The Weaver's Blindness

Folklore

Sit close. Keep your hands still. The wind is rising, and the wind is only the breath of the One who sleeps, stirring the edges of our world. In the beginning, there was no stone. There was no soil. There was only the Great Slumber and the silver hair that flowed from the deity's head, a river of moonlight that had no shore. The One slept, and in that sleeping, the hair began to drift. It drifted and it tangled; it tangled and it spun. This was the first weaving. The silver threads crossed one another in the dark, forming the warp and the weft of all we touch. We are the children of the fray. We live upon the silken plains where the weave is tight and the ground is smooth. You see the horizon, and you think it is a line. It is not a line. It is a seam. It is the place where the silver hair was tucked back into the void. But the One does not sleep in a stillness. The One tosses. The One turns. When the deity shifts a shoulder, the earth shudders. When the deity sighs, the forests sway. These are the tremors we feel in our marrow; these are the reminders that we are but dust upon a blanket. Look to the north. See the peaks that pierce the clouds. You call them mountains. We call them the Knots. They were not planned. They were the result of a snag in the silver hair, a place where the thread looped back upon itself and tightened. The harder the One pulled in their sleep, the higher the mountains rose. The more the thread twisted, the steeper the cliffs became. The mountains are the mistakes of the weave, the places where the fabric bunched and hardened into stone. Be careful where you walk in the high places. There are gaps in the weave there. There are places where the silver has worn thin, where the thread has snapped under the tension of a thousand years. If you step into a fray, you do not fall down. You fall out. You fall through the gaps of the world and return to the Great Slumber. We weave our own baskets. We weave our own clothes. We do this to honor the pattern. We keep the threads tight so that we might imagine the world is stable. We pretend the knots are permanent. But remember the silver. Remember the shift. We are only as secure as the sleep of the One, and the One is beginning to stir.