inside your own skin, you’d never notice.
I do.
“What are you doing?” Bane asks from the couch, where he’s pretending to read a book and very obviously watching me instead.
“Staring at myself,” I say.
“Is this a metaphor thing or a Fate thing?”
“Fate thing. Worse.”
He groans. “Fantastic.”
The mirror-thread quivers again, tugging toward the outskirts of the city, to a place that tastes like dust and locked doors and the sort of silence that isn’t empty so much as it is waiting.
I follow the pull with my senses, and an image rises in my mind of a red-brick structure with boarded windows and iron bars, its name half-scraped from a weathered sign.
I know that building, but I shouldn’t.
Bane watches the color drain from my face. “Do I even want to know?”
“No,” I say slowly, “But I have to go somewhere important.”
“Okay, and?”
“I dreamed of it. The night I became me.”
He sets the book aside. “Great. Hate that. Let’s go.”
The asylum squats on the edge of Chicago like the city got sick of itself and coughed this place out. It’s been sealed since the 1920s, according to the official records—abandoned, condemned, left to rot.
The Loom says otherwise.
Mist curls around the iron fence as we approach, coiling through broken stone angels and toppled headstones in the overgrown yard. The building’s windows are boarded, but faint light flickers between the cracks, like someone set up a haunted Christmas tree inside and never turned it off.
“Charming,” Bane mutters. “Real fixer-upper.”
“The wards are old,” I say, running my fingers along the rusted gate. Glyphs hide beneath the corrosion—layers upon layers of them. Human, in origin. Then augmented. Hijacked. The mark of Harrowgate threads through it all like a hairline crack in bone.
“Can you get us in?” he asks.
“Getting in isn’t the problem.” I slip a thread between the wards, feeling their resistance, their tired rage. “Getting back out is.”
He huffs a humorless laugh. “Good thing we never do anything simple.”
The gate unlocks with a shudder that rattles my teeth. We cross the yard, leaves crunching underfoot, the mirror-thread tugging insistently at me.
The asylum door is heavy oak, reinforced with iron bands and a lock that looks like it belongs on a prison more than a hospital. When I touch the handle, the air thins.
For just a second, I see it differently: clean halls, white uniforms, gauzy curtains, the smell of antiseptic. A girl’s laugh down the corridor. My hand is small on another’s.
Then it’s gone. Just dust and rot again.
Bane catches the flinch. “Flashback?”
“Flash something.” I swallow. “Let’s go.”
Inside, the darkness isn’t empty. It feels…busy. Wasps swarming behind the walls.
We move carefully through the entry hall, past the collapsed reception desk and a decay of old wheelchairs. Faint light pulses at the edges of my vision—not from bulbs, but from the floor itself, where filaments of thread snake between cracked tiles, converging on a single point.
“Down,” I say. “Whatever Harrowgate built, it’s under us.”
“The worst stuff is always in the basement,” Bane says. “One of these days, you’re going to find a global conspiracy headquartered in a sunroom. Just for variety.”
“Doubtful.”
The stairs to the sub-basement are behind a rusted metal door marked STAFF ONLY. The sign seems quaint, given the glowing glyphs carved into the steel beneath it. These are newer, sharper than the wards outside.
I trace a circle over one, feeling it bite back. “Not all locked things should be opened,” I murmur.
“Then we definitely are,” Bane replies.
He’s not wrong.
I twist the lock with a thread-snap. The door swings inward, and we descend into the belly of a machine pretending to be an asylum.
The sub-basement hums.
Not like electricity, although the lights overhead flicker with a cold, clinical glow. No—the hum is deeper, a vibration in the Loom itself, a sustained note played on too many stolen threads at once.
The room opens out into a cavernous hall, the asylum’s bones rearranged to accommodate something that absolutely did not exist when this place was built.
“Okay,” Bane says quietly. “That’s… a lot.”
It’s a loom.
Not like the one the Fates use—ancient, cosmic, unseen. This is a human imitation, a monstrous, industrial version spread across an entire wall, built from metal frameworks, glass channels, and pulsing strands of light.
Threads cascade down in shimmering sheets, each one representing a life. I see them rewrite mid-air, segments erased and replaced, memories spliced in, choices rerouted. Faces flicker in the glow—people sleeping in hospital beds, walking down sidewalks, sitting in traffic—never knowing they’re being edited like bad drafts.
Powering it all are the souls.
