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knoughtwright · 4 years

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Tatterdemalion Ch. 8: Weaver

(A couple notes: The previous chapter ended on a cliffhanger and that was... a while ago, so if you’ve been following along you might want to reread the previous chapter before starting this one. Second, I’ve painted myself into a bit of a corner where I’m unenthusiastic about any of the possible ways to move the story forward, so there might not be any more after this.)

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When I asked Anpiel what a weaver was, it told me “A spider which has made its web in the hole left by the death of God.”

When God died, Anpiel said, creation had been torn open and lay vulnerable to the chaos outside. The hungry things which waited beyond could worm their way into the fabric of the world and take some of it with them as they left, tearing it further and making it all the easier for the next thing to come in. But to our great fortune, the first one that had come through did not want to devour the world, but only to take it as a home and refuge against the battering sea of chaos for as long as possible. The First Weaver entered the world and set about repairing the tear through which it had come, guarding its new home against other invaders. And it created other weavers in its image to help it with its work.

The repairs were far from perfect. The weavers could not create anything new, as God had; all they could do was stitch together the pieces they had been given. The geometry of the world distorted as they joined together pieces that had previously been distant. The pieces didn’t fit together quite right at the seams, and things still managed to sneak in through the gaps. And whenever things did make their way in, they would make new tears which the weavers would repair to their best of their ability, but the world would get a little more ragged. Eventually it would disintegrate beyond the weavers’ ability to maintain, and the outside would gobble up those scraps that remained.

In the meantime, though, the weavers were an invaluable boon to the angels, which lacked the ability to carry out such repairs themselves. They were, however, often at odds. The weavers had no concern for God’s plan, only the canvas on which it was to be carried out. Many of the things the angels had been tasked with protecting --the humans most of all-- were to the weavers merely vulnerabilities, providing a foothold for invading outsiders. And the weavers would without hesitation destroy anything they saw as threatening the structure of the world.

---

The first part of the weaver I saw was shaped like one of the little spiders I would see in the ruins, but magnified a thousandfold. The core of its body was larger than mine, and with its stocky legs included its diameter was close to three times my height. Its surface was a total, reflectionless black, making it look more like a patch of darkness or a hole in my field of vision than a physical object taking up space. If there were eyes on the head, they were the same flat black as the rest of the body. I could see the movement of mandibles but their overall shape was utterly unclear.

Above it was what looked like a second spider floating in the air, as if the first spider was being reflected in a surface just above our heads. This one was many-colored and shimmering, its surface like resin floating on water. Its eyes and mandibles were radiant, so bright and complicated they hurt to look at. Although it seemed to mirror the first spider’s movements step-for-step, a closer look made it clear that it wasn’t walking along a reflected ground. It was hanging as from a web, and indeed I could make out thin shining threads in the air around it. Except... following the legs out from the spider, they branched, and they kept branching, becoming thinner and more numerous as they went out, until they were indistinguishable from the web it was climbing on.

For several minutes, the weaver ignored us entirely, its focus totally taken up by the tear I had created. Both sets of mandibles and both sets of legs worked at the hole and the air around it, the black spider periodically reaching a leg back to draw almost-invisible thread from the abdomen of the shimmering one. The thread was wrapped around the hole in a pattern I couldn’t understand, and gradually the hole shrank and disappeared to nothing. There remained a distortion in the air, like looking through one of the glass shards that we’d sometimes find in the ruins. But the opening to the outside was entirely gone.

The weaver, both parts of it, turned to face me. It spoke, sounding like a chorus of almost-human voices speaking almost in unison and not at all in harmony. “The mouth-which-is-also-a-human has bitten the world and swallowed nothing. The weaver requests an explanation for the bite.”

I responded, almost managing to keep the stammer out of my voice. “An outsider had infected the crow, and this was the only way I knew to lure it out.”

“The threads binding the human-which-is-also-a-mouth to the crow are weak and easily broken. The chain from the human-which-also-a-mouth to the human-which-is-only-a-human to the crow is stronger but still insufficient to motivate a dangerous act. The weaver requests a causal thread binding the crow’s condition to the bite.”

Introspecting under the weaver’s stare was not exactly easy, but I had a feeling that providing an answer it considered satisfactory was my best chance of getting out of this alive. “Um, I wanted to prove that I could be useful to others, that I wasn’t just a dangerous burden.” It didn’t respond, so I continued: “I felt like maybe if Starlight, that’s the crow, could be saved then so could I. And... maybe I wanted to pretend that the threads binding me to the other human were stronger than they were.” I didn’t realize that I was aping the weaver’s language until the words were already out of my mouth. I tried not to think about the fact that Sumac was next to me and had heard everything I had just said.

“The weaver requests a clarification of the usage of the word ‘saved’ by the human-which-is-also-a-mouth.” When it said “saved” the many voices abruptly died off, replaced by a single voice --my voice-- saying the word exactly as I had said it.

“Saved from infection, I mean. I want to be... only a human and not also a mouth.”

The weaver considered me for a long moment. “The interests of the weaver and the human-which-is-also-a-mouth are perhaps sufficiently aligned for a conflict to be avoided. The human-which-is-also-a-mouth desires to be ‘saved’ and the angel will not permit the mouth-which-is-also-a-human to reenter with world-blood dripping from the teeth. The weaver cannot separate the human from what the human also is, but the weaver will render the mouth-aspect inert while leaving the human-aspect intact. The human-which-is-also-a-mouth will be made more similar to humans-which-are-only-humans, the world-blood will be concealed from the angel, and future bites will become impossible.” A brief pause, and then “The weaver wishes the human-which-is-also-a-mouth to understand that no choice to leave unchanged is being offered. The mouth-which-is-also-a-human will permit being sealed shut or the human and the mouth will alike be destroyed.”

