The Woven. The Spring-Sworn was no longer on Sentinel Iron-Chest’s shoulder. Both souls were picking thick spiderwebs off themselves and each other, having fallen into a ‘flowing place far from sunlight’. Overwhelming, sickly lavender was all they could smell as they shuffled quick to each other’s side, united against the strange. Weird ‘fluffy’ stars were ‘brushing’ their light over an uneven ground. Mounds that moved into one another as wind makes its waves. Though among those mounds none could claim to be of Water’s name, it was a different texture they shared in the dark.
∞
Syrib thought of clothing, for indeed it was a room of fabric unfolding she and Iron-Chest had been brought to - then a palace vaster and world imagined from that room. Where-uneven the sky was rippling as a sheet to mast or flag await. Those fluffy stars of woollen craft or similar, and so in that scarce false-light could shaman and sentinel both see their breath.
∞
And upon the dark violet flag that was hanging everywhere, a symbol of a hand that too was a spider, through varied stages of unfinish and design or transformation. A new force still hatching and defining itself. Syrib was disappointed, her caution grew: what need was there for a flag if Spring would last forever? Were they not to leave such things behind? What madness had found the prisoner in her isolation?
∞
Iron-Chest sniffed about for a better sense of where they were and where next to go, as to stay there seemed unwise. If the woven place was a mechanism of the prison he long had helped to guard, he did not recognise it. The ground was a carpet unsettled, stretching to its limit and threatening to fold back again, almost wrapping Syrib and Iron-Chest in silk and cocoon. The walls and ceiling as poorly pitched tents waned in liquid air The Sentinel could see.
In this flow and ebb they floated, they stood and fell, without falling to any ground or drifting off into whatever finality even there made claim.
∞
Only one of the walls was stiff. Fit for vultures. Covered in spiders sailing themselves in creep along taut threads that spun from a tangible nowhere. It was at that wall of tapestry Syrib The Spring-Sworn stared, kneeling and listening to its all-completing weave. And Sentinel Iron-Chest heard as Syrib had long followed - speaking from the woven corner of this impossible world:
“Time is dead… and we have killed them. Come, seek The Lightning Crown.”
The tapestry under woollen stars detailed in sequence all of Syrib’s dark desires, and she seemed less a master of Ehl’yiteth to Iron-Chest’s eyes:
-Her rise to ultimate power over Nature’s last ways untamed: Life Proliferate and Death Indifferent. Tragedy in human chains.
-A girl forever remained, in meadow-Spring with Old Gadail.
-Her parents she could not see even in artistic depiction, as neither her memory nor another’s imagination could fathom back what has for so long been dark. Sketched shapes there blurred of happiness, a reward, a return to what was. A sister holding it all together.
∞
“That cannot be Truth…” Iron-Chest’s clawed hand grasped the hilt of his sword, ready to draw it from his back unsheathed.
He thought, could he cut their way out of this realm? He feared every woven corner, loud with words or sounds to which Syrib was kneeling reverently. Kneeling as one consumed, absorbed and so one with it.
∞
A lady of Courtdom spoke from the nowhere that had been made - as meaty thumps thudded from corner to corner - as Iron-Chest listened to those thuds he thought the legs of some terrible spider were advancing and receding. The Spring-Sworn stared on enraptured at the tapestry of her glory. The Sentinel stayed close to Syrib’s side as the words addressed him, as he saw his own likeness young and old and ancient patterned in the carpet same, in the tapestry walls that did not cease to move.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
He saw there as in his dreams: how he would die.
“Yes, you will defend her, Sentinel, though not yet. Not here from me. Do you see your layered destinies in these spindled walls of my making? You have happened by my palace in passing only. For in this version of the threads my Spring-Sworn needed brief aid across the chasm, to find the outskirts of the maze. She has come far alone… and done so very well…”
An assassin stepped into Iron-Chest’s shadow and dizziness soon overtook him, with skill against skill alas he could not match the speed of darkness against him. His greatsword he swung at nothing. The assassin was already gone as a gas through his snout was sharp, his armour and fur too thick for blades, steel on steel echoed.
