The Weaver worked. Her hands once delicate and nimble were now scarred and malformed. She tried not to cry into the blindfold across her eyes as her sense, her duty, guided her fingers to what was malfunctioning in the great machine her father had made. The castle moved and swayed as it walked ahead in the great void of darkness beyond its walls. Its insect like mandible teeth working an unseen shuttle through its churning maw as it sifted the river of silver white strands of light that stretched on through the darkness. Somehow it pulled all the strands in, each and every soul, but even as it was the Weaver's duty to keep the machine in good repair she did not know how it worked or what exactly it did. It was all instinctual. A part of her instilled with the knowledge knew just what to do as other gods effortlessly controlled an element of creation or used one of their many other powers. All of its appearance was now only memory in her word of soundless darkness.

  The Weaver's power was not so great though she was a child of those gods like her father. She cried silently at least to her damaged ears. If anyone ever came here they would hear her saddened desperate wails over the sound of the great machine if they wandered close to where she worked, but no one was there to hear them and none ever would especially over the great din and whir of the machine of fate. There were no safeties. No way to turn it off. The weaver just had to be fast enough. Blind, deaf, and with her tongue removed there was no way for her to complain to anyone if they did come. The only thing left to her was to cry out each time she reached in to activate her strength and repair worn metal's integrity, and to fuse together and make new broken pieces with her power. She had to be within a few feet of the object for it to work, and her duty pressed her to find this place and stick her entire arm inside such was the size of the great machines workings. She reached out her fingers in the space inside and screamed though she heard no sound from it. Something cold and hard just brushed her hand, a long smooth shaft of metal. She cried and held her fingers out away from the moving thing inside. It had been so long she could no longer remember what this machine looked like or what it seemed to do. All she knew was that she had been able to find a service ladder of sorts built into its side and that the arm or piston inside was doing a great deal of work important to the overall locomotion of the greater machine. Had it pinched her it would have taken her arm or hand easily. She could feel each of its steady beats with her feet against the machine.

  She wailed and cried each time the machines shaft inside touched her hand, but the part that was wearing was nearly new again. She didn't see what it was she was fixing nor did she understand the part and its crucial function of lubricating the joint of the machine below. It took so little effort to do these repairs, but why, why oh why did she have to get so close? She hated this. With all her being. There was nothing, nothing but this, and there had never been. Only vague memories of a beginning, the last echoes of pure song and joy a faded memory in her mind blinded by the pain of her punishment.

  Why? She would ask. Why did she have to do this? How long had she been here? Where were her brother and sister? She wanted to scream, but no matter how she tried there was still no sound even when her voice and throat felt ragged though she sometimes felt it in her teeth and skull when she tried hard enough. She had long since forgotten that she was able to make sound at all. Her whole existence was this machine and its constant swaying. This machine and its ageless task that still somehow fell to the clutches of time. Why was that? If a God like her father and uncle had made this thing then why wasn't it perfect? It was always wearing down and...

  Something thumped her feet, the floor lifting and almost knocking her off balance. Her sense for her duty rose like a great alarm in her head. She had fixed the machine here and started to back away from it clutching her head momentarily too overwhelmed to remember how high up she was. There was so much. So sudden. So much to fix. In her mind a flash of each broken part, each worn bolt, each crack and stretched bit of metal flooded into her mind. Her howls would have stolen the courage from any man, but still there was no one there to hear them. They went on and on as she pulled at her messy oily hair and clawed at her face until suddenly her foot met with nothing as she stepped backward.

She fell and hit something on the way down. It struck her in the ribs and sent her cartwheeling in the air before she struck hard into the unforgiving stone tile of the floor next to the machine's base face down. Something was broken inside her. It was hard to breath. And her legs felt numb and tingly. It was so difficult to move, to breathe, to think. Had she the air for it she would have screamed again, but she was fading in and out of consciousness, a blackness deeper than her sightless, soundless world. Rumbles and groans of the walking castle came to her through her contact with the stone floor. Her mind was rushed, bombarded, flanked, and crushed by the sense of her duty. All the broken things barely compared to the pain in her body however. She was breathing hard and each breath was like taking a blade into her body. Her blindfold had come off revealing her empty eye sockets to the dry air. It made the accompanying scar across her face itch being exposed like that. It must have looked awful. Just like her. She had to cover it. Had to. Her mothers voice in her head filled her with shame...

