Chapter One

The Book

The book was a collection of plays written by the Greek playwright Aeschylus. It was bound in soft brown leather, the author's name stamped on the spine in gold. The edges of the pages were yellowed with time, torn here and there, and the pages themselves were fragile and thin. The cover was hanging on by loose threads. It was clearly a well-loved and well-read book.

A quick scan of the first couple of pages told Clementine what she needed to know; it was a copy of the text in its original Ancient Greek. This pleased her; she was reading a degree in Classical Studies, and had taken up Ancient Greek when she was sixteen in the form of night classes. Her degree didn't require the language, but she took the advanced module that had been optional for her and always enjoyed reading texts in their original form.

Then there was the deal breaker: the book's obvious age. She had always had a fondness for old books – whilst she wasn't one for vandalising them herself, she'd always enjoyed old books that had been a bit battered by their previous owners out of affection. She'd been guilty of taking books home from her high school and college library that were more than a little scruffy and never returning them, simply because the fact they were so well-used made her smile.

This one felt like a real treasure. Clementine could smell the age of it and it felt delicate resting in her hands. She already had a copy of Aeschylus' plays at home, (two, in fact, one in English and one in Greek), but when she saw the price, she knew she couldn't put this book back on the shelf in this little backstreet junk shop. It was only a couple of euros, and she could already imagine it on her bookshelf back home in England, tucked in between her Aeschylus copies and her Euripides' compilation.

And then there was this odd tugging sensation in her chest that told her she absolutely had to purchase this book.

So she closed the book and bought it. Looking back on it, as she would years later, she would be amazed at how much a simple decision changed her life completely.

III

Clementine Evans had moved to France in January. Her course had the option of studying for six months in a foreign country, and her course happened to offer places in a French university.

Clementine knew she was fortunate in this respect; her grandmother had been French and she'd spent many summers in Normandy, which was where her family hailed from. She spoke French more or less fluently, which had given her an edge over the other students who'd chosen France and couldn't speak the language properly.

It had been a big change, moving to a completely foreign country, but at twenty years old Clementine had felt ready for it. In a way, it had felt like coming home. On top of that, the modules she was studying here were enjoyable and covered subjects she was interested in. It was nearing the end of May, now, and she would be returning home soon, something that both excited and saddened her in equal measures. She loved France, after all, but she loved England too.

On top of that, there was the fact she felt like something was binding her to France. She didn't understand what, but there had been something pulling her towards France the minute she had been told studying abroad was an option. It had never been something she'd considered, studying abroad. An interesting option for those who wanted to do it, of course, but it hadn't really crossed her mind.

But when she saw the option of France, particularly Paris, she knew she had to go there. Something in the back of her mind was screaming at her…Go. You will not regret it.

So she had.

It was, in a lot of ways, similar to the way she didn't think she could have put that Aeschylus book back on the shelf if her life depended on it.

III

It was late at night, and she couldn't sleep. She felt restless, and the bed sheets felt like a furnace around her legs and waist. She would kick them off every few seconds, get too cold, and put them back on and subsequently get too hot. On top of that, her mind was working too fast, random thoughts flitting in and out of her head; it was hard to grasp one and cling onto it before it slipped away.

With a huff, she rolled onto her stomach and pressed her chin further into the pillow beneath her head. In front of her, the darkness swirled, pressed in on her. Another sigh escaped her lips as she reached out for the lamp on her bedside table and switched it on, flooding the room with a yellowy light and throwing shadows everywhere.

She sat up and drew her knees up to her chest, letting the bed sheets pool around her feet. Sleep was not going to come easy to her tonight, she could tell.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Aeschylus book sat on her cluttered desk. She had too many books on her one shelf and not enough motivation to rearrange them to put it away, so it had been left to languish on top of a box of biscuits and a textbook on the ancient Athenian legal system.

Before she could really process what her body was doing, her hand had reached out and pulled the book off the desk. She hadn't looked through it properly when she returned from her shopping trip; one of her flatmates, an incredibly chatty young girl named Élodie, had caught her as soon as she got through the door and engaged her in a two hour conversation about the boy she'd met in a coffee shop. Then she'd been reminded they were having a flat meal tonight, which they did once a week to catch up with each other, and she hadn't seen any way to get out of it. Once that was over, she'd had a shower and decided to do some necessary reading and work on one of her essays and the book had been completely forgotten.

But now it was in her hands, and chatty flatmates were in bed, and there was nothing to disturb her.

She opened the book at random and a slip of paper fell out. The paper was yellowed, like the pages of the rest of the book, and had been written on in an elegant, looping, cursive script.

It had been written in French, she noticed, and quickly translated it in her head.

Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred; then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then another hundred. Then, when we have made many thousands, we will mix them all up so that we don't know, and so that no one can be jealous of us when he finds out how many kisses we have shared.

She was immediately transported back to her first year of university studying a module on Roman literature; the Catullus poem this was taken from had been one she'd had to study for her final exam. She hadn't been a massive fan of Catullus and hadn't particularly enjoyed that module, but it was ingrained firmly in her head, she feared forevermore.

She stared at the poem. A part of her was amused that someone had left it in there. Then her eyes drifted down to the text itself. It was Prometheus Bound she was reading, she suspected, and whoever had owned this book at some point had scribbled in the margins. She compared the handwriting of these notes to that of the handwritten Catullus excerpt, and realised it was the same elegant script.

Furthermore, the notes in the margins had nothing to do with the text. The first note simply read: Corinth, tonight, Grantaire; the second was an ode to flowers that she didn't recognise. The author seemed to have a particular fondness for yellow roses.

She put the Catullus poem to one side and continued to thumb through the pages. She found more poems, scrawled in the margins and on more slips of paper, on everything from the plight of womankind to a sad-eyed kitten living in a bin to the way the stars twinkle at night, as well as quotes from more Catullus poems as well as some French poetry she recognised and some in what looked like Italian she couldn't understand. There were a few annotations on the plays themselves, some even written in Greek, and the occasional reminder – Give book back to Combeferre, said one, and GET R TO APOLOGISE was scrawled in huge block capitals across the opening scene of Seven Against Thebes.

Out of curiosity, she backtracked through the book to the first few pages. There it was, on the flyleaf, in the same cursive handwriting as the rest of the notes and scribbles: a name.

J. Prouvaire.

"J, Prouvaire," Clementine murmured, stroking her fingertips over the dried, slightly faded ink.

For some reason – one she didn't understand – she felt like weeping as she stared at his name. There was some sense of recognition in that name for her. But there was more to it than that. She had the overwhelming feeling that she was holding someone's life in her hands, and that frightened her. The pull that had brought her to Paris, the pull that had made her buy this book, was felt in her chest once more, and it was stronger and more undeniable than ever before.

A/N: This is just a very small idea that popped into my head the other day and wouldn't go away, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it (I should be revising for exams, basically!).

A few things: I'm aware I'm quite vague about the university side of things, but it's not going to be massively vital to the story aside from it being the reason why she's there and why she'd buy a copy of Aeschylus in Ancient Greek (which I accept is a pretty big reason haha…)

The Catullus extract featured is from Catullus 5. You can find translations of it pretty easily on Google if anyone's interested in reading the full thing (like Clementine, I'm not a particularly big fan of Catullus).

Also, the title is a reference to Atropos, one of the Moirai or Fates of Greek mythology. She was the one who decided how people would die, and was the one who ended their lives.

Thanks for reading :) Reviews are of course always appreciated, whether it's good or bad!