I almost laughed. Minutes earlier, I had fully expected to die; now it seemed like the weaver was going to do me a favor instead. Of course, there was a lot I didn’t understand about its proposal, and it could easily end up being to my detriment in ways I had no way to anticipate. But as the weaver pointed out, I wasn’t exactly in a position to refuse, and I allowed myself to hope that the curse on my body and life might be, if not broken, at least alleviated. I nodded.

The black half of the weaver lunged suddenly towards me, and the world went dark.

---

When I came to, it felt like only seconds had passed, but the weaver was gone. I looked at the teeth on my leg, and they had been covered with a thick layer of webbing, like a captured fly. I tugged on it experimentally, but it wouldn’t come off. I thought about asking Sumac how much time had passed, or what the weaver had done, but I was too exhausted for speaking to be worth the effort. We returned to Anpiel in silence.

It was days before I thought to wonder why the weaver hadn’t just killed me. It was months before what I now believe to be the true answer occurred to me: If the weaver had tried to fight me, it wasn’t sure that it would have won.

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knoughtwright · 4 years

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Illustration for MEDICINE Everyday Therapy T-shirt collection.

#starlight #not a chapter

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Tatterdemalion Ch. 7: Sumac

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Up to this point I suppose I’ve presented Sumac as a villain of my story: the boy who took advantage of my touch-starvation to hurt me, the boy who tried to rape me. But no one is only one thing, and it’s hard to believe that someone is only one thing if you grow up alongside them in a tiny cloistered community.

Sumac loved birds. His love and compassion for birds was so evident that Anpiel eventually allowed him into the Aviary as an assistant, a privilege none of the other humans were afforded. If this were Sumac’s story, I’m sure that the Aviary and the marvels it contained would feature prominently. But that’s not a story I can tell. I never went inside the Aviary, and Sumac never told me what he saw there.

What I can tell is that when he was about ten, Sumac adopted a baby crow and gave it the name Starlight. The bird had been born with one wing smaller than the other and twisted at a strange angle, making it impossible that it would ever fly, and it had been cast out of the Aviary as useless to Anpiel’s goals. But Sumac fed and played with it, and it quickly formed a close bond with the boy. Wherever Sumac was, Starlight was usually hopping along the ground not far behind, unless Sumac had persuaded Starlight to save its energy by riding around on his shoulder.

With Starlight as such a constant presence in our community, it was hard not to feel some affection for it, but it never got very close to anyone but Sumac. It would tolerate our presences, certainly, and would sometimes engage us in games. But it never brought us gifts or allowed us to touch it, as it did for Sumac. I was always a little envious of Sumac for that, although he’d certainly earned his place in Starlight’s heart and I would never have had the patience to care for the bird the way he did. Still, it stung a little bit to see yet another situation where affection and touch were available to someone else but not to me.

Nevertheless, when Starlight was infected by an outsider and Sumac asked for my help to save the crow, I felt little reluctance to help. Except... “Why did you come to me?” It had been about a year since I had injured him, and while I don’t think either of us was holding much of a grudge I was hardly his closest confidante. Facing the thing in the factory had given me reason to believe that I might be able to negotiate with an outsider, but he couldn’t have known about that, could he? Had Amaranth told him? No, I reassured myself, even Amaranth didn’t know what had happened.

“What happened to Starlight is like... what happened to you,” he said uncomfortably, and I felt myself untense. It was still a little annoying to be reminded that my deformity was the defining feature of how others saw me, but my secret was safe, and I couldn’t deny that I felt some kinship with the bird on account of our common misfortune.

Unspoken but understood was that if necessary, Sumac would try to smuggle the infected bird inside Anpiel’s walls. Starlight‘s affliction was a secret, and I more than anyone else was likely to keep that secret and go along with a plan to allow an infected being past the angel’s defenses. After all, if Starlight didn’t deserve a place within Anpiel’s wheel, how could I? So I agreed to help, cautioning Sumac that there might not be anything we could do.

We exited the angel and went to the nearby makeshift shelter Sumac had created for Starlight out of scrap metal. Starlight lay there miserably on its side, and after a couple seconds it opened its beak and something looked out of it at us. The thing was many-legged, many-segmented, and flat like a centipede. It stared at me, and spoke.

It didn’t speak with words, and the thing which it communicated is a little difficult to force into that medium. Unlike the thing I had spoken to in the factory, which seemed almost too big or too advanced for me to understand, this was something small and stupid, and the things it wanted were simple and animal. It wanted food, and its food was the world, and the crow it had taken root in was its path to taking a piece of the world for itself. It knew we were there to attempt to drive it out and it wanted me to know that it had no intention of leaving.

Sumac was clearly alarmed by the thing’s presence, but showed no indication of being aware of the speaking-which-wasn’t-speaking it had done at me. Like in the factory, the teeth in me had opened an avenue of communication I couldn’t have had otherwise. I could pretend no communication had happened; I could keep my secret from Sumac and, probably, let the bird die. But an awareness was bubbling up in a previously silent corner of my mind telling me not only how to respond to the outsider but also how to save Starlight.