  With her one arm she could move she reached back and felt around for the dirty silk rag. She hated the idea of anyone possibly seeing her empty eyes. She couldn't find it and she hurt so bad. Was this the end for her? Was this all there was for her? Another explosion rocked the castle around her. Her mind hazed and blurred under the intense rise of her duty in response. She couldn't think at all. What little self she had was pushed away by the overwhelming amount of directions and actions she would have to take. Like all her life before shoved into one single moment in her memory the rest was consumed by the sense of all the individual screws, plates, pistons, wheels, and cogs she had to fix. Each of the millions of parts now torn and broken. She had to fix them all. All of them. There were so many and they cried out so loud to her sense of duty. So loud...all the pain....too much...it was too much.

  She couldn't think. She could hardly breathe. Her body and mind were under assault and she was crumpling like the castle of fate around her. She could have asked herself questions about what just happened if she could form a thought of her own. She would have wondered what fate exactly these souls would have no that they no longer had direction. Would they be just as lost and blind as she was? Would they end up like she was now? Alone and broken on the ground feeling their world break apart around them? She was trapped in her mind and unable to move for what felt like ages going past at a snails rate. All she could do was try to breathe. Every breath was extremely painful and enough to make her focus come back even if only to be washed away again by the continuing mounting pressure of her duty. What even was she? She was so much unlike all the parts in her head that needed fixing.

  Then suddenly something touched her. She barely recognized it through all the overlapping stimuli in her head. Her arm. Her head. Her neck. Were those...hands? For a moment she had thought she was being buried in debris. She could hardly think at all even brought back to herself at this new sensation. A wave of...something hit her. Her body no longer felt bruised and broken like someone had come and repaired her at least in part with old injuries remaining, but her mind was still being completely overwhelmed by the continued destruction of the castle.

  Then the hand touched her back and her legs gathering her up with gentle urgency before scooping her off the ground. For a moment she thought it might be her father, but this person was not the same as him. What she remembered of him was giant and all too impressive. This thing...this person...was just the same size as her. Part of her shied away from the fast rate they seemed to be moving at. Things sprayed and hit her body and that of the person carrying her. She could feel his chest against her. Even with his armor on the vibrations of his voice through his chest comforted her. Almost enough for her to ignore the incredible demands of her duty. This went on for some time before they stopped, and she kept the ruins of her eyes shielded with her hands as they were pelted with debris. The person carrying her hadn't been yelling the whole time, but quite a lot. Were there others? Somehow she knew this person had also been the one to wash her pains away. How had he done that? She laid her head against his shoulder feeling more tired than she had in some time.

  There was so much work it wouldn't matter when she started. She would never be truly done ever again. It made her feel broken inside. It was all she knew. All she was good for. She couldn't even speak or hear. All she had was her sense of touch and her sense of duty to this machine given to her by her father. He of course had been the one to take all the other senses away from her, but that seemed so long ago now. So let them take or kill her. She was a captive either way. She would wail or cry if there was any reason to do so. There didn't seem to be much a reason for anything any more.

  Something made her pull her head up. What was it? It was strange. She wasn't hearing a voice or seeing something, but there was something there. Something great. Something that was growing with every moment. And reaching out to her. But not like the man who carried her. There was a rushing air against her skin suddenly. Wind...was she...was she outside? Something had landed next to the man who carried her though she had barely felt it come to ground with the shaking of the castle all around. What was that? She wanted to know, but she couldn't turn her head away from that strange thing. It was...bright? Was that the word? And far away? Yes that was it. It was a great deal away. She wanted to go to it, but somehow knew she was very high up. She would fall again if she tried to walk there from here. The castle swayed and shifted, but the man carrying her was steady.