They hang in translucent tubes along the base of the loom, floating in viscous light. Some are still writhing, threads vibrating with weak protest. Others lay limp—harvested, emptied.
My stomach lurches. “They’re manufacturing fate.”
“More like counterfeiting it,” Bane says, jaw hard.
The mirror-thread tugs me further in, toward a side section of the loom that shouldn’t exist at all.
That’s where I see her.
Her, as in: me.
Another Faron, suspended mid-air in the thread cascade, her form half-formed and half-dissolved, like someone paused the process of writing and erasing her at the same time. Her face is my face, but softer, younger, more afraid.
My knees threaten to give.
“Tell me you’re seeing this,” I whisper.
Bane’s hand lands steady on my shoulder. “Yeah,” he says. “I see your evil twin. She looks like you before coffee.”
“Not helping.”
“Wasn’t trying to.”
A voice cuts through the hum. “I wouldn’t call her evil,” it says. “Merely… incomplete.”
She steps out from behind the loom with the calm assurance of someone who has never once feared consequences. She’s tall, composed, and terrifying in the way of people who believe in their own righteousness. Her hair is twisted into a glossy knot at the base of her skull, and her suit is a rich, dark blue so precise it might as well be armor. Her gaze is frost.
“Faron,” she says. “Prototype Eleven-A.”
Bane mutters, “I already hate her.”
I keep my face neutral. “I remember you. Zelena.”
“Director Zelena,” she corrects mildly. “Handler for all fate-adjacent assets under the Harrowgate Initiative. Including you.”
“Funny,” I say. “I don’t remember signing up for that.”
“That’s the point.” She glides closer, never quite touching the threads but moving between them as they part for her. “Your role required a certain… structural edit.”
My pulse spikes, but I keep my voice steady. “Enlighten me.”
She gestures toward the loom’s anchor—its core. At the very center of the machinery lies a single massive thread, thicker than any I’ve ever seen, braided from light and blood and memory. It runs through everything—every stolen soul, every rewritten fate.
At its heart, I see another woman. She looks like me, but not.
Slightly taller. Sharper lines. Her thread burns brighter, older, frayed in places where mine is smooth. Her eyes—closed now—are identical to mine in shape, but I know in my bones that when she opens them, they will burn hotter.
“Clotho,” I breathe. Clotho, the spinner. Lachesis, the allotter, and me, Atropos, the inevitable. Only now, I go by Faron.
My sister’s name feels wrong and right in my mouth at once. Familiar, like a song half-remembered.
Zelena smiles faintly. “At last, a flicker of recognition. She was the original—Prototype Eleven. You are the revision.”
“Faron,” Bane says softly. “You never told me one of your sisters was here.”
“I didn’t know,” I say, and that’s the worst part.
Zerena nods, as if we’re all being very reasonable. “All things die, right Atropos? We harvested what remained of her thread when she perished and used it to craft a new you. A cleaner slate. A Fate more amenable to manipulation.”
Rage claws up my throat, hot and bright. “You used her to rewrite me.”
“We refined you,” she says. “You were fractured, grieving, unstable. We removed the burden of that pain so you could serve your function.”
“You stole my sister and my memories and then put me to work cleaning up everyone else’s mess. That’s not refinement. That’s theft.”
“Perspective,” Zelena replies. “The point, Faron, is that this city can be managed. Guided. We’ve created a system where stray variables—supernaturals, Fates, necromancers—can be accounted for.”
“People,” Bane snaps. “The word you’re looking for is people.”
She ignores him. “We can offer Chicago stability. Safety. All you have to do…is walk away.”
The hum of the loom seems louder now, a chorus of lives held hostage.
“What’s the catch?” I ask.
Zerena inclines her head toward Clotho. “The anchor remains. Project Harrowgate continues. Your sister stays exactly where she is. Or…”
“Or?” I prompt.
She smiles. It doesn’t reach her eyes. “Or you pull the anchor thread. You destroy everything we’ve built. You free the assets, yes—but you risk unraveling their fates beyond repair. Including yours. You’ll no longer be a Fate. You’ll be…human.”
My stomach cramps. Sweat breaks out along my hairline. “And my sister?” I ask, though I already know.
Her tone is almost pitying. “She dies first.”
“This is a trap,” Bane says.
“Of course it is,” I reply.
Zerena spreads her hands. “No traps. Merely a choice. This city, or your sister. Stability, or chaos. You, as you are now, or you, as a grieving, broken girl who watched her world end.”
