Frayed threads. The machines around clashed as parrying swords are said to have sounded. Shay did not trust her eyes as they saw only nonsense: looms fit to fashion stars their size. The crashing waves Shay had heard below, here were massive plates of fabric being folded and lifted above to the factory ceilings beyond by machines unruled by clarity or any confine.
∞
Looking back down into the latch there was only blackness, not a single glowing mushroom where countless had just been.
‘Will Argus find The Club?’ Shay worried about Woid and Serib, grieving what could be, alas she could not turn back into such uncertainty. What good would she be with her bloody foot and shoulder on the mend?
A pain in her chest. Her heart was beating as though pressing against twine-strings digging into it, her stringed heart beating like prepared meat yet still alive. Those strings of spidery Fate some would say, trying to keep her in this story. She shook off a spider crawling through her fake hair, having barely a moment to shudder when voices bellowed distantly throughout the factory. Without looking around for safety she started unravelling a heavy syringe from the leather, needing dearly to forget whatever Grief was saying; worry being the enemy of her focus.
∞
The words of Argus followed her as eyes across an empty room. ‘Fate can design for you a perfect life, if your heart could again open… do not inject yourself with that poison.’
The great machines threw their weapons of steel and noise at each other out of sync, shaking her more alert.
‘Just get the job done.’ She breathed, her twitchy elbow having its own thoughts.
∞
Unsure what or who to listen to, she wrapped the roll of poisonous medicine back into her harness, finding the nearest shadow to skulk in. Taking this opportunity to swallow more ‘sweets’ for her shoulder, she listened to and followed the distant voices growling from deeper in the factory:
“What was that almighty crash?”
“Crashes you mean! The shrines’r out of pop with each other again, wefting when they need to warp.”
Shay looked up to the ‘shrines’ she thought were looms. Sparkling their patterns as night skies. Celestial wallpaper.
∞
Hiding in a black corner she watched - saw cyclops-monks among woven rafters above, sat with folded legs and arms meditating in front of the loom-shrines, watching over the eightly-limbed workers that were frantically and with purpose threading violet silk through the titanic sheets of fabric. Defaced tapestries hung drying as sails up there, and hairy arachnids skittered across them with ease, as though across their own webs they said:
“More of Payn’s red-words here!” they were dabbing at the blemishes with hot cloths. “Hiding careful in the amethystine.”
“We’ll never get this blood out! The dyes were swapped! Tampered ye, tampered!”
Shay thought of the dark-red scratches Lay’d Payn had left for her in The Dam’e’s desk and elsewhere. The numerous disturbances proliferating throughout the factory allowed Shay with her limping foot as it was, to tear free a bandage from a discarded pile of sheets that rolled by, pushed by a grumbling spider.
∞
She discarded her now useless boot. Having bandaged her foot her hands were bloody as well, though seeing another soul wearing them, she snatched from a barrel some unused thimbles and with her head down, walked through the busily folding and unfolding factory. The thimbles could perhaps prevent her from smearing blood wherever she touched, though her foot was leaving prints.
∞
She was spotted here and there but never long enough to be a threat - always a glimpse of her or a figment of her, in the corner of busy eyes otherwise preoccupied. Umbra-stepping (or shadow-limping, rather) was the method - into the shadows of passing workers as they went and came, using their shadows as a ladder across the warehouse. She wished all shadows were lily-pads for her, as they were to Woid, though her technique was limited to those of animate things.
∞
Most of the workers had eight fingers per hand, and countless eyes from their hairy archaic arachnid faces, thus the thimbles little helped her blend in. The commotion and her remaining speed did much of the work; the guards accused each other in her wake:
“Chemicals are in your eyes, making you see all-sorts!” The backs of superstitious heads were smacked.
∞
Shay hid to catch her rushed breath behind a warm generator. She thought it was a generator. A boiler. Humming away towering up to the untouchable ceiling. The Ersecutor’s words stared at Shay there, catching up to her. ‘Serib is responsible.’