I hesitated for only a few seconds. If I thought about it any longer I was afraid that I would decide not to act, and Starlight would die. So I acted.

I informed the thing in Starlight of my plan, to which it enthusiastically agreed. And then: Arcs of hundreds, maybe thousands of teeth extended out of my body. Arcs of blood followed them, sometimes staining the teeth, sometimes twining around them without quite touching, sometimes following entirely separate paths. Together they formed the surface of a sphere about half my height in diameter. Suddenly the teeth and blood jerked in a direction that shouldn’t have been possible and the sphere they contained became dislodged from the geometry of its surroundings. Looking through the gaps in the arcs of blood and bone, the view of the other side lurched unpredictably and nauseatingly. The outsider slithered eagerly out of its host and leaped into the sphere, the teeth jerked again, and that part of space was no longer part of the world. The outsider floated somewhere we couldn’t see, gleeful in its little detached bubble of reality, and where it had been there was a spherical hole in space which Chaos shone through.

Sumac stared at me, gaping. I couldn’t breathe or think clearly. I was everything I had been feared to be. I was an agent of the unweaving, a piece of the slow destruction of the world. I had proved myself both able and willing to tear out a piece of the irreplaceable structure of reality, and the only reason anyone rational should be willing to let me anywhere near them would be to destroy me. And my nature had been seen; there was no possible way to keep this a secret now. Everyone I knew would now want me exiled or killed, and they would be right to.

But Sumac only said “Thank you,” and scooped Starlight up in his arms. There was a quaver in his voice but he met my eyes and the sincerity of his gratitude was written on his face.

I composed myself. “We need to run.”

But it was too late. The air above us coiled into ropes which then reached down and wrapped around us, binding us in place. There were thundering footsteps of something very large moving very fast and a horrible screeching which I hadn’t heard since I was a toddler.

The danger was not, as I had feared, in what might come out of the hole; it was in what would come to repair it. The weaver was coming.

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Tatterdemalion Ch. 6: Hyacinth and Sorrel

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Though Amaranth had been born within Anpiel’s wheel, her mother Hyacinth and her father Sorrel were both immigrants. They had been priests, speakers to the dead, in a city where such heresies had been permitted. Their city, Hornblende, jealously guarded the souls of its dead, angering the angelic psychopomps which desired to take them to judgment. Hornblende warred against the angels for years but eventually succumbed. The chorus of its dead was broken, the spirits sorted and taken away to the nearest heaven or hell according to the angels’ determination, and the priesthood made to join them by the traditional method of a knife to the throat and a pyre. Hyacinth and Sorrel escaped but were forced to leave behind everything they owned and everyone they knew.

Anpiel had taken them in gladly. It did not oppose the angels of judgment but nor did it feel any camaraderie with them. It cared about its birds and only its birds. If someone could help it further its own part of the divine plan, it didn’t matter at all if they had acted in violation of some other part. The former priests, tired and hungry and on the run, were for their part more than willing to take on a new vocation.

My most vivid memories of Sorrel are as a storyteller. He would sit the children around him after our evening meal and tell us about Hornblende, about his travels before reaching our home, about the things he had seen while scavenging for Anpiel, about things he had entirely fabricated. He never equivocated, he never tried to conceal which stories were fiction and which were fact, but he told them in exactly the same way and it was a long time before I learned how to tell the difference. Sumac was more interested in the fictions and Amaranth only ever wanted to hear the truths, but I loved both the same. I loved watching the way his hands gesticulated as if sculpting the scene out of invisible clay, I loved the emotions expressed in his face and voice, I loved the vivid descriptions that made it feel like you had seen and heard and tasted everything in the story yourself.

All my early memories of Hyacinth are of her being unhappy. My mother told me that the loss of her home had broken something in Hyacinth which had never really healed. She was far from totally dysfunctional; she raised three children while surviving the dangerous conditions of working for Anpiel, which is a feat many healthy people would have struggled with. But often things I and others said would make her snap at us or start crying and I couldn’t understand why. Sometimes she’d lose her focus in the middle of a task or conversation. Amaranth told me she would frequently wake up crying and occasionally screaming. When she was out scavenging, the other adults said, she was reckless and showed little concern for her safety. She frequently came back with injuries.

I think she was as surprised as anyone else when it was Sorrel, and not her, who died on a scavenging expedition. He ran afoul of the weaver which had spared my mother and me, whose territory had crept significantly closer to Anpiel in the intervening years. His scavenging party had, like us, gotten lost in the fog of the weaver’s maze, but apparently the weaver was less inclined to show mercy to a group of three armed adults than to one tired and underequipped refugee and her three-year-old daughter. The rest of the party made it out alive; Sorrel did not.

When they returned without Sorrel, Hyacinth left to retrieve him within the hour. She went unarmed: The weaver was by far the greatest danger she would face in this task, she had no hope of actually defending herself from it if it came down to that, and not antagonizing it seemed like a much higher priority, especially given the mercy it had shown my mother and me. She took an offering: An insectile outsider which had crept in through a crack in the world, the length of her forearm, which she had killed a year previously but which hadn’t decomposed a bit since then. The thing was useless to Anpiel but could be quite useful to a weaver. The offering wasn’t a particularly effective bargaining chip, as there was nothing preventing the weaver from killing Hyacinth and taking the outsider’s corpse anyway, but at least it could serve as a show of good faith.

