MIRANDA - It's a dangerous game Fate plays with Free Will. How are we any different from [Morpheus]?  

CASSANDRA - A dreamer can replace the god of dreams with their ego, but one cannot lay claim to their own birth and death.

MIRANDA - And the Suicides?  What of their Free Will?  ...Titania's Will could keep her from the forest. 

CASSANDRA - Free Will is only a delay from Fate.  She'll cross [into the forest], and we'll be waiting.[i]

So begins a debate by Titania's maidens on fate vs. free will - a reoccurring theme throughout The Medisaga Trilogy.  What makes this examination so interesting is that Titania's three maidens turn out to be the Sisters of Fate themselves. 

There is a painting by John William Waterhouse that shows the Fate who measures the thread of life tangled in the strand, looking tentative and uncertain, unwillingly bound by the thread.  The Fates in trilogy keep close watch over Titania's journey, watching her make decisions that lead her toward them, and others that lead her away.  Eventually, one of the sisters begins to question her responsibility, and like the Waterhouse painting, becomes uncertain, wanting to save Titania from her own fate.  This will drive a wedge between the sisters and the world of order will be turned on its end.

In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus must persuade Hades to allow him to bring his love back up from the Underworld.  He takes out his lyre and when he begins to play, the story goes, his music is so moving that the Underworld pauses: Ixion's wheel stops turning, the Danaides vase ceases to overflow, and the Fates weep for the first time.  

That a mere mortal could move the gods to tears struck a cord with me, and I decided to explore the human emotions of three beings that had such a cold and calculated purpose.  Thus I gave each Fate her own identity and her own sense of destiny.

They are Cassandra -named for the priestess in Aeschylus' Agamemnon. She too has the gift of prophecy that no one believes.  She is the Fate that spins the thread of life.  Miranda - named for the daughter in Shakespeare's Tempest, she has a tempest stirring within her and is the one who begins to question their control over the lives of others.  She measures the thread of life.  And finally Artemesia - named after the painter Artemesia Gentileschi, one who draws and creates the world around her.  She is the Fate that cuts the thread of life.

I've taken liberties in the trilogy to redefine some very well known mythic characters.  But their traditional identities are still present, and help to guide Titania's journey.  The Fates unexpectedly find themselves taken with the fairy queen's predicament.  Despite the price she's had to pay, Titania continues to test the Fates by the strength of her will to be free - to not just lie down and accept her fate, but actively engage it and change her stars.

In the first film she quotes from Peer Gynt:

TITANIA -  "There is a ruling Fate. And 'tis a comfortable a comfortable knowledge." (she goes on) And yet they are not so constant that they cannot be tricked...[ii]

The threads of life (a different color for each character) literally run their way through the trilogy ultimately leading Titania to the Underworld in the third film.  Here she will try to change the fate of another character, thus affecting her own.  She herself will be tested by the Fates, made to persuade a force that to most seem unmovable.  But it is her enduring spirit to try, to fight for life with everything she has, to put herself before another, that might make our Fates weep, and maybe - just maybe... change their minds. 

[i] dialogue from TITANIA script, © Lisa Stock 2009

[ii] dialogue from TITANIA script, © Lisa Stock 2009

(Videos from TITANIA, The Medisaga Trilogy and more are on the Enchanted Folk Homepage)

By Lisa Stock

Titania Journals

"Once, while working in a museum, I held a pair of ancient sandals in my hand - the footprint of the person who wore them was still there, as though they had slipped out of them moments before, and not a thousand years before. 

It gave me pause to think of all that had transpired between their life and mine. 

Like standing in one spot on Earth thinking of all that is going on in the world at that very same moment - across continents and oceans and deserts. 

An infinite number of possibilities in one breath of time. 

For me to live in the magic is to imagine all the roads ever taken, then one by one find a way to discover them, learn about them, and bring them to life."

Lisa has been a member of Enchanted Folk since October 2007

members.enchantedfolk.com/medisaga