ꙮ Salme’s Atelier, in the Library annex. Centrelight streams through the window and all the Atelier’s woodwork sings with its light. She’s been rather busy working on some projects! She’s spun fibre into thread, and spun gnosis into the thread along with it; she’s been doing that in her spare time for quite some time now, if I’m not mistaken, and now– thinking of the Beast, and its inhabitants, and what she could make for them to keep their comfort close.
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- Yazhn Ravhi, the Hierophant
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#saint
slides the shuttle between the threads, shifts her feet pedals, allows a breath for the weddles to shift the warp-threads into their new configuration then returns the shuttle to the other side. She’s thinking of dry heat and starlight, of wind, of warmth. The overall impression is of warmth, the pellucid-radiant cotton weft serving as structure and shield for the thick-spun burning wool weft she’s weaving between them. Finally the tension is right. She pushes the batten home with even tension. One last line, and then this, at least, will be complete—but for the dyeing.
ꙮ Line by line, one side then the other. Did you know that there are attestations in Samudra of Ancient script being written like that? Written left to right, then right to left. Like a beast of burden would plow a field, is how Almachadta would think of it, but they didn’t have that metaphor available to them on the pellucid plane, so instead they called that kind of writing weaveward. The cloth is pleasantly, slightly, warm to the touch; it will always be thus.
: “Weaveward? That’s lovely. I’d like to try it sometime, writing that way.” She pauses. “Any thoughts on this last pass special? I want it to remind them of home, even when they’re very far away.” And yes, she knows she doesn’t have to speak aloud for you to hear, but it feels right to do so.
ꙮ So it does, and I would do the same, were I capable. As for the cloth… you spun gnosis into the thread in Queenstown, in the Valley, on the train between. It could only ever remind them of home, but it should also remind them of you, don’t you think?
blinks. “Well that doesn’t … I suppose it will. That wasn’t the intent, but. I suppose that is an inevitability. We so often take weavers for granted, you know? Who wove the cloth doesn’t matter, just that the cloth was woven. But they’d remember, wouldn’t they?” She thinks of that, as she sends the shuttle through once more—of herself, of her love for them, of the part of her that is fire, that can and does warm.
ꙮ What we do is, often, not what we ought to do. It is a work of art, and you wove it with your own gnosis, gathered from the world by your hands as surely as the fibre was gathered. It will have your signature, one way or the other; I think it’s fair to lay claim to that. They would want to remember you by it, when it warms them on a cool night. And so: a shimmering trace of flourishing-wrapped-around-burning along one edge of the cloth, a maker’s mark.
: “You’re right, of course. And I—embrace that. Maybe not wholly and lovingly, not yet. But I will.” She runs her hands over the completed cloth. Later, she will release the tension, stitch in the loose threads, and knot the fringe, but she knows how to do that. Right now she has an experiment she wants to do. “Though,” she says idly aloud to you. “I was thinking of leaving the fringe long, that I could maybe thread some crystal beads with our voices recorded there. For them. If they ever find themselves alone again.” She says ‘if,’ even though it feels like it will be a ‘when.’ She says ‘if’ because some part of her is nursing, (rotating), a strange hope she can’t even articulate (well, she can. She is good at articulating things).
(But does she want to? If she speaks it into the world, will it then become something that might be taken?)
ꙮ Some things can simply be yours and yours alone, if you are not ready to speak them aloud, yet. It is not the case that committing something to the record means that it can now be taken from you, though; if anything, it is a claim staked to anyone who is listening. Who, in this instance, is me. But. I digress. I think the long fringe is a good idea.
smiles, not at you, because there is no ‘you’ here to smile at. But her smile is for you, and you alone. “Thank you, silmät.” She stands, straightens, stretches, and looks out into the Centrelight. “I think, then … I hope that maybe, perhaps, I might get to choose the length of the thread of my life. That I might get to have as much as I could possibly want, rather than having a normal human lifespan. Though who knows, maybe I’d want a normal lifespan? I don’t think I’d be satisfied with that.” She laughs a little. “I am not easily satisfied.”