∞
As spiders emerge from their waiting to see what has disturbed the damp stillness of their webs, so Iron-Chest in nigh-unconsciousness found himself with silk and other threads wrapping him bound. Gigantic legs manipulated around him. The room spun him spun. Sticky webs matting his furred hands to his Hadaeon-greaves. He was no sustenance to her, but a tool for The Lady-arachnid he could not see.
He felt himself unravelling thinner and thinner, that one of his hairs was pulled and all the rest of him was a knot coming undone. So it is - to be unthreaded from one story and sewn into another.
Syrib was then and now alone.
∞
As Sentinel Iron-Chest was sucked taut as warp from one tale to another similar, the unseen lady spoke from the spun corners of all-else-things - narrating to Spring-Sworn Syrib her task, the young shaman’s lightning eyes tracing the tapestry she had inspired and in turn would self-fulfil:
“Welcome to Frac’tralien, where loom and will have wed. Your greatest adversary is yourself… your conscience… a lesson that is my own. You are Fear and Bravery both. While your adversarial Serib seeks the fallen starspear of Ithuriya… I send you on another quest of an older sort. For Ithuriya’s weapon was not always hers in Haven’s Ithurian house - it belonged once to giants when young was the universe, and older still it was a titanic crown known as The Lightning Crown. You are not the first shaman to think these things. To have these wishes dread and pure. And this will be your quest. To join the crowns that were shattered. Smelted and spread into new moulds as to obscure their origins and give to all a lesser power that should have remained whole. For I have seen The Timelessness of my enemy… even from her cell she has power yet. Now I understand Timelessness is unstoppable - a new nature - though I am Fate and all human things are my domain. We together shall order this new chaos as Truthdom ordered the old. You are core to my enemy’s ending… and to mine.”
“Is her cell not yours?” Syrib asked, with whatever last gasp she had.
∞
The same assassin as before, a woman masked and cloaked, stepped into Syrib’s sewn shadow. She paused before doing what needed to be done: one of her bony fingers was a needle laced with what is to some a poison and to others a medicine: helping them remember or forget.
∞
And the lady so trusting of her masked servant did not see! The assassin had done nothing at all. And from this hidden inaction so much would be begotten. With the assassin gone Syrib stood unbeknownst from her reverence and held her hand out to the tapestry, to touch where she herself was portraited a lord:
“I shall be Lord of Nature…”
“And I of Human Nature…” Lady Fate added. “…for we shall bear The Two Crowns in Synarchy. And that shall be how Courtdom rais’d.”
∞
Now you know the planned sketch of Lady Fate, sworn arch-foe of Lillian, whose name is Freedom.
“Who will dare face me their saviour? I will arrange the elements… even Life and Death mine to command with The Grand Scarab’s bloodline dry in the sands of D’neath…” Syrib’s farsight foresaw as it wished to. “…the runes-infinity I leave, I have left…”
“You will…”
The Spring-Sworn spoke to her own heart with its different justice, to the winds with hope her master would hear her hope and not despair, in or from this woven place beyond all she knew: “I will save you, Gadail.”
And to parents she once had known, to her sister long dear, all the more she knew not what to say, nor where they were. From a distance the assassin watched Syrib, before stepping-gone into shadow completely, a smile hidden by her mask.
∞
The Spring-Sworn asked her arachnid-accomplice:
“How will all this power and peace be mine? My Lady… if I am my greatest adversary… I see her in your woven work. I hear her doubting my thoughts as I doubt hers. This Serib in my heart.”
“The ending begins with a hex.” All crease and corner crawled. “An unshamanic hex forbidden and sealed away by your master no less in his youth… and his ancestors before him.”
“Sealed away? Tell me, My Lady.” Syrib pleaded. “I will bore down to any deep, force apart all vaults.”
“You have climbed high, and all roads from here lead down. In Timelessness through thread and fathom, with the aid of Silence I have found the hex for you, and to you I will bequeath its boon internecine. As the Serib in your heart strengthens so you shall strengthen, as you strengthen so she shall weaken. You are Syrib no longer. I name you among my Minim! Minim, The Spring-Sworn, The Eighth.”