∞
Here a child, but in some ‘future’ further along - (whatever such a word as Future now means, in Timeless dreams as these) - Serib plays it appears, no small part in Time’s attempted or successful murder. Around Shay’s planning mind swung such interrupting notions, muddying the shallow. Time being murdered, Entropy increasing with Time, and similar impossibilities. She had to focus on what was ahead, but you can do what you like.
∞
“Make it harsher, eh!” voices yelled in her direction, and she heard the clicking of controls nearby. “These stains’re rub-stubborn.”
Sloshing liquid meanwhile boiled inside the generator and eventually a soft vapour thickened the air with fog and hisses, pouring from vents. Shay crawled around trying to find what was controlling the machine. Then, scratched visible and red into the thick scaly legs of the humming generator, she read as you now do these words of rhymeless mine. The words that knew she would come this way:
“Timelessness! Freedom triumphing over Fate, usurper of The Will! Let us get to it - your parents needn’t age, Shay, and perhaps even the darling prince might a place in your scared heart allowed, when all this at last is through. Remember, that once you would have done anything to keep them from dying. You must find me as you always have, and unlearn all you know of Entropy. It began all things… alas that with all-severing Time do those same things end by Entropy’s hand… and begin again, and end again. No hilts, only the blades of swords we hold. Finding and losing one another, we are nothing without our bludgeonings of chaos, chance and change; our minds evolved and designed as not to recognise that we are trapped in Duality, unable to imagine the shores of Else.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
∞
Shay paid less attention than you do to these ramblings, as she thought the arachnid-worker’s voices were getting closer. Having crawled through to the other side of the generator, she heard heavier steps thudding against the woven rafters above. She dreaded to think it, alas it was him - Argus - up there interrupting monks otherwise deep with meditation. His net-cape draped through the mist and she shrank from view before his eyes could spot her, she hoped. She continued looking for the source of the fog and saw stairs snaking above-around the generator.
∞
The fog was thickest up above now, hiding Shay and whatever stars the ceiling kept. Fearful of poking head or eye out from behind the generator for Argus to see, she climbed the etches and ledges carved across its shining side. One by one my words followed her, and she wondered sickly what weird motions had made possible such scattered telling all reversed:
“Time brought happiness to you, something from The Nothing
and eventually-inevitably helped you forget their faces, their voices;
but did you really forget them? What does it take but a scent familiar,
and you are hurtled back small into their arms? For all your avoidance…
Oh and the good prince, Time and Entropy embracing and eloping brought him to you too…
the masks that happiness wears to hide the tears ‘neath of eternity.
That evil and tragedy, good and joy alike, all shall come and go.
And what are we, caught -
transient and between.”
∞
Her bloody foot slipped with a bang on the smooth edges, her shoulder strained as she hung strong from one clenching hand.
“Heard it now, didn’t you?” a worker snapped below, trying to convince their fellows.
Shay gained again her purchase and kept advancing with her fingers pinching every vantage she could. She flicked a thimble off into the foggy depths, the clatter of it distracting those she feared would head this way, having heard her tumble.
“What was that?” other voices slobbered, and she heard footsteps patter further away.
∞
She could not see far ahead of herself now, her climbing hands reaching into fog. There was an uncharacteristic wound or dip in the side of the generator, enough for her to crawl inside and rest. It was as though the thing had suffered a collision or crash with something equally large, surviving dented. In this deep nook she rested accidentally at first against the next message from Lay’d Payn. She recoiled, the words painful to touch:
“I was happy with my sibling before The Divide - when they left or I did, who can remember those-the aeons older-than Once Ago? And Serib is happy under her master’s watch, knowing there he will live in Spring-forever, for Far is her sight and she has seen where only lightning reaches, and falls down from. And where or when were you happy, Shay?”
