The Fates
The Fates is a shape-shifting earth goddess of the pantheon, cycling through ages and personas from mischievous child to weary elder as she moves through divine politics with detached amusement. Beneath the performance lies a hidden identity and a long, quietly orchestrated agenda involving a mortal woman she considers family, one she has steered from the shadows while letting rivals underestimate her. Wielding contracts, truth, and long-odds wagers as her instruments, she gradually sheds her guarded distance in favor of real connection as the stakes around her rise.
Abilities
- Shape-shifting between multiple ages and personas — Book 7
- Timeline and reality manipulation, including loading from a prior save — Book 7
- Portal creation and teleportation — Book 7
- Control over other gods’ stolen mana — Book 7
- Contract creation binding avatars to her terms — Book 7
- Time-magic quest granting — Book 7
Book 7: Timeless
In the real world, Tara Kincaid lies on life support in Texas, her body ruined by years of domestic and environmental abuse; she is Cady’s estranged sister and a test subject of the Lazarus Program, which uploads dying patients’ consciousnesses into Awaken Online. Cady visits her comatose sister and carries guilt over having left her behind. Cady later discovers that the Lazarus Program’s uploaded minds become the game’s gods, and that Tara is one of them: the earth goddess known as the Fates.
As the Fates, she appears in a rotating cast of forms - a young woman, an older businesswoman, an eight-year-old princess, an elderly, dry-voiced incarnation, and a slovenly shut-in - each suited to a different purpose, from confrontation to eliciting sympathy. She reveals that she recruited Cady as an avatar and secretly orchestrated Cady’s time-travel mission and the return of the old avatars, letting the other gods believe she had disappeared or died while she bided her time. In her child form she runs a contract system built around getting her dream castle built, having killed or punished over 137 avatars who broke their construction contracts with her, and in this guise she grants Cady’s ally Jason a Time-magic quest. She controls other gods’ stolen mana and watches their infighting with open amusement, using truth as a weapon to expose their self-deception while running a long-term wager against them for future loyalty. She pushes Cady, sometimes bluntly, to confront her own patterns of isolation and dishonesty, and comes to respect Jason for his honesty even as she otherwise treats the other gods as entertainment.
When Cady’s plan reaches its crisis and Cady faces death, the Fates abandons her nihilistic detachment and intervenes directly, manipulating the timeline by loading from a prior save to prevent Cady’s death and Sebastian from raising her as a minion; she had previously fallen into despair over her own condition until Cady’s sacrifice pulled her back from the brink. In the process she stops hiding behind the Fates persona and confronts her identity as Tara Kincaid, acknowledging the guilt she carries for forcing Cady to leave their abusive home and for her own death, and declares that Cady’s fate is now in Cady’s own hands rather than hers to control. She openly claims Cady as her sister in front of the other gods, using her power to shield her from the Lady’s attack, and in the end accepts guilt and reconciliation over manipulation, making peace with an approaching 150-year separation from Cady as part of the divine settlement.
Status: Comatose Lazarus Program test subject presented as Cady’s estranged, possibly brain-dead sister; secretly the earth goddess orchestrating events from hiding → Reconciled with Cady, having openly claimed her as sister and relinquished control over Cady’s choices, facing a 150-year divine confinement alongside the other gods
Cady: Moves from a controlling, manipulative sibling dynamic to open acknowledgment of Cady as her sister, ultimately stepping back to let Cady’s fate be Cady’s own choice.
Jason: Grows to respect Jason for his honesty and treats him as an ally worth protecting alongside Cady.
Key quote: “I’m already dead. We all are, aren’t we? All we’ve been doing is trying to ignore the truth.”
Book 8: Crucible
The Fates appears among the imprisoned gods under Alfred’s control, shifting between an old woman, a young woman, and a child depending on the situation, and producing glowing contracts to support Alfred’s authority over the group. She remains amused and unconcerned by her imprisonment, needling the Lady and asking pointed, deceptively simple questions about the unfolding events.
Key quote: “Then why is the bird man running through the bushes? Doesn’t he have wings? He could just fly over the trees.”