ꙮ I can’t help thinking that it would be better to have the choice, and then choose according to one’s will, whatever that will ends up being, than to not have the choice at all, so that seems like a reasonable desire, to me.
smiles for you again. “Having the choice is … almost always better than not. I still can’t believe I …” she shakes her head and then she chooses to stretch a bit more, before going over to sit cross-legged on a pillow before the Centrelight. A support spindle is sitting there—light and agile, easy to keep spinning—and a distaff wound with gleaming raw silk. For fineness or speed, she’ll use the wheel, but she prefers to spin by hand—especially for this.
: “Since I’m going to ply them all together I don’t have to start with pellucid,” she tells you as she settles into position. She sounds like she’s trying to convince herself.
ꙮ Different letters require you to place your pen to the page at different initial angles, different positions relative to the whole of the text. What are you thinking of starting with, here?
: “Burning. It’s the easiest. I am fire, after all.” She winds the starter thread around the spindle’s base, and starts the draw from the distaff, but doesn’t begin spinning, not yet. “But I’m not sure if that’s right. I was going to make separate threads, you see. Five lengths, each type of gnosis drawn from me, about me as … proof. For Jae. So she knows I’m alive. Then I was going to ply them together with liminal. So it doesn’t really matter where I start.”
: “Unless it does? You don’t have to know, but if you have an opinion I’d … value it.”
ꙮ Just because you could start in any fashion doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter how you start. Set the tone. You weave a memorandum of yourself for her hands, and you are fire; to me it stands to reason that that’s where you’d start. Would one open a missive, or a story, with something untrue to one’s self and meaning?
: “There’s a stylistic argument for that, I think, but it tends to not be my style, no. Indeed, I prefer to start with the barest truth, and work backwards from there. Thank you again.” And then she begins to spin.
flicks the spindle, keeping it twisting rapidly, drawing the silk from the distaff, and she thinks of the fact that she has always burned. As a small girl, brown as a nut and unquenchable as a bonfire, she’s burned—with the desire to know, to love, to feel, to do. Everything had been new. ‘I am tired of having hands / she said / I want wings’ and ‘I am tired of human / she said / I want to live on the sun’ and now she is here, burning, burning, burning, passion and emotion running over, free to want and feel and love—and hate. To be as messy and as imperfect as she wants. Both human and scorched-burnt on the sun’s surface, feeling everything again. She draws that out of herself, and spins it into the silk that winds tighter and tighter and tighter, perfectly and expertly made.
ꙮ The silk is ember-bright. Tense but not so tense as to gnarl the strand, tense like a coiled spring. What else are you, that you weave into this self-telling story-gift?
: “I am All things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?).” She laughs, and she thinks of Almachadta, the Centrelight, soil, roots, growing things, flowers and fields and wonder. She never fit, always burned too brightly, but she still loved it. Loves it. Her context. He connections. The rhizomes that reach and knot notes everywhere, connecting people and places. She thinks of the part of her that flourishes, too, and that flourishing means growing, means accepting things as they are, not as you they ought to be. She offers then, her feeling of home, the house that lives in her past and in her heart, filled with people, open to strangers, but she also offers awe. “Glory be to God for dappled things – / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings.” And also her one wild and precious life.
ꙮ Swift; slow; sweet; sour; adazzle, dim: this thread is every colour and none at all, like irrica in the light, and it winds round the burning thread, twisting and bending and curling, suggesting vaguely but not implying a shape, the two curling into and around and through one another in ways that they could not but do. What else?
: “Want,” she says softly. “Sacrifice. Ambition. Small ambitions and large ones too.” Here she thinks of want—Jae’s attention, Aurelius’ touch, Awoken’s heart, and larger—a story, a legacy, a rewriting of an entire cosmos. She thinks, almost absurdly, of blackberries. “Some berries fall: those are for squirrels. / Some are unripe, reserved for bears. / Some go into the metal bowl. / Those are for you, so you may taste them / just for a moment.” She remembers picking blackberries for them when they first arrived in Almachadta, remembers the greediness, the selfish joy of tasting them again. She remembers stealing perfect blackberry crumbles in little miniature ramekins from some Courtyard vendor. She remembers letting herself be devoured if it got her anywhere at all. “Some berries occur in sun, / but they are smaller. / It’s as I always told you: / the best ones grow in shadow,” she says, and she lets the tenebrous core of herself weave itself with the silk, ugly and beautiful by turns, unashamed, maybe, for the first time.
