Name: Minerva

 

Identity: Spinner

 

Weapon: spinning wheel/ the thread of life

 

Gender: Female

 

Appearance: 17-year-old girl

 

Personal Description: calm, rational, careful, meticulous, sometimes absent-minded while lost in recollections

 

Favorite things: fairy tales

 

Important Person: The figure in her memory

 

Camp: Parliament

 

Personal Story:

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“Far out in the ocean, the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal.”

 

This view, the only thing Minerva remembers, repeatedly swims into her dream. As she remembers nothing else, her purple eyes barely show any expression or emotion.

 

Minerva operates the “spinning wheel”, a huge machine of deciding each person’s limit and end of life. She spins “the thread of life” onto the spindle, allot it to each person, cut it, and spins the new life-thread. Keep the circle going is her day-to-day work as the “spinner”.

 

Every life-thread connects to someone. If one’s thread is cut, he or she will die of different causes, such as diseases, old age, accidents, and natural disasters. Managing people’s life and death requires the spinner to be extreme calm and rational, so she has to receive memory clearance at the highest level each day. Without memory, she will not generate feelings or thoughts. She is just treated as a cog in the wheel. She does not need to think and feel.

 

She doesn't remember why she started this job, nor her real name, she only has the alias given by the parliament - [Minerva], the goddess of war and memory.

 

“Her skin was as tender and delicate as a rose petal, her eyes as blue as the deepest lake.”

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Pieces of a distant fairy tale swims up from deep within Minerva’s mind. She only remembers a gentle figure, which is the reason why she started this job, like the little mermaid who gives her voice in exchange for human legs, trading her ability to express love for the power to go for love. Minerva can only remember her original wish when she regains her memory.

 

“Unless a man were to love you so much that you were more to him than his parents; and if all his thoughts and all his love were fixed upon you, and the priest placed his right hand in yours, and he promised to be true to you here and hereafter, then his soul would glide into your body, and you would obtain a share in the future happiness of mankind.”

 

Minerva has worked in “the gap” for ages. Over and over again, she exercises the power of God in her mortal body, observing people’s life and death, tasting their pains and pleasure, and then forget everything.

 

The joyful moments of human life are just inaccessible to her, but the fairy tale is left on her mind. Even the A-level memory erasure fails to clean it.

 

The parliament has always been worried that she would be “worn down” by this memory, but Minerva has achieved a delicate balance by her own will. Therefore “those people” do not want to easily “destroy” her. After all, it is not easy to find a spare as efficient and suitable for the job as her.

 

Inspiration from: The Norns-Norse mythology/ The Little Mermaid-Hans Christian Andersen