She returned a day and a half later, Sorrel’s spirit following behind her. Her plan had worked: She had gone into the weaver’s territory, presented it with the outsider’s corpse, and been permitted to retrieve her husband’s soul and leave unharmed. But on their return, Anpiel’s wall wouldn’t open to let them in.

Sorrel was almost certainly damned for his work as a heretical priest. If left outside, sooner or later he would be found by a psychopomp and taken to a hell, and Hyacinth was unwilling to allow her husband to meet such a fate. Anpiel, for its part, didn’t want to antagonize the angels of judgment by harboring a damned soul. The risk wasn’t really that great: It was unlikely that the angels of judgment would even become aware of Sorrel, and if they did Anpiel could fend off anything short of a small army, and they wouldn’t send an army for one soul. And even if it did come to that, Anpiel could always surrender the soul if necessary. But it was more of a risk than it wanted to take.

Hyacinth camped outside the wall for another two days. She made it clear to the angel that she wasn’t going to abandon her husband. If Sorrel was not permitted to enter, then Hyacinth would leave with him and try to find refuge elsewhere, and Anpiel would lose her as a worker. Eventually the angel caved, apparently deciding that the risk was a smaller cost than losing another pair of hands. The wall opened and the pair entered.

Sorrel was the first dead spirit I had seen. At a glance, he looked as he had in life, but closer attention made it quickly apparent that his image wasn’t consistent with a three-dimensional body taking up a specific location in space. My depth perception failed looking at him, making him appear to be a very large object very far away, even looking further away than objects which were clearly behind him. His appearance didn’t change in quite the right way when I moved to see him from a different angle. When I tried to touch him he seemed to recede away from me without moving, somehow remaining behind my hand even when my hand was right where I had been sure he was.

His interactions with me and the others became more limited. He could speak, but only things he had said before. He could carry out apparently normal social interactions, but only if they hewed closely to a script he had used in life, and the moment a conversation included anything novel, he either lost interest or his responses stopped making sense. He was utterly passive, allowing Hyacinth to lead him around everywhere.

Hyacinth explained the minds of the dead by comparison to dreams and memories. Their experience of the world was like a dreamer’s experience of their dream, in that they still felt and saw things and responded to them but all of it just... happened, without them having any kind of choice or control. They didn’t remember the past the way the living did; it would be more accurate to say that they were memories of the past. A living person could not interact with anything without being changed by it; a dead person no longer changed but was the crystallization of everything they experienced in life.

Sorrel still told us stories, but they were, word for word, the same stories he had told us before he died. There was no novelty and no variation and he couldn’t answer questions that would take him off his previously established track. After a little while Hyacinth tried to fill in for him and tell stories herself. She threw herself at the task with more passion than I’d ever seen from her, but she wasn’t very good at it. She couldn’t tell the story with much expressiveness and she didn’t know how to set a scene with her words, and her attempts always ended up feeling more like dry lists of facts than stories.

Then one night she and Sorrel sat together and she told us “Listen to what I say but how he says it.” They told us a story together, alternating sentences. Hyacinth would give an unembellished statement of what had happened, and then Sorrel would follow it up with a sentence from some other story, nonsensical on the face of it but capturing the feeling of the ongoing narrative better than Hyacinth could. At first I would try to tune out Sorrel’s words entirely, and just pay attention to his tone and gestures. But after a while I realized that his words fit the story too. Not literally, of course; they were about different events in different places. But they told you what it would feel like to be there, even if all of the details were wrong. Hyacinth and Sorrel continued telling stories this way the whole time we lived within Anpiel. Their stories had a beauty which even Sorrel’s stories in life had lacked, and even most of the adults ended up gathering around most nights to experience the new art form which the couple had created.

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knoughtwright · 5 years

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@cedar-would drew Amaranth as a present for me

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Tatterdemalion Ch. 5: Amaranth

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My closest friend within Anpiel, with the possible exception of my mother, was a girl named Amaranth about a year older than me.

From a very early age, Amaranth had a gift for understanding and making use of the old bits of machinery that covered the landscape. Before she was even allowed to venture beyond Anpiel’s wheel, she played with the scraps others had foraged, pieces that failed to meet Anpiel’s specifications but still had enough functionality left in them to work with. She made little toys, sometimes as gifts for the other children but usually just for herself. At first they just beeped and whirred and spun, but then they made music, and then they moved around, and then she had an entourage of little automata that rolled and scuttled after her wherever she went.

She gave names to the little things that followed her, spoke to them, and told us when they were happy or sad and when they wanted things. She had never done anything to give them the ability to interpret what she said or to have emotions or desires, and she knew that nothing of the sort was within their mechanical capabilities. But their personalities were nevertheless intensely real to her, through a sort of anthropomorphism perhaps like that which a young child applies to a doll, though she maintained it into adulthood. It seemed a harmless enough eccentricity and it clearly brought her a great deal of happiness, so no one ever tried very hard to disabuse her.

She begged to be allowed out to forage herself, and was allowed to go out earlier than most children did, when she was around eleven. On her returns from those early trips she was ecstatic, babbling about the things she had seen and collected so fast I could barely make out all the words she was saying, let alone discern their meaning. She was accompanied by adults every time, but this was not enough to keep her safe. On her fourth excursion, they awoke some long-slumbering machine which was less broken than it appeared, and she had to be carried home bloody and mangled.

