Weave

 

Arin had always felt the city pulse beneath their feet. Not metaphorically, literally. Even the streets above the glittering towers hummed with threads of order, thin and nearly invisible, vibrating just beyond the perception of ordinary citizens.

Beneath it all, in the Loomhall, the hum was deafening. Gold and silver filaments stretched like veins through the stone walls, pulsating with the memory of every law, every building, every whispered secret. The city wasn’t built; it was woven. And the Loomkeepers maintained it.

Arin’s mentor, Master Calvere, had been teaching them to see those threads since the day they arrived: how a single misaligned filament could unravel a district, or even an entire block of consciousness. And Arin had learned quickly. Too quickly, some said.

But learning was not enough.

Tonight, Arin traced their fingers along a filament that throbbed with a strange, alien energy; a black thread, thin and humming with a faint discord.

Forbidden. Dangerous.

“Careful,” Calvere’s voice said behind them, soft as silk but edged with iron. “Leave it alone.”

“I can’t,” Arin whispered. The thread sang when they touched it, vibrating with voices. Voices of people they had seen above. People who no longer remembered protests, lovers, and families. Ghosts erased from history.

Calvere stepped closer, the glow of the loom reflecting off his sharp cheekbones. “That thread… touches things you were never meant to see. The Charter forbids it.”

“I’ve seen enough,” Arin said, their hands trembling. “You’ve been rewriting them. Erasing them.”

Calvere’s eyes didn’t flinch. “I am keeping them alive. Order keeps people alive. Chaos… chaos kills faster than hunger or disease.”

Arin clenched their fists. “You call erasing memory ‘keeping them alive’? They aren’t alive if they don’t exist in their own minds.”

“Mercy is often cruel,” Calvere said. “And you —” he gestured to their hands — “would destroy them trying to save them.”

Arin’s vision blurred. The threads hummed in resonance with their heartbeat, and suddenly the Loomhall stretched impossibly; walls bending, arches arching like ribs of some immense, slumbering beast. Threads slithered through the air, a living lattice of light and intention.

They stepped forward. Their fingers grazed the black thread, and the city shivered in response. One touch, one pull, and centuries of stolen memory could flood back into the minds of those above. One pull, and the city might breathe. Or tear itself apart.

“Stop.”

Calvere’s voice was ice.

Arin hesitated, “I can’t.”

“You will,” he said, raising a hand. The loom responded. Threads lifted from floor and ceiling, thick and luminous, like snakes hunting prey. They darted toward Arin.

The first brushed a wrist. Cold. Bright. Hum vibrating straight through bone. 

The next wrapped around an ankle, snug and unyielding, cutting slightly into flesh. Arin tugged, kicked, twisted, but the threads anticipated every move, tightening as they moved, constricting with perfect rhythm.

They pressed against their chest, their throat, coiling around fingers and torso in a lattice of living force. The hum of the loom synchronized with Arin’s heartbeat, then dominated it, overriding the body’s rhythm, until the apprentice could feel only the threads, only the hum, only the pressure of a thousand lives and laws pressing in all directions.

Calvere stepped close. “Even rebellion has a place in the pattern. You will keep the city from ever forgetting what happens to those who pull.”

Arin’s lungs heaved. Their tongue pressed against the filaments around their throat, trying to speak, to scream, to warn the city above, but the threads swallowed sound and vibration alike. Every struggle only tightened the weave, entwining them further. Fingers, wrists, ankles, waist; every joint ensnared. They were suspended in midair, body taut, held by the luminous, serpentine lattice.

The black thread pulsed once, teasing, alive, then vanished from sight. 

The city above went on. The streets shimmered, trains hissed along invisible tracks, and citizens walked in perfect rhythm. None remembered protests erased, none remembered erased voices, none noticed that the apprentice who had almost unbound them had vanished into the Loomhall.

Arin hung, immobile, body pressed into the web, conscious of every filament humming along their skin, biting lightly into muscle and tendon, vibrating through every nerve ending. They could see the golden and silver threads vibrating around them, each strand carrying a law, a memory, a life. The threads whispered of a world that would never know freedom, a world perfectly preserved at the cost of the human body caught at its center.

Time ceased. Days, months, centuries blended into the unchanging pulse of the city. Arin felt every breath of the metropolis, every pulse in its streets, every flicker of memory it absorbed. They felt shadows of themselves in the threads, what they might have been, what they might have saved, yet could not reach them.

And always, the web held them.

Arin’s fingers brushed against one filament, and the hum vibrated through their bones. They could see the black thread somewhere beyond reach, glowing faintly, forbidden, alive. They wanted it. Could almost touch it. But every movement only tightened the hold, and the loom’s pulse reminded them: freedom is not permitted. Not yet, not ever.

And in the silence of the Loomhall, the black thread thrummed faintly while Arin hung, a witness, a monument, a prisoner of the perfect pattern.

 

Prompt credit to createglue