Bone Pattern

Rope the Color of Eclipse- October 17, 2014

There I was in the darkness under the earth.  It seems ever more distant, more like a dream.  I lay on my back in the dirt, and the Weaver stood above me.  Grim faced, jaw clenched, she didn't even glance at me.  Her eyes traced the pattern of bone above us, searching out it intricacies.  Shining cords, moon-silver and glimmering, overflowed from her hands.  The Weaver wrenched her gaze away from the labyrinth and stood for a moment breathing hard, staring at some point of strength within herself.  Her hands a little back, a little away from her body and full of dripping silver.  It was in this moment that I noticed her wounds.

The places the puppet man's knife had found her, on her face and chest, bristled with prickling shadow.  Darkness ran like blood from her wounds, wrapped itself around her throat and arm.  Tiny fragments of bone were embedded in it.  The man had cut her and now the Weaver bled the substance of the bone pattern.  No wonder she had come.  She gathered up her cords of steel, her glinting wires, and followed us below Denver.  The Weaver was a woman compelled, a woman forced out of her comfortable life.  She bled the bone pattern, and was driven by it.  

But she had her cord.  The Weaver shaped this part of the world, before it was even a city.  She had come and she was prepared.  She stood before Fisher's ragged body and the thing that dragged itself free of him by painful degrees.  One long fingered hand reached up to grasp the shadow seeping from her chest.  Her fingers twined into it, shadow solid enough to touch and pull.  Shadow that fell from her skin like blood.  With one hand, the Weaver pulled it free.  She tore shadow from her skin like clumps of hair, like teeth, like shrapnel embedded in her wound.  True blood, almost invisible in the dark, almost as black as the shadow wires in her skin, flowed from her.  Her face showed no sign as she tore the growing pattern from her skin.  

And it kept coming.  Inches and then feet of dark wire and bone that she pulled out of her body.  She meant this to be a purging of it, then.  That and more for her other hand flashed ready with its cords.  She bound the stuff she pulled from her skin, wound it round with steel and resolve and spun it into something new.  The Weaver braided her blood into the stuff of the bone pattern. She made a rope of it.  Long and spiraling, drifting across her skirts and making a pool of hematite shimmer at her feet. 

I thought it wouldn't end.  On and on, she pulled the shadows from her skin.  The coil at her feet grew.  Fisher's carrion birth fought itself further into the world, thrasing to be free of him.  There was a terrible silence in that room as they both worked, each to free themselves, each bound in equal measure.  Bit by bit, though, the shadow wires thinned.  The bone fragments ceased to tear themselves out of her.  I'm not sure how long that pause lasted.  That brief time in the center of the storm.  It seemed to never end.

Until the last dark tail slipped free of her body and the Weaver's hands were filled now with rope the color of an eclipse.  Rope that could bind the twisted maggot struggling free of Fisher's flesh.  His beauty already fading, he lay on his side.  Battered and split open, little more than a doll cast aside.  A broken boy left in a cave to be eaten by his burdens.  The twisting skeletal shape that had lived so long in his flesh kicked within him and he twitched.  Fisher's eyes were blank and empty.  It was too late for him.  Maybe he deserved what he got, for his part in this.  

The Weaver strode toward the creature while it remained trapped.  Encumbered like a moth still half encased in its chrysalis.  She gave it no chance to be free.  With its own pattern she bound it.  Its own and hers as well, careful layering and twining of the rope.  It fell into place along the creature's body, wrapped around its violation and rendered it null.  Where the eclipse colored rope touch it, it faded from view.  She might have been wrapping her rope around nothing at all.  Darkness animate retreated to an ordinary grimey dimness.  She bound it down until she reached Fisher's flesh, and still more of the creature remained within.

Then she began to pull.

"Help me," she snapped at me.  I was not forgotten after all.

Her boot planted on Fisher's chest, we both pulled.  We dragged that thing, thrashing and silent into our world and we bound it.  The Weaver worked with grim determination, hauling hard on the rope.  She stamped hard on Fisher's body to pull his burden free.

When it was done, when the creature was bound, I felt as empty as his hollow frame looked.  Just flesh now.  Just a gutted body, eaten away and looking unreal.  Looking like meat.  The Weaver looked tired, her eye shadowed but still glaring.

There is no graceful way to end this.  No way to avoid saying that the Weaver is gone.

She left Denver, dragging the bound creature of void, the thing that Fisher began to summon, and that I helped him birth.  She dragged our burden out and away and left him dead in the earth.  I suppose he remains there still, bloating or desiccating according to the climate.  The Weaver walked away from this city, and left her looms and her yarns, her big old house behind.  She walked away from me and from everything she has done here.

I suppose the deep will change here now.  I don't know how.

I am left with a black spot on my palm.  No longer a hole.  Just a scar that remains.

I sit in my apartment and watch the leaves falling outside and I try not to remember the writhing shape that Fisher carried, or the pattern in the bones.  I am waiting to see what will happen next.  The Weaver's world is falling but I can't see what the wreckage will be.

Nothing to do but wait and see.  

End of Series 1.

What follows will not be what has come before.