Anpiel was able to treat most of her injuries, but she had sustained damage to her spine which it could not repair, and she lost all movement and feeling in her legs. She was placed in a wheelchair, which she took to more easily and comfortably than anyone expected. The wheelchair she was given, created from specifications provided by Anpiel, was powered by hand, but after requesting some parts of her own from foraging parties she was soon able to build a motorized second chair. Over the next couple years she continued to alter and augment both chairs, eventually attaching to the motorized wheelchair four large spiderlike mechanical legs that could be extended to scramble over rough terrain, or retracted to allow it its original function as a wheelchair.

Once she had attached the legs she started using that chair to venture into the outside herself. The adults were terrified for her, but her enthusiasm was utterly undiminished by her experience. Once, her parents tried to stop her from sneaking out at night by keeping her far out of reach of either of her chairs. She was not, however, out of reach of a remote control she had made for one of her mechanical companions, which she used to drag the manual wheelchair to her bedside, then wheeled herself to the mechanical chair, transferred herself to that, and went out and sulked in the wilderness outside Anpiel for almost two days before returning. They didn’t try to restrict her movement after that. Anpiel, of course, could have stopped her from passing beyond its wheel, but she always brought back the best trinkets so it was not inclined to do so.

I should say, though, that she did not take most of those adventures alone. I usually joined her, and no one else ever did, so it was just the two of us out in the scrapheaps. The adults always tried to dissuade her, and none of the other children were willing to go out without an adult, but I said yes every time. The adults didn’t want me heading out either, and I knew it was stupidly dangerous, but it felt good to be valuable to someone. She made no secret of how happy she was to have an extra pair of hands and an audience for her to explain the mechanisms we sifted through and her theories and ideas for how they might be used. It felt good, too, to have something she shared only with me. I can’t know for sure, but I suspect that some of the ideas she shared with me were wholly original to her, thoughts which had never before been thought by anyone. Thoughts which existed in her mind, and mine, and no one else’s.

She was the girl expected to marry Sumac, and so when I injured him it came as a surprise that she was my closest supporter. She was the first person to ask me what had happened after Sumac told his side of the story, and though she was angry with me for sleeping with her informal betrothed, she was far angrier at him--partly on her own behalf, but especially, miraculously, on mine. She told him, very publicly, that I had let him off easy and that if he ever tried something like that with her she would cut his dick off.

She gave no indication that she didn’t intend to marry him, though. I wished sometimes that she would --for her sake or for mine, I wasn’t sure-- but I knew that wasn’t realistic. The community was so small, after all. What other choice did she have?

We continued to go foraging together, and she continued to add to her chairs and her automata. Her one ongoing source of frustration, the one problem she couldn’t solve, was the chair’s battery. She needed to charge her chair at Anpiel’s wall, somehow turning its thrumming heat and light into energy she could use, and she had no way to recharge it beyond that boundary. It wasn’t too much of an impediment as long as she stayed within Anpiel except for carefully planned single-day expeditions, but it meant that she could never hope to venture too far from the angel. Eventually Anpiel suggested a solution, and Amaranth and I went out into the wilderness to collect the rare and valuable piece of salvage that it required.

We went to the location Anpiel had given us, the ruins of a factory whose purpose I couldn’t begin to guess at. The ruins were nestled in a sinkhole, with a nearly vertical drop ten times my height at its boundary. Amaranth had no way to get her chair down into the hole and back out again, so she lowered me on a rope and I went into the factory alone.

It’s probably for the best that Amaranth wasn’t with me in the factory. She probably would have died, and there’s a good chance she would have taken all the rest of us with her. And even if by some miracle she had been unharmed, she would have learned things about me that I’m very glad she didn’t know.

It is difficult to describe what I experienced in that decrepit building. Reality itself was badly frayed there. Space seemed to bleed, and my memories of the place refuse to sort themselves into a linear chronology. I know that at some point I found what I had sent in there to retrieve: a pair of severed angel wings, still glowing with the dim embers of holy fire, feathered but otherwise entirely unbirdlike. They had far too many joints and the joints seemed almost mechanical, and although the wings were ten feet long outstretched they folded up small enough to be easily carried. They seemingly weighed nothing at all.

I know that at some point I came to the gash in the world and saw Chaos through it. It was terrifying, as wrong as anything I’d ever seen, but at the same time looking at it had a sweet floral taste that drew me in. I know somehow I got away.

I know that at some point I encountered the thing which had come through that hole and made the factory its home. I don’t think I saw it. I don’t think it was the sort of thing which could be seen. But I knew it was there, with as much certainty and intensity as I’ve ever known anything. And it saw me.

And it spoke to me. What it produced may or may not have been sounds but they certainly weren’t words but they were just as certainly speech. The best way I can describe it is like radio static, but this completely fails to do justice to the way it filled up my mind, pushing out all thought, the way it felt intensely like it meant something but just as intensely like it was nothing I could ever understand. Something inside me stirred and answered, in the same speech-that-wasn’t-words, and I threw up.

It let me go, I guess. I emerged from the factory shaking and disoriented but uninjured, carrying my prize. It was hours before I could speak, and even once I could, I refused to tell Amaranth or anyone else what had happened. The thing inside me could speak and apparently negotiate for my safe passage, which meant it had a will, and neither I nor anyone else knew what it wanted. I was afraid that if anyone found out I would be exiled.

Amaranth spent a few days experimenting with the wings before attaching them to her chair. Once they were functional, she excitedly came over to show me. They unfurled into huge canopy above her, catching the sunlight and turning it into something she could use, so that she’d be able to charge anywhere there was sun. She laughed, and in that moment, for the first time, I was unashamed of whatever it was that the unweaving of my first home had made me into. That which had allowed me to help make her laugh, to help make her free, could not possibly be anything other than beautiful.

