The Weaving

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room.

She sighed, again. Over and over, every life, every cycle. Same day, different millennia. The shape of her body changed, but not the Work. Not the threads, not the rules, not the weave.

What was the point?

The ennui always ate away at her around the fortieth year. Her youth was gone, again, and she was achy with the strain of the bench. So what if the threads were synthetic now? Who cared if the dyes are aniline, not from natural plants? That supplies were presumably delivered by drones and armored robotic vehicles, and the taboo from looking outside is to keep her from despair, not distraction?

The transparent plexi of the window was thick and slightly frosted. To keep her alive.

She was sick to death of shadows.

At least the air quality here was better than many of the other locations she lived and wove within in the last century or so. Every time, she'd find herself in some tower or another, with tools and supplies that looked so antiquated against the sleek modern materials. Or the cracking, dilapidated modern materials, if she ended up in one of the war zones. Did they get the gear from a looted museum? She had to assume there weren't any trees anymore, much less wood that was capable of being shaped into utensils. Or people knowledgeable enough to shape it. Or had the world looped again while she was toiling at the loom? What had she missed in the intervals?

Yet she still wove memories into the tapestry, in colors she remembered if she closed her eyes. Mirrors, then video cameras, showed clearly all the things outside, in vibrant colors and subtle shifts of tone. Even when color leached out of the world, out of camera shot, still she wove from mind's eye. In desperation, in validation, in search of restoration -

Faugh. Enough. It was torture to remember what was.

Loops! That's all she was made of! That's all anything was made of! Her life, the weave spread out in all its rainbow glory on the loom in front of her, time itself. Spun of gossamer threads as fine as a strand of nucleopeptides, or as thick as a rotating ball of plasma. The twirl of the galaxy around a spindle consisting of a black hole, the fluff spitting out again when Lachesis didn't snag it properly. Even Atropos would get world-weary, and clip the threads of an exhausted planet with scissors composed of dark matter. Didn't she recall an old, old story, of an elder god losing a hand when he got too snippy with her?

She pulled back from the loom and stretched her back with a crackling shudder. Blood, muscles, a heart beating thump-thump-thump with quickened movement that she'd nearly forgotten. Too long. Too long in a body that would be ravaged over and over by time, Clotho pulling her life thread and tying a neat knot in the end, adding another and another and another -

Where were they now, in this near-dead world? They must still exist, for she kept being born and reborn to the same task, to the same curse, to this endless looping march of thread and color and shuttle and shed. Why? Atropos, do your job already!

Her original shiny bronze mirror had long ago been replaced with one of beaten gold, then of mercuried silver, then aluminum. All of them had long ago been replaced by modern technology. She preferred the time of mirrors; at least it showed her a world alive and green. Not this wasted land of browns in so many shades she was sure her skein chests couldn't house them all.

How many years since she'd seen a flower bloom? A sheep stroll across a landscape?

A knight?

The only male she knew still existed was downstairs. Theoretically. She could hear them through the thick floor occasionally, and food appeared regularly. Sometimes there was another lighter voice, and maybe giggles? Laughter? In this soul-sucking world?

Why am I doing this?

Why am I still here?

Even as the thought entered her mind, her fingers bent to the task at hand. It was all she knew. Throughout the thousands of years, there was only the endless weaving. Sometimes she would gather more colors from the storage chests, sometimes embroider over a plain pattern, but always her attention on some aspect of the weave. Fibers, intersection, parted and re-woven, breaks and slubs knotted and smoothed. Loops, patterned over and over again.

That led to this. This world, brown and sere. Almost dead. She saw it again and again in the video feeds, here and elsewhere. Around the globe. Life pulled away, drained and vanished. Oceans barely pulsed on listless shores. No song, no bird calls, no chattering, no bells, barely even a breeze. The howl of storm or rumble of thunder would be welcome, but even that was stilled.

Were there any other choices?

What if.... What if she - just stopped?

Her fingers flew with the shuttle, but her thoughts were no longer on the work. One answer, at least, she knew. Disobeying. It had happened time and time again. Death came soon after. But, even in the lifetimes where she complied, she still died before the work was completed. And came back, for more work, same tapestry but different place, different time, different colors. Slowly the life and color leached out of the world, and the tapestry was no closer to being completed than before. Then, what it was all about?

Her eyes looked up beyond the warp to look at the completed section. She'd invested millennia of work into it, so the pattern should be clear to see. But the warp blurred at the edges, as if it dissolved into some strange dimension that she couldn't fathom. The lumps and bumps of the tapestry lay in the shadows, curse them. Everything was obscured from view.

Loops. Marching into eternity, their silent rows a testament to her work, that who would ever see?

Looping... Un-looping?

