The Woven Tales

This town greets you with open jaws. They say if you're going to survive here you need deep roots. It's a pity you don't have them, you just have me.

Treble was the one that told me you were out there. I'd just fed him his dinner, and was getting ready to set him in his guard-pen for the night, when his blank eyes turned to the door with such intent. He wandered straight to it, and started pawing it with withered hands, groaning terribly.

When I opened the door and saw you on the step, do you know what he did? He stooped to pick you up. Not to eat you, I don't think, he held you so delicately, as if he were a human cherishing a newborn. The first spot of kindness you were ever shown in your short life came from a ghoul.

I don't think whoever left you at my doorstep meant you any compassion, not with my reputation in this town. People see me and cry witch, kidnapper, murderer, ghoul... all sorts of things. Say I'm the one who brought Treble back from the dead. Say I lure children into my home with the tinkling of music boxes. Say I'm really a ghost, and that my body lies under the pear tree in my garden, and that's why it grows so strong.

It's very easy to believe in evil witches when the truth is much harder to deal with. The truth means that someone who isn't me attempted necromancy, shoved a wayward inhuman spirit into a corpse, and now both amble about in flesh-hungry confusion. The truth means that said revenant got his name from his fondness for music boxes, which I indulge, but that far from settles the matter; those neighbourhood children remain unfound. And I'm not a ghost, but I am... Other. And two bodies, one of which was once mine, nourish the roots of that pear tree. Gossip can be like a stopped clock, you know.

A bizarre amount of my problems start with attempted necromancy. There's whatever happened to poor Treble before I lured him away from his captor-creator with a jar of rancid offal, there's what happened to me, and now there's you. Treble's had his time in the spotlight, and you're too young to appreciate yours yet, so it's my turn. I was a unremarkable girl from a village over yonder who grew up to be an unremarkable woman. A weaver, and at two-and-twenty I was affianced to a respectable toymaker twice that. It was more of a business matter than anything else, but he seemed nice enough, as did the town, at first. I didn't much care either way; the unpredictability of romance was never for me, I much preferred the intricate planning and artistry of the loom. My husband-to-be seemed uninterested in having children of his own and had no wish for me to cease my profession upon marriage, so I was happy enough with the arrangement. I probably would have remained so had I not been killed. Struck by horse's hoof on a night-delivery of some weaving, I lingered in pain and nonsense long enough to see the sunrise before I finally died.

And that was when my problems started.

If it were up to me alone I'd be busy being woven into the pear tree by its roots, but unfortunately my fiancé had fallen in love with me. So he tried to bring me back. Not as a ghoul, as Treble's captor-creator did, but as a spirit inside a machine of his creation.

He made a simulacrum of me out of wood and toy-parts. Life-size, like a mannequin filled with clockwork. And then he tried to bring me to life.

It's a terrible thing, to be pulled from peace and safety into someone else's fantasy, but I suppose you'd know that. Until Treble, that was probably all you knew. I tried to live with him as his doll, I really did. But I could not speak. And I could not eat. And he'd made my fingers too stiff and clumsy to hold a shuttle.

I stuck it out for a year and a day until I choked him. A year and a day of nothing in my world but him and his fantasy. And even after I did it there's no justice; he gets to rest under the pear tree and I'm stuck here.

There are some perks to this body, of course. I'll never be able to speak, or eat, but I've modified myself enough now that I can weave again. I even made some improvements. I was always captivated by the greatest weaver of legend, and having only two arms and but a single pair of eyes is so limiting...

I don't think I'd have been able to take the time to write this in my old form, you know. But now I can watch you and bounce you as you need whilst I write my thoughts. You little tyke. My little tyke. What's your story, I wonder? Were you made by someone trying to recapture what they lost or trying to recreate what they'll never have? Were you once one of the disappeared children? It doesn't matter to me where you came from or why, what I know is that you crossed the veil twice and never tends to go well for a soul. I am certain of your personage but I'm also certain that the parts used to create you weren't human... if they were you'd have less fur. And fewer eyes. And no teeth.

This town is going to be harsh to you, little one, so different from what they expect and so easy to weave into what they fear, and you've no roots to ground you... but you do have me.