The mirror-thread inside me thrums tight.
I force myself to breathe. To think.
The truth is harsh. If I yank that anchor, my sister dies. Lives will twist. Some may break. Unwritten pain will spill out. I’ll be human.
But leaving this machine running? Letting Zerena keep rewriting people because she thinks she knows best?
That’s not fate. That’s tyranny.
“I want to talk to her,” I say.
Zerena’s eyes narrow. “That would be…unwise.”
“Afraid she’ll tell me to burn this place down?”
Bane smiles, all teeth. “That’s my vote, too.”
The director studies me for a beat, then steps aside. “You have three minutes.”
The threads part as I walk toward her.
Clotho’s thread hugs around her like a cocoon. I reach out, brushing my fingers along the glow. My skin prickles.
Her eyes snap open. They are my eyes—but older, heavier, burning with a fury so deep it feels geological.
“Hey,” I say softly. “It’s me.”
“I know,” she says, voice rough but steady. “I dreamed of you.”
My throat tightens. “I didn’t know about…” I gesture feebly. “All of this. They erased my memories of it.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve been holding on to as much as I could. For you.”
The ground tilts under my feet. I swallow hard. “If I cut your thread—”
“I go,” she says simply. “And I take this abomination with me.”
“Zerena says that will unravel everything.” I don’t mention what it will do to me.
Her laugh is hoarse and humorless. “It deserves unraveling, but…it might kill you.”
“I won’t die,” I whisper. Just become mortal.
“Then be my revenge, sister.”
I blink back tears that burn, furious and grieving all at once. “I don’t want to lose you.”
Clotho smiles. “Never. I’ll always be with you.”
Behind me, I hear Zerena’s footsteps. “Time’s up,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “It is.”
Zerena must sense the decision in my stance, because her composure cracks for the first time.
“Think carefully,” she says, urgency sharpening her words. “If you destroy this loom, you don’t just free a handful of souls. You untether every edit we’ve made—every correction. Crime spikes. Supernatural incidents spiral. The city burns.”
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“I’ve seen the projections.”
I step away from Clotho. My thread—the real one—thrums with power. “You saw one future. One of many. You built this monstrosity because you couldn’t stand the idea that you weren’t in control.”
“I built it,” she snaps, “because leaving destiny to chance has cost too much already.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But you’ve corrupted the Loom. I can’t let that stand.”
I weave a decoy thread with one hand, a shimmering false choice hung just low enough for her to grab. Her gaze flickers to it instinctively.
“Bane,” I say.
“On it,” he replies.
He moves like a shadow, slamming into a bank of controls, sending a shock through the artificial loom’s matrix. Lights flicker, threads stutter.
From the far side of the hall, pods open. The unfinished ones spill out. Half-stitched Fates stumble forward, eyes unfocused, threads flaring and snapping at random. Some look like me. Some look like strangers with parts of my face, my hands, my expressions pasted over their own.
I gape. One steps toward me—a perfect mirror of my features, but there’s something else coiled in her thread, something cold and necrotic.
When she smiles, it’s Tromble Lope’s smile. “Well,” she says in my voice. “Isn’t this fun?”
“Absolutely not,” I say.
She lunges. We clash in a storm of threads and fists and shared reflexes. Fighting yourself is like fighting in a mirror—every move anticipated, every feint reflected. But she’s not me. She’s a composite, spliced with Tromble’s cruel precision and none of my inconvenient humanity.
“You were meant to be better,” she hisses, our fingers locked, threads sparking between us. “Cleaner. Sharper. You could have ruled this city.”
“I’m not here to rule,” I snarl back. “I’m here to stop people—things—like you.”
And then I stop anticipating and start improvising. Instead of meeting her next strike, I let it land—just enough to throw my body off the expected line. Pain bursts in my ribs. She stumbles at the missed cue, off-balance for a precious half-second.
I take it. A thread-blade springs to life in my hand, woven from my own fate. I slice through the splice line where Tromble’s pattern knots into hers.
She gasps. Cracks. Then falls apart, dissolving into a tangle of dead threads.
Across the hall, Bane grapples with another opponent—a rewritten version of himself, leaner, colder, wearing Harrowgate’s symbols over his heart like medals.
For a terrifying heartbeat, I see them mirror each other perfectly. Then the fake-Bane falters.
Because there are things you cannot counterfeit—years of shared battles, the tiny shifts in posture when he’s about to be reckless, the way his thread curls around mine like it got used to it and never straightened out again.