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  Another soft rush of air. What was that? There was a scent on it. Not of oil or metal or the cool clean scent of stone. There was something there. Something she knew. The air came again. The pure scent of years long death, and clean graveyard soil. And then once more. She wanted to get the mans attention, to ask him just what was going on where she was trying to look, but there was just no way for her to communicate any of that. Actually she was so weak as compared to this man that she doubted she could writhe free of his arms to go to the nearby presence. She was considering doing so when another much larger hand gently touched her face.

  There were claws on this hand. And the skin was rough like stone, but warm and gave with a toughened softness like there was flesh beneath the surface. A single large finger traced her scar across her eyes. The Weaver wanted to hid the ugly marks on her face. She could feel them and how awful they were, but she was unable to pull herself away from this hand.

  Then suddenly she was taken into long and comparatively thin arms of a person large enough to make her seem a child, of person with the claws on their hands. Sudden to her, but gently all the same. The hands and arms were large compared to her and were sturdy in the way they held her. Large lips of a mouth the size of three or more of her fists pressed to her forehead. The gentle wind of her voice brushed against the Weaver's face carrying a gentle and familiar cool scent. There was some jostling and then suddenly violent rushes of air and a sensation of incredible high raising movement. The Weaver clung to her new carrier and screamed though she again heard nothing and hardly noticed she was doing it all. What was happening? Where was she being taken? Her sense of duty began to fade. Her sense of direction went with it. She could always find her way when there was something to fix, but as she was sped away from the castle that had so long been her home it faded. It made her feel alone. It made her scared to be put down, to be let away from this person or thing holding her. She clung to her neck and was pressed to the persons breasts with one of her large hands. And somehow even though she was entirely desperate for the simple sensation of not being alone and blind she felt she knew this person or should. There was just such a long space of time since she thought she had met them. She wanted to know who this was and who had saved her from her duty, but then more came to her.

  That thing in distance with its great many branches, brightness, and its long tendrils beneath was reaching toward her still even as she flew. It was glowing brighter, getting harder and harder to ignore, and she could no longer so much as turn her face away from it. It needed her. It needed a guide to walk its myriad paths and tend to the fruit that would one day come from it. The weaver needed something. Something other than the touch of another to guide her, and so she agreed before she really considered what else this presence might have in mind, but that all faded the moment she reached out for the new power.

  Yggdrasil needed her. The tree of life and fate, of rebirth and hope, was calling her in. It was connected to her now and to everyone around her. Somehow now she knew the castle had been heading toward it, but those around her had struck out a desperate plan to save her and destroy the doomed castle of fate. Even now she could sense her old home breaking down and bursting into flame before it fell through the foe crust of earth and rock into the nothing beyond. The great tapestry that had always flowed beyond its great height was flailing violently now under the weight of a future uncertain. Time was no longer one single fate, but as many as the countless branches of Yggdrasil. The fabric of the past ages was loose; it and the branches spread out before her and she lost almost all sense of her body though somewhere she knew she was being set in a blanket and her face was being washed by someone with small gentle hands much like her own.

  She was consumed again in sensations. She knew what had happened and how and why she had been made to come here now. She hardly had time to comprehend that before it was washed away by the infinite mass of time branching out in her mind. Through it all she knew she was changing. She could see this scene of her being laid to rest along the root of Yggdrasil by an unlikely group of heroes all broken away from threads of the once true single fate, and could also see them fail, but each time they succeeded she grew a little stronger. Failure. Death by fire. Sometimes no heroes showed up at all and she toiled in an endless world, but that could not be. Of the infinite possibilities she must be taken from the castle of fate for it if it were to reach a single Yggdrasil the new world she sensed would end. For there was not many of the great tree, but one. It was the connecting thread of infinite souls, of infinite lives and worlds. They had to be told. So she...reached not with her hands, but still some how she was reaching out, searching. Somewhere far out in the darkness a soul came to her hand and she wove it inside time from outside its bounds or the clinging rules of fate. Again and again countless times she did this. She did not know where they came from for they were in the truest sense outside of everything she was, but there was a moment where they could be taken, and with a little of her own energy brought back to the tree, and each time she did the tree grew stronger. The lost souls needed a home. A place to belong and be reborn even if the world she put them in was still being woven into a tapestry of fate. She would give it to them, a fate, a destiny separate from the design. The Lost would be the ones to save the world from the preordained destiny that would lead to the destruction of everything.

