Loom-room. Serib pinched at the reddish speck, scratching it freer as flakes of oily paint and wooden splinters fell away. Woid was stirred from his slumber and Shay turned quickly around. At first Serib had only her fingertips holding on to the speck that soon was a thread, the end of which was crimson, while all the rest as she pulled and pulled was violet. Colours of the cosmic duel between Lay’d Payn and Lady Fate.

∞

The harder she pulled the quicker it was all unwoven, becoming longer and strong as steel ghostly thin, a quite lonesome thread embedded in all the wall. More paint and more splinters, as into that corner and the next, up to the ceiling and under the floor, Serib pulled and the entire room unravelled slowly into wobbles, while Shay and Woid stared bewildered. Mad words dripped visible in both colours extreme and those between bleeding stitched, scabby or scarred:

‘Shedding -

as weft-snakes.

And warped Conscience!

Rising -

from every grave.’

∞

The plaster underneath was compact, stacked reams of word-laden paper and patches of heavily embroidered tapestry, layering one another as bricks. The two materials dense against the other and crushing all pigment out of each other. One of the amalgamated blocks fell forward with a spill onto the floor.

“What is that - through there?” As Shay set about cutting at the walls with one of her swords when Serib could no longer pull loose the long thread, the little shaman’s hands wet with crimson and violet fluid, Woid called from the window:

“Oh, here we go...”

∞

The furthest fields were all in the spread of growing flames. As grew such fiery desolation the smoke seemed to choke and shrink the constant sun ever smaller and the sunny light was steadily replaced by smaller embers separate once stars themselves growing darker. The walls bled yet more words, one read there and here, making together one declaration:

“In a labyrinth of black holes they built my prison… but long has been my plan to murder Time, and when at last Time bled, discord was sown. And not sown from that moment onwards just; but all moments throughout what once was Time! And ‘Now’ is something altogether Other-Than and Else. In Timeless reign.”

∞

So the walls rambled as Woid helped Shay heaving away the oily layers of the failing wall that had fallen across the slippery floor. They were trying to cut or bash open a wide enough hole to escape the loom-room and flames outside. The read words, the red words, scratching everywhere:

“This is no prison to hold me, but my own palace of old from sensical dimensions far removed. A place of bitter jailors checking on empty cells unbeknownst, a Keep my own without realm. In Timeless reign.”

Lavender and poppies of many colours burned closer, flames lashing through the window. Having cleared the slimy clutter, Shay hacked with greater heart her swords at the layered-over wall and Woid joined her with his dagger. Shay searched but nothing in her harness was fit for such a task. Woid tried umbra-stepping through the threshold to whatever was on the other side, alas the dimensions were flickering endlessly through the epochs as pages skimmed - and he fell thwarted to the ground from his displaced momentum:

"Well, I never..."

∞

Serib ran with focus to the window and from her hands she cast a deluge of water conjured as to fight back the climbing pyres of flame hissing inside. She fell quickly with scalded hands, unable to control her power. Though seeing Woid and Shay struggle so to the cut the wall open she stood again and with redoubled calm cast another wave crashing at the raging blaze. Almost blinded by fire or heat, retching inhaled poppy-lavender smoke, her hands blistering, she could through the chaos see a 'diving smoke' yet more terrible: and sounds faded quietly despite their screaming as The Black Angel Silence up high was falling to the earth this way.

Silence, The Black Angel no longer peaceful nor placid as Serib had first met them - slumped in a corridor too large from which she and Woid watched Courtdom's dignitaries roll through conversations they did not understand. Above this very room now falling apart into the silken threads of its making.

There! There terrible in burning skies descending with wings too-many, Silence closer and closer though quieter and quieter as all began plunging-soundless into the gravity of its loyalty.

∞

Behind Serib was a structural crack, then another louder - the next quieter - and all the pale unstable ceiling wavered, burning here and crumbling unsupported there. Shay stepped into Serib’s shadow, grabbed the brave shaman and stepped back into Woid’s through the hole in the wall as all around them fell to smoke and darkness.

∞

“I really would advise against all future contracts with this employer…” he moaned through loud coughs. “The stakes are just too high.” He brushed with disappointment at another ruined shirt.

“Never thought I’d hear you say that.” Shay with her mask had fared better against the fumes.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

∞

Serib’s hands were raw from the scalding water she’d been throwing and she too was coughing into the sleeve of her lightning robes. Shay held the little shaman close. As she and Shay looked around the room, awfully the same intact fireplace stared back at them, and they were next to the same sunny window. Despair was almost full though the sun was casting longer shadows being sleepier in the sky than before, the wind breezed in harsher spontaneous speech of a storm's announce - making bow and bend the violet sprigs and redder stems in the ever-fields outside. The two flowers were one flower-strange.

∞

Shay fell back for a moment in relief enjoying a fresher and different sound, making satisfying clicks with the bones of her prosthetic arm, satisfying for Silence was gone. Serib tucked her painful hands under her arms, grimacing drained by lightning, water and flame. Woid was already out in the very different Corridoor where not one sign of battle could be seen. There was such a grin of satisfaction on the assassin’s face, leaning grateful in different sunlight:

“Thanks… got us rightly out of that one.” He made a picking motion with his fingers at Serib, imitating her discovery of the red-tipped thread.