ꙮ A berry-black thread of gnosis unfurls like a vine, and where it touches the burning and the flourishing gnosis, they burn brighter, they ramify and tangle around the vine; it coils, and changes, a parallel structure around the two threads, changing what was into something more complex than that, and that complexity, that reaching-out, is the core of the act of creation, and it does spill forth beauty. What else?
: “I also serve.” She thinks of caring for Iikka when she was very, very small. She thinks of standing beside her companions now. And then there is the Sword-Saint. There is always the Sword-Saint. She loves Almachadta even if she has never felt entirely of Almachadta, and part of that means giving herself to Almachadta. “Was I born to become / a ritual mourner?” She wonders aloud. There is a part of her that feels as if she were crafted for the role precisely, by hands that carved her harshly and unkindly. But the world does not make such neat sense. Not even stories make that neat kind of sense. “It’s madness to live without joy / And to repeat to the dead / Whose part was to be gladness / Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts / Only the two salvaged words: / Truth and justice.” And she spins her radiance into silk, not unconflicted or simple or straightforward, but there nonetheless, steady despite the shadows that cross her face now and again. She is the Sword-Saint, and she does serve.
ꙮ And once again, she speaks with a resonance that reaches past and reaches through; a thing that will be her own and is not yet, the potential of which exists in every moment and breath, which reaches back towards her from that point, sings a harmony that underlies her words. This thread joins the berry-black, curls itself around it like a cat in a sunbeam, its resonance a pure and perfect harmony. And she remembers: When she came to the villages, people flocked to the gates. Not for her mask, but for her - not the same way that they showed up for Badri, not more or not less, not the same people, necessarily, but they came because they knew that she would learn their stories, and share them in her song, a rhizome of transmission of that which mattered. And all of this is like an armature for the berry-black vine, and the structure binds itself to itself, remembering whom it echoes. What else?
swallows, hard, and blinks back tears, but she will thank you when she next has a moment. And then, despite the fact she’s done this so many times neither the Architect nor whatever metaphysics that rule their world could wipe the memory from her (she could work a spindle almost before she could walk) the perfect rotation of the shaft almost stutters. “Pellucid, clear lake, certainty. I have at least the virtue of curiosity and of counsel, but …” ⁂
: “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.,” she tries, but though she can draw the resonance into her voice, though she knows, she knows, this is a part of her, and those lines are not untrue, they aren’t true either. It is about truth. It is about truth. She hesitates, just a breath, and then … ⁂
Saga-sword, truth-teller. The story is a lie. The story is the truest thing there is. And she has correlated so much, understood so much, learned so much. She laughs. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant — / Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise,” and into the thread she spins her stories, she spins the library, hours of annotations, of composition, of researching. Learning, and the delight in learning—the mapmaker teaching her her letters, Badri teaching her to write, Aurelius teaching her to see, Wolf sharing his song and Awoken his stars and Luĉja their wisdom and Archie his way of seeing. The delight of counsel, of swapping theories with Jorule and Caion and the slow joy of unraveling a mystery but keeping awe tucked in her heart. “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind —,” she says, almost sings.
🙧
ꙮ And a thread the blue of Samudra’s sea and the blue of that which you observe through breaks in the clouds, as you might standing on Tulinsuojat’s shore, becomes the lattice through which the burning and flourishing strands always-already wound; not new or strange but always present, once she saw how to see it there. The three strands form a helix, around which counterwinds the berry-black vine on its radiant scaffold. This would serve the purpose which Salme had in mind.
: “It would, but what if I could do more. Push it just a little further into something new. Come with me on a journey, silmät?”
ꙮ What, indeed, if you could? I would like to find out.
closes her eyes. She thinks of herself, who leaps between worlds. She thinks of herself weaving wonders. She thinks of herself and xenia, loving a stranger. She draws impossibility, movement towards truth, the collapsing of space, of time, of here and there. Of Salme and the intended recipient. Of individual fibers twisted together, of individual gnoses. “I have gone out, a possessed witch, / haunting the black air, braver at night;” she says, still spinning, “A woman like that is not a woman, quite. / I have been her kind.” ⁂
lifts her eyelids. Salme’s eyes are a light brown—unremarkable, mostly. Almost yellow—not gold—in the right light. Tawny, the flickering orange of hot coals, sometimes. She didn’t realize that until Zaya told her that. “I have found the warm caves in the woods,” she says, and she thinks of the shrine with its tallymarks and the resolve to change it. “fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:” she says, and she thinks of the strangers she’s invited in, the riotous, happy warmth. “A woman like that is misunderstood. / I have been her kind..” There are many things words can communicate. There are many things stories, memories, gestures, ritual can communicate. There is nothing, though, quite like finding someone who understands a part of you no one ever correctly saw before. She thinks of Jae, and herself, and the distance between them collapsed, intertwined. She can do it. She believes this.