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Tatterdemalion Ch. 4: Damask

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It occurs to me, belatedly, that I should introduce myself. Soon I’ll tell you about the others under Anpiel and how their stories intersected with mine, but for the moment permit me the vanity of speaking only of myself.

My name is Damask, daughter of Aster. I have looked through the ruptures in the world and seen what lies beyond them, I have met the First Weaver and its greatest enemy and survived both, I have bent long-forgotten tools and servants of the ones who broke the world to my will. Nevertheless, the most important thing about me continues to be what grows in my right leg.

Anpiel’s other subordinates made no secret of being terrified of me. I think within a couple years they stopped fearing that the small child living among them was an agent of some outsider waiting for the right moment to strike, but they never stopped thinking that I might be contagious. For the first five years I lived in Anpiel, the only person willing to touch me was my mother.

I was eight when the thing in me stirred for the first time. Three of the other children had been making fun of my limp. I didn’t have a limp, but they had apparently convinced themselves that my abnormality impaired my ability to walk, and were performed exaggerated lopsided gaits to each other’s great amusement. I was standing, helpless and ashamed, trying to think of a way to get them to stop, trying to make myself so small that I might stop existing until it was over.

And then I felt the shame drain out of me, replaced with a cold anger unlike anything I had felt before. I wasn’t broken, they weren’t better than me, I was something far greater than them which they could never hope to understand. I basked in the feeling for a second before I noticed that they had stopped their taunting and were staring at me. I followed their gaze to the trickle of blood running down my outer shin, then followed it upward to see it seeping from where the teeth emerged from my skin, like bleeding gums. The shame returned in full force and I ran.

After that the other servants of Anpiel demanded that it reevaluate my suitability to be within its wheel. Anpiel, once again, declared me not to be a threat, so I was grudgingly allowed to stay. The other children stopped making fun of me after that point. They were colder and more fearful for a little while; I think at least one of them must have seen not just the blood but the look on my face which preceded it, and they feared what might happen if they were to provoke such a reaction again. Within a year, though, they were all willing to speak to me and include me in any activities that didn’t risk physical contact. It was too small a community for anyone to stay a total pariah for very long.

For my part, I kept any feelings of anger and pride bottled away far from my conscious mind, and the teeth never bled in front of the other children again. Sometimes, though, I’d wake from half-remembered violent dreams to find that I’d been bleeding in my sleep. The first time it happened it soaked into my sheet, but I snuck out in the dead of night to wash it and subsequently slept with a rag tied around my leg, so as far as I’m aware no one found out. When I started menstruating, which no one had thought to explain to me in advance, I tried to hide that too, thinking that I had again become more monstrous.

After the first time the teeth bled, my mother joined the others in refusing to touch me. When we had traveled in the aftermath of the unweaving she had by necessity come into repeated contact with me and my wound, and after that she reasoned that no harm had come to her before and there was no reason to think that anything had changed. But after the teeth bled, that reassurance was gone. Something had changed and my aberration was something oozing, unclean, dangerous. She apologized profusely and repeatedly, and she cried for me and for herself that she couldn’t hug me. But that wasn’t enough to overcome her fear.

I went without human touch until I was fifteen, when Sumac, a boy two years older than me, offered to fuck me. He was taking a risk in even asking: I was as untouchable as ever, and there was a not-quite-formalized understanding of which of the children were going to marry which, and he had an expected bride who was not me. (I, of course, was not expected to marry anyone.) But I consented, and we met in secret many times over the next half year.

I didn’t particularly enjoy the sex, and he liked to hurt me which I definitely didn’t like. But having someone who was willing to touch me, having the feel of skin on my skin, more than made up for it. You’re thinking, maybe, that he took advantage of a traumatized younger girl’s poor judgment to hurt her further. I’m certainly not about to defend Sumac’s moral character, but I don’t think that I erred in choosing to fuck him. I got something I wanted, he got something he wanted, and I think we both benefited from our trysts.

Until, one time, he started hurting me more than I was willing to be hurt, and I told him to stop and he didn’t. I panicked, I felt blood start to drip from the teeth which only made me panic more, and carefully constructed mental barriers were broken down in seconds. And then the line of teeth extended far past its usual length and past even the limits of my body. There were hundreds of teeth, most of them sharp and not even slightly human, not floating in the air with their roots exposed but seemingly emerging from something which was not itself there. Almost as soon as the new teeth had appeared they arced whiplike through the air and into Sumac’s side, tearing a bloody gash. And then just as suddenly, they were gone and it was over. He pulled away and we both fled.

Sumac wasn’t able to hide his wounds and the whole story soon came out. He was quarantined for a few weeks while he healed, but the injury I had inflicted on him was just a normal laceration of the flesh. No otherworldly flame came from his side, no deep black scab formed, no teeth poked out from his healing skin. Reactions to the incident varied, but the general consensus was that Sumac had been stupid to touch me and had paid the price for it. I wouldn’t be touched again until after Anpiel was breached when I was eighteen.

I don’t tell you these things out of a desire for pity. I’m alive and, except for the teeth, uninjured, which makes me luckier than many. And I’ve seen strange and beautiful things, I’ve loved, and I’ve touched many other lives. All things considered, I’m not unhappy with my life. I just tell you these things so that you understand why, when the servants of Anpiel came into conflict with other forces, it wasn’t always obvious that I should side with my own kind.

