The Shattered Weaveress Part 1 (Patreon)

The Shattered Weaveress

Or

The Fortress of Daughters

Part 1

Sky-Flower didn’t budge when her sister first called for her to head to the outer walls, claiming she had spotted a group of men fleeing across the green. For as long as she could remember, her sister was the sort for fantasy and false sightings, keen to excite but slow to consider.

Sky-Flower’s resolve lasted only as long as the other priestess-daughters began to leave all around her.

By the hundreds, they rose to the heights of their home with the spidery legs and wings gifted to them by the Weaveress. Sky-Flower herself loved to climb. Her favorite thing to climb was the silk noose that had been used to lynch her mother during the bad days.

She was younger then. Too young to remember the exactness of the horror, but she remembered being scared. She remembered her mother screaming her name as threads began to grow from her neck just before she fell upward into the sky.

She tried to free her mother using a kitchen knife, but the dragons in her blood got angry at her acting like a boy, and forced pain into her. Staring at the shadow of her mother’s thrashing body, a sudden stillness consumed the body. Soon, mother stopped struggling. Soon, mother released her grip on the noose. Soon, mother opened her arms and embraced the sky, a rapturous smile pulling her face into a perpetual rictus as she swayed in the wind.

And mother had a beautiful smile.

Skittering up the Weaveress’ threads, Sky-Flower darted upward and panted a small kiss on her mother’s forehead as always. Remembering the rules of piety, she loudly greeted all the aunties and big sisters she could see around her. She tried to remember their names, but there were so many of them, and she never had a chance to learn them all.

Something about that made Sky-Flower quite sad.

Leaping off her mother’s body using her eight legs, she hopped across five more nooses in sequence with a few other daughters before she sailed over the walls of the inner castle and spread her wings.

The flesh on her black fluttered open like a translucent fan and Sky-Flower dove down across the layered walls made from wood and bone. Some of her fellows accompanied her descent and they giggled at each other’s company, indulging in a brief bout of aerial tag before breaking off again.

Sailing over all three rings leading to where thee Weaveress nested at the heart of the mottled castle, she skipped across the parapets and swatted tattered flags as she soared down toward the moss-coated threshold of Fort Greenhome.

Sky-Flower couldn’t quite remember why it had been called that, but she guessed it made sense. Rolling hills and vast fields lined with flowers tall as cloud-piercing trees went into the horizon. To the far left, she could see the beginnings of the ocean lick at distant sands lining the landbridge leading up to their home. From the right ran a long, deep channel that used to be filled with water.

Again, she wasn’t sure why it was filled with water. Some of the books said stuff about war being paused and a truce with the “mongrel-blooded Kosgan dogs” until the crisis was over. Really weird stuff since all daughters knew that fighting was boy-like and got you sick immediately.

Except if it was between some of those bright-haired daughters. But they were strange themselves, seeing how tall and muscular they were getting.

Maybe it was something to do with how well their hair drew in sunlight.

No matter. Sky-Flower would ask the Weaveress later.

Folding her wings and rearing her legs up in anticipation of a landing, her eight legs curled as she slammed down and dug her pedipalps between the cracks running atop the parapets. The outer walls were rimmed by what looked to be jagged teeth. Rusted tubes and rotting hives also littered the structure, but the Weaveress didn’t tell the daughters to do anything about them, so they stayed.

Pushing through the crowd, Sky-Flower found herself drawn into the excitement as they stood in rows across the walls, some of her sisters pointing down at distant figures running through the grass.

Squinting her eyes, she tried to make out the features of the strangers–of what they were and what they were like. As more and more daughters squeezed atop the limited space, she found herself trying to look over the towering body of one of the blonde daughters–a bricklayer if judged by her Weaver-blessed gifts.

Sky-Flower herself was touched by her nearness to the great Weaveress, and so she took on an imitation of shape. She had gained the legs and wings of the protector, but no additional arms. And definitely no new eyes.

At that moment, she was more jealous of the searcher-daughters than she had ever been. Never more jealous of her sister and her freedom and her ability to see and explore and jump around.

Who cares if she didn’t have wings? At least she didn’t–

“Flower! Flower!”

She turned and found her sister, Sky-Wish waving at her. Pushing through the crowd as gently as she could, she made her way over and found an open spot offered by one of the lighthairs. Sky-Flower looked up to grin at the robust daughter in thanks, but the other girl was too distracted by the approaching figures to react.

They came sprinting through the grass, bodies bloodied and savaged. As they emerged from the green, a chorus of shock ate through the daughters.

“Look! Two-legs! They’re two-leggers! Ha!”

“Where’re the Weaveress’s gifts?”

“They’re so slow…”

“I don’t see any wings either.”

“Are those men?

“Sky-Wish,” Sky-Flower said, “Do you see how many–”

“Twenty,” her sister said. She sniffed the air and gagged. “They’re–” She paused. “They’re running from someone. I see–”

A loud crackle silenced all chatter. A few sisters recoiled. Some squealed as they fell off the back of the wall, tumbling over the edge. No one responded. No one apologized. No one spoke.

The bodies of the men burst and tore open like wet bags of red and ropey stuff. Confusion streamed through Sky-Flower, and judging from the faces of her sisters, she wasn’t alone.

Why had the men just exploded?

“What happened?” asked the tall daughter next to her.

“Maybe it’s something men do,” Sky-Wish suggested.

Sky-Flower ignored the conversation. She found herself fixed on the way their openings oozed with fluid, on how the last of the men were still crawling toward them.

He held up a hand and howled, and howled and howled. The noise coming from him was agony undistilled. Everyone on the walls flinched. A few of the younger ones even started crying, and with the building of emotional distress, Sky-Flower felt the weight of worry settle inside her.

She remembered this feeling. She had felt it the night her mother died. She had felt it when she was alone with little Sky-Wish afterward before the sky stopped weeping fire and the Weaveress crawled out from within the castle.

Fear. Tension. Dread.

It was like a bubble of tranquility had burst around Sky-Flower, and she could taste something wrong in the air for the first time, the scent like smoke and–

“There’s someone else,” Sky-Wish said. Sky-Flower turned to glance at her sister and saw all eight of her eyes were alight with the glow of the Weaveress’s sight. She was peering out through the leaves and trees and even the flesh of the dead. All that was natural belonged to the Weaveress, and all that was natural could be gifted to the daughters. “They’re coming out from… there’s… huh? There’s a cloud around them?”

“A cloud?” Sky-Flower asked, squeezing her eyes together again.

***

From a kilometer away, Veylis watched her Punished die and took her first steps toward the heart of the Rupture.