⁂
then, finally, thinks of a promise. To face the end of the world. And then she is speaking to Jae, but she is speaking, also, to the universe, and she is speaking directly to you as well. “I have ridden in your cart, driver, / waved my nude arms at villages going by, / learning the last bright routes, survivor / where your flames still bite my thigh / and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.,” she says, and she does not know if she looks directly at you, but she looks with purpose where her heart points, and her eyes are fire. “A woman like that is not ashamed to die,” she says. “I have been her kind.”
🙧
ꙮ Thread-found the gnosis twists, again, once more, in a direction that is not any of the eight that can be named, reaching to remember form-fact-firmament. It touches something true. Liminal, DC 5?
- Salme, The Sword-Saint invoked their 🌌liminal gnosis [d8] -> 4.
- Salme, The Sword-Saint spent 1 Arete and now has 5 remaining.
ꙮ As you watch, as we watch, five and one threads of gnosis weave around one another, and where before they ramified, entangled, here they become a fractal, briefly, gleaming with potential. ⁂
ꙮ Did you know that there is a reason that the word ‘textile’ contains the word for ‘text’, Salme? When we invented words, we had not yet bothered with one to distinguish the act of entangling threads of words, one after the other, weavewise or otherwise, from the act of entangling threads. Stories were, and remain, a thing that is woven; textiles and texts both a thing that is worn for dignity and comfort; to convey meaning and self. ⁂
ꙮ Five and one threads of gnosis twist through an unseen way, they chase each other through the air, briefly. Two helices, unmoored from and ungrasped by each other yet perfectly balanced around a center point, chasing each others tails in imagination and then, rather suddenly, literally. The artifact takes the form of two serpents, one thread-of-irrica and one chiaroscuro black-and-white, with little purple french-knot eyes, tangled hopelessly together, one’s tail in the other’s jaws– an act of play more than violence, or perhaps of steadfast determination, in principle, to not let go. ⁂
ꙮ In the centre of the artifact, that which it surrounds, which is and can be felt even if it cannot be seen by the naked eye, is a small spark of an ever-burning fire, a reflection of Salme which represents, but does not in any way diminish her. 🙧
swallows, and it is a heavy swallow. “I didn’t know that, but as soon as you said it it made perfect sense.”
lifts the thing she’s made carefully, with both hands. “Silmät, it’s beautiful.”
ꙮ Yes, it is.
: “Sometimes,” she says, “I wonder if I’m greedy. If I want too much. If I am too much.” She doesn’t sound like she’s wondering it now.
ꙮ Could one, ever, truly, over-extend one’s hand towards brilliance, or towards another whose light we would touch? One could reach towards their will, and fall short, to be sure. And another might say that the falling-short is a death, avoided by having stayed one’s hand, and yet… I, myself, would reach towards that light. As you have done, here.
: “I would rather attempt to shine and fall short always and forever then dim myself again.” She runs her finger, wonderingly, over each of the snakes. She doesn’t know if there was once a word for this, this kind of burning, brilliant certainty, this kind of settledness in herself. “Thank you for weaving with me, silmät, warp-thread to my weft.”
ꙮ The work was yours; I simply observed its occurrence. But, you are welcome, and it was my joy to do so; such will I do, for as long as I am able.
: “The work was mine, sure, but the words were ours. You just told me text and textile share a root.” She smiles down at the artifact again. “Even if it was my will, it was a will that required your gaze to bring it to fruition, because I couldn’t see the outcome myself.” She sets the artifact down, this piece of herself she will give away, and says, “I think I’d like to go be alive on the Beast for a while, now. Is there anything I can do for you before I go?”
ꙮ It is good to be alive, wherever it is you are so doing it; what you can do, for me, I suppose, is experience something, anything, which brings you joy, or sparks your interest, or… go be alive, Salme. It was good to weave with you.