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Tatterdemalion Ch. 3: Anpiel

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The outer boundary of Anpiel was a wall of glowing-hot metal, as tall as four men and curved into a perfect circle large enough to take half an hour to walk around. The surrounding terrain was flat and empty, so we saw Anpiel a long time before we actually reached its edge. My mother was not a devout woman and was less inclined to trust angels than many, but given the desperation of our situation she was not going to walk away from anything which might be willing to help.

When we had come close enough to the wall to feel the heat radiating off it, an aperture opened up like an eye, and something on the other side beckoned us in. We entered.

The thing which greeted us had two crow-like heads atop a sexless humanoid body half again as tall as any human I’ve ever seen. It was covered in glittering silver-white feathers that made rainbows shift around on its body as it moved. This effect was a little less evident than it might have been, because when it was not in purposeful motion it was utterly still. This creature was also part of Anpiel, no less or more than the wall we had just passed through.

I don’t know exactly what Anpiel told my mother that day about its nature and history. But since I’m telling stories based on others’ memories anyway, this seems as good a place as any to recount what I learned about Anpiel once I was old enough to ask it myself.

Anpiel was, when we met it, essentially sessile. The crow-thing and others like it could walk, true, but they couldn’t go beyond the metal circle which formed Anpiel’s boundary, and that couldn’t move. Anpiel had not always been immobile, though: At the beginning it had wandered the world with God, assisting in the creation of the birds.

Anpiel’s harsh caw of a voice was only a rough approximation of human speech. It was usually easy enough to determine what words it was saying, but any kind of emotional inflection was completely absent. And Anpiel didn’t usually have many emotions to express to us anyway. But when it told me about working side by side with God in the process of creation, there was no doubt in my mind that it spoke with love.

I don’t believe angels are capable of loving the same way humans do. For an angel to love a human, or to love another angel, is as far as I’m aware psychologically impossible. But they can love their work, and they can love God.

Gradually, as the world became more complete, Anpiel’s role shifted from creator to protector. It monitored the birds it had created, acting to prevent extinctions by establishing and protecting sacred sanctuaries or raising birds itself or hunting down anything which had multiplied too much and threatened the delicate balance it and others had designed.

The world was never wholly completed, though, and Anpiel was still playing some role in ongoing creation up until God was killed. At that point further creation became impossible and the threats to existing species multiplied, and Anpiel switched to a fully protective role.

It soon found that the broader environment had become too chaotic for it to have any hope of achieving the kind of control it would need to protect its creations. It started to build an aviary. The Aviary. It gathered up breeding populations of every bird species it could and brought them to one place where it could look after them, enlisting the help of a weaver to create a place many times more spacious than its geographical extent would suggest. At first this task required many servants, but once it had obtained all the bird species it could, it transformed itself into something vast and containing the Aviary, capable of managing the bird populations and farms to grow food for them within its body.

It still needed helpers for one thing, though. The angel was a vast machine, and sometimes it needed repairs or upgrades. When God had died and the angels could no longer be remade through Its holy fire, Anpiel had learned to add to itself using scraps of human-made machinery. But once it lost the ability to move freely, it could no longer acquire the pieces it needed on its own. For this it enlisted a small group of humans, to venture out into the surrounding graveyard of old machinery and scavenge parts to its specifications. The work was dangerous but Anpiel’s demands were infrequent enough that they were granted plenty of leisure, and within the great circle of Anpiel’s body they never lacked for food and were safer than almost anywhere else in the world.

When my mother and I arrived, Anpiel’s workers comprised two families, and Anpiel offered us the opportunity to join them. I am sure that if the decision had been up to the humans we would have once again been rejected due to my affliction. But it was entirely Anpiel’s decision, and with me standing within it it could see perfectly what was inside me, and it judged me not to be a threat. My mother accepted, and so we settled in what would be my home for the next fifteen years.

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Tatterdemalion Ch. 2: Wander

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By the morning the flame on my leg had died down, leaving behind a large jet-black scab with only a passing resemblance to dried blood. Though I don’t remember the night of the unweaving, I remember that scab. It itched intolerably and I wanted to pick it, but I was kept from doing so by the feeling, inexplicable but utterly convincing to my three-year-old mind, that if I did so something malevolent would look out at me.

After three days, though, the scab broke apart and fell off on its own. Nothing looked out from underneath, and most of what was revealed was just normal skin. Raw and red and a little bit twisted as though by old, deep scars, but unremarkable human skin nevertheless.

But in the middle of where the scab had been were what looked exactly like seven human teeth embedded in my flesh. They were abutting each other as if emerging from a jaw, but there was no curvature. Instead they formed a perfectly straight line down my outer thigh, ending just above the knee, with molars at the top and incisors at the bottom. My mother once told me, laughing, that for a moment it seemed to her like the strangest thing about the teeth was their size. They should be baby teeth, she felt, to match my body, but they looked like full-size adult teeth.

We traveled aimlessly, looking for anywhere we could stay. We found several villages that at first welcomed us, until they learned about my condition. Fearing that it might be contagious or malicious, they gave us a wide berth and insisted that we move on, though several at least had enough pity on us to part with a few supplies for the road. I suppose I should be grateful for that; we certainly would have starved in the wilderness without their charity.