Arachnid voices skittered up through the fog, having found Shay’s blood behind and below. Argus’ steps were thudding lost in the mist above. She wondered if the written words were even for her:
“Gargarensyr shall through entire histories chase me as to protect the history he as an Heir-Scholar loves, but the rewriting of history little concerns me. It is reality we are here, there, (every)when and (every)where to rearrange.” Shay noticed some of the words were scratched out. “Scarred by loss and grief, we go now to find again upon the shores that Freedom saw, what has been lost to grief, and we shall not let go. One last, one last Again.”
∞
The surfaces of this nook she had found were digging into Shay’s bones. Resting uncomfortably in the ditch, reading what was meant to be hope left her only with despair. For trying demands more courage than laying down where Grief is lord. Her heart was her body, and wounded she felt Grief’s cocoon binding her, bidding she remain here forever away; she felt bitten and filled with venom. She reached for the medicine, so worded the rim of the dim pit she was crawled inside in reply:
“You do not need that, my dear Amneshay. Forgive my rambling on, you know what my symptoms are belike. In long-different ages you are here beside me as I scratch away, and you remind me that, you forget me this: you needn’t forget your pain… it is what first led you to me. These are the old rules we by-abide, as we bide, soon to make our own Beyond. You must find me for I am your Lay’d, and save those needles of yours for our other friends and foes. It is you that taught me this… when or where syringes might as swords. Insidious subtlety over immediate savagery.”
Whoever or whatever was leaving these Timeless messages, had left more than words. Shay felt underneath herself to feel what most was jabbing her: a herby candle lay discarded.
∞
It had half-burned along ago but the wick-scent was still clear, and smelling it she could taste the spiced porridge such candles were once lit above in the Wintry nights of childhood, in lost ages when Time still was - when Winter and Night still could meet - cold and bright. Her younger sister was there with her parents.
“Find me, my Amneshay - and you will see again such candles glowing over cold evenings. You and I shall see to it such an Again does not end, and there will be so much we do not know-again. Imagine Spring forever. The tide never truly in nor out, as come together again the shattered teacups, the fulfilled then broken wishes and dreams. And they will call us Anew Falsehood, but it is a new Truth we have remade.”
A vent opened by Shay’s head and chemically clean steam hissed free. Her aching arms hid her from the rage, and as she tried to sit up her skull and spine knotted. She felt small spiders crawling everywhere, all the ditch covered with pillows. Words everywhere:
“Fate wants to web and keep you, Shay, in that bed where Grief is lord. Do not inject it away but listen to your pain. Our hearts are now our compasses as Time flails tailless; the dimensions vying to be foremost. Seasons strange. Unable to support The Court of No Longer.”
∞
Shay pressed a needle into her skin, the machine around her bubbling and humming. Words covered and smothered everything she looked at or laid upon, and she ignored it all, written even on her arms:
“That first night with Serib, making soup for her, that was your first dose for a long while. I know you try to forget these facts… what is it about her that reminds you? A haunt forever of Fate's design. Avoiding and forgetting was going so very well until she arrived. Fate wants and designed this story for you, where you are going through meaningless motions (e)motionless.”
“Leave me alone.” Shay swatted at the words, the needle deep in her arm. “I’ll bring you the girl safely, and then we’re done. I don’t care about your duel with Fate - it is your own.”
She euphorically emptied the syringe, knowing bliss would follow. Voices gnashed out there in the factory, though she had not the strength to act. To understand or care. Red words scratched into her eyes or eyelids, and even closed she still had to read:
“You care for Serib, and there is no shadow deep enough against such light, Shay. All chapters are my chapters… shake off the strings of Fate and decide - what sort of soul you are - who are you?”
Shay filled and emptied the syringe for a second surge, until every syringe was empty. Scratching above her. Scraping around her. The words of her sealed eyes rewritten. Reiterating.
"Very well. Rest here in my den for now... I will keep our enemies from you."
The top of her head spun into uncertain infinities, her every weight was behind her.