One thing suddenly occurred to her: what if, instead, she undid the weaving? She'd had suspicions for a long time that she was recording the history of a people and a world. But the people were mostly gone, by their own unmaking. What was left to weave? A safe place, for what? Whom?

Did the people down below even exist? She had never seen them. Were they real?

Or were they jailors?

Were they... the very Beings that cursed her to this fate? It was a chilling thought.

She remembered a name. Penelope. Penelope had made a different choice, had undone the work every night, to give herself time. And she'd gotten her husband back, and had reclaimed her life.

How many lives could she reclaim by undoing the loops that led to this?

Could she really do this?

Her eyes darted around the room. Modern lighting had taken over the old torches and candles long and long ago, but with the old equipment had come some old leftovers. She'd always assumed in case of blackout or emergency, though none had ever visited her tower. No matter what happened outside, the weaving continued unending.

But one chest always held some candles and matches.

How much time did she have before the curse hit her?

She'd been a good little weaver these past few centuries. Nothing to tempt her to look out the windows at such inventive destruction! It usually took her a long time to die, like when she stole that boat. Enough to sing a swan song. Theatrical, indeed, but those times called for such displays.

She pushed away decisively, before she could change her mind. She had nothing to lose. The chest furthest away held what she was looking for, and she carried her treasures back to the loom. Four fat beeswax candles were swiftly placed at various points where warp met weft, to maximize the spread of the flame. She lit the wicks, and they immediately caught.

She waited till tongues of flame ran like rivers into the blurry shadowy area, lighting up bits and pieces of the pattern. A bouquet of flowers burned to ash, the fire moving on to the arm of a lover, then the crown he wore. Beyond, a skyscraper in bold colors of blue and gray flared and died. The rain of oranges and yellows destroyed the fabric, like the people outside had done to their world.

Then she looked out the window.

She felt the curse take hold, but the fire could not die now. She heard the loom crash to pieces as she beheld a world broken and dying. There was some water, black and muddy brown. Not even grass, but bare dirt looked dry and stripped of nutrients. No bloated bodies, or twisted wrecks of metal, or craters where life and love had once stood, like she'd seen on the video feed. Just... nothing left. The end of a world, beyond hope of saving.

Then let it burn.

Atropos, where are you?

She sat on a chest. The fire burned hot, she could feel it, but it was a detached feeling. She felt blurry, like her un-making. It was an inferno, but it, too, was blurry. Like most of it was burning somewhere else, and taking the heat with it.

The room began to melt.

Not from heat, but from reality. She stared at her hands, gnarled from century upon century of weaving. They were dripping, without pain, like the wax from the candles. She wondered idly when the poor bees had perished, whose work burned the structure of their remembrance.

The room tilted, and she was falling, falling.

Everything was black. Not like she was dying, she knew what that felt like, but as if the fabric of the world was disintegrating under her. Pinpoints of light glittered above her, and tears fell, because she hadn't seen the stars in so long. They were beautiful.

She fell, and fell, and everything faded to black. Far away in the distance, the orange flames flickered and burned on, and on....

She fell, and stared at the stars, and let the tears fall.

Time lost meaning. Distance was a faint memory. Directionality? She floated in a void of no color, staring at points of light so bright they hurt.

She fell forever, in no time at all.

Something brushed her hand, and curiously, she curled her fingers around it.

The black ever so slowly turned to billows of gray.

She remembered. Fog.

And a bright light burned, and the fog faded.

The sun rose.

She blinked.

She was lying on a hill, richly green with grass. A clump of it was in her hand. Other things swam into focus: birds, and clouds, and sheep, and a few children laughing and playing. Above her, a chattering of ladies got louder, and noises.

It took a while, but her mind finally realized the noises were saying. "Arachne, Arachne! Come on, sleepyhead! Wake up! Come join us!"

She remembered.

She remembered it all going wrong.

She knew what she had done, and how she could change it.

No curse this time. No attitude, no bragging, no claiming to be better!

She took a deep breath, of fresh, clean air. There were still tears on her cheeks.

It felt new. And young.

She smiled, and sat up. A cluster of young ladies sat on plump cushions under some shady trees, and a breeze flowed by. Flower petals danced on the wind. Three of the ladies glanced at her knowingly. The spindle, the shears, and the measure of thread they worked with glittered in the shade.

"Come on lazybones, you're the best weaver! Do something with these beautiful threads! We've been sitting here spinning and dyeing them, the least you could do is make something pretty!"

Indeed, she could.

And she would.

'The web was woven curiously,

The charm is broken utterly,

Draw near and fear not,—this is I,

The Lady of Shalott.'

The Lady of Shalott (1832) By Alfred, Lord Tennyson