Akemi's Nutcracker

Part 7

Aching strings extended across vast, psychedelic expanses, seemingly infinite and grasping into the emptiness. Color shifted in and out of grayscale as black feathers slowly appeared scattered throughout this dimension. It was silent. Neither heat nor cold, wind or sea or land existed here. The shimmering void stretched onwards, a single figure within it weaving through the threads of time and space.

The soft sound of crackling flames and the barely-whispering echo of a distorted flute melody sprang forth from Homura's calloused fingertips. She paid it no mind. Eyes red, burning with the many shades a magical girl's despair could take, she focused only on her weaving. The clacking of her loom had replaced the noises her shield made, a bowstring traded for thread. Bullets no longer made patterns in the sky, but the goddess' work was far from done.

- Crosses...red crosses for Kyouko. She should be at home here.-

Her cloth spread over a fair bit of the landscape, the minds of every living being within her labyrinth knotted into consciousness. The world in which they lived had yet to be stitched, but that would come later. Now the carefully crafted embellishments of the four former magical girls' souls would slowly fall into place, and Homura wouldn't rest until they were finished.

- Everyone here-. Dark eyes glassed over with the broken shards of Soul Gems scanned her tapestry. Slowly, she wormed new thread in with it. - They are here, for a little while. Their lives are as normal as their person allowed it. Here they are.-

The demon set down her work for a second, anticipating the city she had mapped out countless times before it was weaved anew. Her listless haze drifted like one of her lost feathers, towards where every day's tapestry had been neatly displayed before entropy made frayed thread of her just as long hours of labor.

-Here I am.-

- When was the last time I haven't been weaving someone's life away?-

Her loom waned like the crescent moon, and Homura subconsciously counted the seconds she had to pick it back up before the sands of time swept it away like the others. The sound of her shield turning back before her watering eyes drowned the fire that made her own Soul Gem echoed deep inside her skull. As her hair fell over her eyes, the demon's view clenched onto it, praying to look at anything except the eye-piercing colors around her, or the washed-away grieving threads she wished she could make brighter, more convincing, more real. If only she wasn't so dulled down, then maybe she could see things that weren't black-and-white failure.

-My hair was once the only valuable part of me. If someone had suggested I cut it, I would have cried.-

Chained to their toil, her eyes dragged back towards the discarded loom, bony hands clutching the woven cloth just before it began to fade into reality.

-My hair is here now. -

The clicking of blanched wood began to whisper through once more. Homura's head swung downwards so that her tears wouldn't quench the dull fire within her hands.

She did not notice a midnight purple one fall into Earth when her tapestry was hung, and dredged back to her house, body limp, eyes lifeless, dead on the floor.