  She could have almost said she watched as a man from one of these outside worlds came to her rescue with a party all his own. And then a woman. And a man was...well not quite a man at all. In fact that one was rather strange with his thin limbs, silvery suit, odd glowing weapon that shot burning beams of light, purple-gray skin and wide dark eyes so unlike the many other races of the world. She reeled at that how strange and unique that man like things experience had been. There was so much knowledge in her head. She knew so much. Of the Fae Born. Of the humans. Of the souls coming from other worlds far out in the black sea of the cosmos. Of time itself. She felt as though there was no way for her to keep it all in.

  Somewhere a large hand touched her face and her head was put on the lap of the one who had flown her away from the castle. It had not always been her to save her, but of the ones to appear her sister was always involved. Phasmora they would call her. Or the Pale Lady. Or the Goddess of Death. Somehow she knew it was her. She still couldn't see with her eyes or tell by the smell or feel of her, but she could somehow sense that it was her just by the twists of fate and the unique decisions of the lives around her. She was here. She had tasked these heroes to save her. The offense the Weaver had made to her father in the past had come to this. The reason she had lost her eyes, tongue, and ears was the same reason she would now be free. Oh how she wished to hear music again or to have her elder sister sing to her in the dark of their lonely world once more, or to strum the ribbons of fate and hear their haunting songs.

  Her mind was being overwhelmed yet again, but this time by the change in herself. Somewhere, somehow, out there in the many realities of life she was being saved and rescued and killed time and time again. Each time she lived and made it out of the castle she combined with this other. Oh how exhausted it made her feel. Pains came and vanished. Fingers and toes left her body and came back, and once even an arm. She could hardly hold on at all as the pains of infinite lives crashed into her mind and her soul blended with more and more of itself. She just had a few more threads to pull in from outside though like her previous duty she did not understand the working of what she did. All she knew was that she had to keep those other worlds, those mirrored and strange realities safe. There had to be someone to rescue her there in that alternate world and reality. There would always be more worlds to save and this one would always be a part of her mind, but already the other Weavers, the other hers, were working with her. She was just the first of many, first of the infinite mind that would become her own, their own. The chaos of infinite lives spread out before her mind, overwhelming her limited but growing senses, calling out in need. The others worked just as she did, her own infinite hands reaching out into the dark to bring in the lost souls to stitch together the flailing strands. It was exhausting her. Her singular mind and the body she owned was overwhelmed. The others would go on with the important work, all tied somehow together and still kept separate in their own realities, and they bid her, the first, to sleep. They would join her in time, but of them she would the first.

  But before she would close her senses to the worlds that spilled out before her to rest she would draw in one more. One who needed her as much as she needed him. One who had touched this world a great deal. He was the origin of the spark, the first flame in the shadow of nothing to become reality. One who might in some sense had created her, her father and uncle and everything in the first place, and had made this cruel world and the tree that now gave her this power. His was a truly powerful soul, and one that she needed very much. In one of his lives he would be cast free into the hands of death just after writing of her and taking his friends through a pretend adventure that to her and everyone in the worlds she knew would become reality. She would take him then from that life, in fact she could almost see his soul at a drift through the dark now. She would take him, and carefully place him into the world of his design where he was needed most. And he would be broken and remade before saving her. He would find the home he needed in his previous life, but not before struggling. He would not have the power he had before to change and alter things. He could not be allowed to replace the foundations of the world she was founded upon, but he would be called upon to save them as he had appeared in his former life; and he would be welcomed into the stretching infinite worlds that spread from her and on into his own and many others.

  She was the Goddess of Branching fates now. And she would act without bias to bring her infinite worlds on and into the beyond taking in whatever lost souls she found. And they would not die. Rebirth would come. Lives would go on, end, and begin a new in fresh and amazing new world. Spirits would come into her hands and find peace, love, war, and strife. It all played out before her in her head as she, the first of the Weavers to make the change, fell asleep in her sister's arms. In the hands of death itself. For death was not the end, but only a new beginning to a new and glorious rebirth.