“You’re not me,” real Bane growls, and headbutts the double hard enough to break the edit. The clone folds into ash.
Zerena screams something wordless and furious, reaching for a control thread wrapped on her wrist.
I don’t give her the chance. I turn back to Clotho. She meets my eyes, and for one breath, we are two girls again, standing at the edge of an unknown future, holding hands, afraid and defiant.
“Do it,” she says.
I slice the anchor thread.
The loom doesn’t so much explode as it simply fails.
Light fractures. Threads whip and scatter, flaring out of their imposed routes and snapping back to where they were always meant to be. The pods shatter. Souls surge free, their ribbons shooting up—up through the concrete, through the city, through the sky.
The sound is terrible and beautiful—a thousand overlapping sighs of relief and pain and release.
The shockwave knocks us all to our knees. My sister’s form burns bright for a moment, all that stolen power running through her one last time. She smiles at me, and I feel something shift in my chest—an old, carved-out space remembering it once held a sister.
“Thank you,” she says.
Then she’s gone.
Her thread, newly unshackled, unspools into the Loom, not as anchor, not as a battery, but as what it always was—one immortal, sacred thread.
Zerena staggers to her feet, hair loose, suit torn, control fraying. “This is not the end,” she spits. “You have no idea what you’ve unleashed.”
“Probably true,” I say, breathing hard. “But at least it’s honest.”
She snarls and rips something from her pocket—a slim pair of gloves, slick and dark.
Alien, my mind supplies, remembering a door beneath the city and a god beneath the lake and a hum from between worlds—all things I’ve dealt with over the past few months.
She slips the gloves on and vanishes—like she stepped sideways out of this reality into another threaded lane.
“Coward,” Bane mutters, pushing himself upright. He’s bleeding from a cut on his forehead, hair mussed, shirt torn. Somehow, he still looks annoyingly good.
I sit back hard against a cracked control console, reaching out to catch a thread drifting near my hand. It’s raw, reeling, but clean.
Bane moves closer and crouches beside me, something small and delicate cradled in his palm.
“Found this,” he says.
It’s a thread fragment, still glowing faintly. Clotho’s. I can feel it.
“She’s gone,” I say.
“Yeah,” he replies. “But not erased.”
He curls my fingers around the fragment, steady and warm. “You saved this part of her.”
My throat closes. “I gave her back her choice.”
We sit there for a while in the ruins of a counterfeit destiny, listening to the Loom settle into its new shape.
Above us, the asylum groans.
“We should go,” Bane says.
The bridge is where I always end up when I need to think.
Chicago sprawls around us in steel and light, the river cutting a dark ribbon through it all. The wind tastes like exhaust, lake water, and a thousand small stories unfolding at once.
Threads swirl everywhere—some bright, some dim, some steady, some frayed. Messy. Chaotic.
Alive.
I lean on the railing and watch them.
My own thread glows normal. Only now there’s a difference—a faint, new shimmer running along its length, like a scar that learned how to shine.
“I don’t know who I was before,” I say.
“Does it matter?” Bane asks.
“Sometimes,” I admit. “But less than it used to.”
He nudges my shoulder with his. “Who are you now?”
I think of Clotho’s last smile. Of the people freed from tubes. Of the necromancer still out there, the alien still here, the Shadow Man with his riddles and receipts.
“I’m the Fate who broke their machine,” I say. “And I’m the one who’s going to make damn sure nothing like it takes root again.”
Bane smiles faintly. “I liked you better before you got dramatic.”
“You love me dramatic.”
He doesn’t answer that. He doesn’t have to.
The wind picks up, tugging gently at my hair. Threads rustle around us. Sirens ring in the distance. Voices.
A whisper threading through the noise, intimate and small and terrified slips past all of that. “Help me…”
I straighten.
“Please tell me that’s not another necromancer,” Bane says, already resigned.
“No,” I say, feeling the coil of a new story winding up, the Loom shifting to accommodate it. “Something else.”
He sighs. “No time off?”
I smile, not without weariness, but with something else layered in. Resolve.
“I don’t know who I was before,” I say again, watching the new thread spark into existence and hook into mine. “But I know who I am now.”
Fate breaks.
We rebuild.
And somewhere in the city that doesn’t sleep, another thread begins.
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I hope you enjoyed this free short story. Stay tuned for next month’s adventure,
Misty