∞

The three of them had a small dance as to wriggle out the madness they’d found abundant in the eternal loom-room. After, Shay sat Serib down in an old chair without legs by the cold dusty fireplace familiar and from the ingredients strapped to or in pouches among her harness fashioned a remedy for the shaman's burns. With every movement made, dust and lint were thick in the room's rays of sunlight. At first an oil Shay dabbed into the peeling skin which then as cream thickened with friction, the cream eventually hardened dry, and when it fell crumbling from Serib's hands her fingers though sore were less raw.

She wished she could see Shay's face. Woid looked tired, smiling at them both as he asked:

“The walls in there…were they promising you anything? Making it harder to leave?”

Both Shay and Serib confirmed - at some point the walls had been promising everything if only they stayed. Illusions walking and speaking.

∞

When the three of them were out in the Corridoor they were faced with a choice. To the right, the hallways led likely along the outside of the building, going by panes of sunshine. The leftward path sloped down into candle dark and a crooked grandclock was staring at them from beyond the end of the Corridoor, inside a large room all its own.

“I’ve been seeing those around.” Serib said and the other two nodded.

The grandclock might have had inhuman arms or limbs suddenly; it is difficult for my words to spell what their eyes had seen - Serib could hear the limbs slapping wet or slimy at near things, chiming discordantly as they moved.

“That’s no good at all…” Shay drew both of her swords.

“Shall we vote on which way to go?” Woid suggested. "A coin, maybe..." he dug about in his pockets.

Serib refused to take her eyes from the grandclock, electricity zapping across her gaze.

∞

The grotesque grandclock definitely had arms now; too many arms or other-limbs, slimily each was searching separately for what once was in Time, trying to find the constellations lunar and astral that always had been - and now no longer were. And as Woid too was readying his back-hand dagger, Serib listened:

“Wait!” her shout startled her friends.

Thunder roared from behind them: from the right-hand path baking in sunlight; it was her thunder - the same which had beckoned to Shay and Woid all this way since the factory, helping them find each other in the prison-palace maze of Corridoors.

“I think it’s too obvious.” Shay asserted, for the flowering fields had flickered and lavender was overwhelming all other colours. The colour associated with Lady Fate. Though she had been first to draw her weapons she was first to hesitate.

“It’s not me… I know my own call.” Serib reaffirmed.

"And you're stood here with us..." Woid agreed.

“Come!” Shay rushed ahead to the waiting grandclock.

∞

Between our three and the grandclock were walls joining above; the partition between this Corridoor and what perhaps was an open atrium beyond. As Shay and Serib ran closer to that partition hoping the scene would change safer, the dark room was clearer. The roof of glass but only darkness sparkled there, and candles jutted out of shattered teacups. The grandclock navigated air-not-there it is said, the clicks of its hidden gears shrieking and gurgling. The snapping of an invisible beak inside. Ink splattering in its dire levitation.

∞

Woid tried but could not step as a distraction into its shadow or any among other shadows of the twisted room. With mastery of the dark craft he stepped ahead to the threshold between atrium and Corridoor, alas - was it Gravity sleeping strangely? Or other forces at untold work? Poking his head through ‘here’ and into ‘there’ nothing changed and only danger remained. Just as the loom-room thwarted his momentum, the shadows near The Grandclock behaved the same: against him.

∞

The candles began to as planets move in weird orbits with their cups, rotating and revolving by command of The Grandclocks’ other-limbs. His imagination warped or wrapped by the weirdness, Woid had a better sense of why he could not step through the shadows; this was not a room of laws obeyed. Timeless. Dimensionless without the Space that Time once supported, and so the grandclocks carried that wound with them.

∞

The Grand ‘Thing’ was reaching and snatching out for Order Again from Timeless Chaos: for nights and days to see and light with dark again for its unreadable numbers to tell the hours that once had been granted and never taken away.

“The grandclock from my shop…” Shay dreaded.

“And the club…” Woid remembered leaning on it.

“And the factory.” Serib had seen it too, lagging behind as she was, exhausted from elemental efforts.

Landscapes unfolded and aeons reeled ‘long the edges of polished gears and undulating weights of inner Guar’dezhan, The Chiming One. Deafened by its chimes and dizzy with spinning architecture our three huddled helpless together; dusty books fluttered as though with wings their pages and mangled furniture reassembled itself. A sun-large chair crashed into the moon out the other side into splinters restructuring themselves on nothing into a shelf for plants and their pots but instead there stranded planets came to rest and roll.

∞

Uncertainty settled down and our three opened their frazzled eyes to a quiet place. Guar’dezhan stood now just as grandclocks should, with tall normalcy nestled against a wall of Shay’s shop.

However, far from normalcy it was - as Shay, Woid and Serib were tiny, standing on top of the grandclock where even dust was large. Shay’s small shop the size of a city to their eyes.