After a few such encounters my mother tried unsuccessfully to pull out the teeth out of my leg. We spent two hellish hours with me tied down, crying and screaming, and her trying to pry the teeth out but continually flinching back from the torture she was obviously inflicting on me. Eventually she gave up and we resumed walking.

Once we stumbled into a weaver’s territory. The area was continuously filled with a thick fog that made it impossible to see anything further away than the height of three men, and there were no landmarks except for rocky hills. The geometry of the place twisted and curled in on itself and we quickly became hopelessly lost. As we wandered deeper into the maze we started to see glistening strands in the air, seemingly attached to nothing but the fog. They burned intensely to the touch, and we often needed to take substantial detours to avoid them.

Eventually we encountered the weaver. We didn’t see it, but we heard its screech coming out of the fog. The air was split by a high noise that sounded like a wounded animal but impossibly loud, but under that were other noises: a low rumble, a mechanical scraping noise, a wet hiss, and what sounded almost but not quite like a female human voice.

My mother scooped me up and ran from the noise. The weaver followed us, continuing to make that terrible noise but never coming quite close enough for me to see through the fog as I looked over my mother’s shoulder in terror.

I don’t know how long we ran. In my memory, it feels like it lasted almost the whole day. That can’t be true but I don’t know how to correct for my fear and a young child’s sense of time to get the truth, and I never asked my mother about it when I had the chance. Eventually, though, the fog cleared and the screeching stopped.

This is, I suppose, another cause for gratitude. The weaver could easily have killed us if it had wanted to, out of hunger or malice. But its only concern was with trespassers in its territory, and it was content to drive us out, scared but unharmed. To be honest, I find it easier to feel positively toward the weaver which drove us off because we were human than toward the humans who drove us off because I was not entirely so.

The place we emerged from the weaver’s fog was far more barren than those we had traveled through before. Small scraggly trees dotted the landscape but otherwise there was nothing but grass and fields of ancient machinery that had rusted almost to nothing and crunched beneath our shoes. We walked through the desolation for almost a week with little noticeable change to our surroundings. Without any humans to beg food from and without any hope of finding anything to eat in the wild, my mother feared that we would starve. But then, finally, we met with greater luck than she could have hoped for.

We had been walking for two months when we entered the domain of the angel Anpiel.

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Tatterdemalion Ch. 1: Unweaving

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I was three years old when the town I was born in was unwoven.

I remember things from before the unweaving --a cacophony of brightly painted overlapping sigils on the outside walls of the church, a porcelain doll belonging to a friend-- but the event itself is lost to me entirely. I have only my mother’s account to go on, and even that is limited: She avoided talking about what had happened as much as possible, and it was only when her grief or her anger at me overflowed the barriers she had constructed that the story ever came out.

A stranger calling himself Foxglove came into town, a scavenger, bearing miracles scrounged from the parts of the world patrolled by weavers and automata and fiery angels, where others would not dare to go. His profession invited suspicion, but Foxglove was affable and charismatic and quickly charmed himself into the town’s good graces.

My parents were asleep when the unweaving began, but I’ve since learned how unweavings always happen so I can fill in the details. Foxglove snuck from building to building that night, defacing every sigil. He entered the church, killing the guard if it was guarded, and destroyed the minor angel chained therein. The town now defenseless, he positioned himself where he --or the thing growing inside him, if there was a difference-- intended the epicenter of the unweaving to be. Then he allowed his body to split open, and reality split open around him.

My parents were awoken by screaming. Rushing outside, they saw that the night was illuminated by cracks in the sky through which they could see what my mother called hell. I myself use the word hell more narrowly, to describe the places of torture created by the worst of the angels. What my parents saw that night was not antagonistic to human well-being but merely indifferent to it.

What they saw was Chaos, the roiling, gibbering sea outside the world, and perhaps the maw of the creature which was currently tearing a piece out of reality for its dinner. They saw colors they had never seen before, heard a thousand voices speaking a thousand unfamiliar languages. Stare for more than a second and you start to feel foreign things sliding into your mind; your eyes turn away instinctively.

The town, meanwhile, was folding in on itself. Streets contracted, roofs disintegrated, gravity and wind pulled everything in and up, light itself bent at impossible angles. And walking down the street towards our house was Foxglove, or what remained of him.

My mother described him as looking like a tree, with his body forming the base of the trunk, and... something else, where his head used to be, forming the branches. They were branches but they moved and they were cuts in the world and also the knives making the cuts and they reached up and up until they cracked the sky and became the cracks and... her voice getting shriller and faster as she tried to describe what she had seen until she trailed off, breathless.

My mother ran back inside to get me, scooping me out of bed without even bothering to wake me up first. When she got back outside the branches were everywhere, and she needed to duck and weave to avoid them. My father was gone.

She never found out if he had been killed or had just run away. She told me sometimes that she knew which one it was, but which answer she was certain of varied from one telling to the next. All she could do was run to the escape route they had agreed on in case an evacuation became necessary, and hope that she would meet him there.

One branch, suddenly twisting in a direction she didn’t expect, grazed my right leg. It left a gash but most of what flowed out was not blood but a strange multicolored flame. I screamed, and my leg, or whatever my leg had opened up to, screamed as well. My mother ran, trying to carry me in such a way as to keep the wound from touching her.

When we made it to the rendezvous point at the edge of the village, my father wasn’t there. So it was just the two of us leaving by way of a secret narrow path through the surrounding woods. The path, a weaver-made reparation after some earlier, smaller calamity, twisted in ways that defied geometry and quickly brought us somewhere very far from home.

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