1 Prologue

The woman sat at her loom, hands sure and steady, eyes unseeing. The pattern she wove was a beautiful thing, each graceful line of color swooping and soaring with a perfectly cohesive randomness, but she saw none of it. Her eyes saw only the stories told within the threads.

There! A man chopped firewood for his family. As the woman watched, his skin grew mottled and discolored and finally melted away, leaving a skeleton vigorously chopping wood. Inside, his wife prepared dinner, humming even though the skin on her back had been flayed off and her tongue had been cut out. Nearby, their son was playing with his toys. His hands and feet had been amputated.

There! A city, teeming with life. As people scurried from one place to another, no one seemed to notice that the streets were slick with blood.

There! A grassy meadow on a sunlit summer day. The air was thick with the smell of blooming flowers and rotting flesh.

There! A young girl sang to herself as she was painstakingly skinned alive.

The woman added another thread to the shuttle. It fit as though it had been there from the beginning.

There! Vast armies clashed on a plain. Every soldier there dangled on strings that were held by two men playing chess.

There! A single blood-red rose with its petals dropping to the floor. As each petal fell, an invisible audience applauded.

There! The sun rose over a verdant forest. Worms crawled from under the tree roots, devouring the trees from within.

The woman wove through the night, each caress of shuttle and thread bringing a new image. A phoenix, its eyes devoured by crows. A woman with the body of a spider crooning lullabies to a serpent. A boy weeping blood and bleeding tears. A man peacefully meditating as he was burned at the stake. A dove, its heart torn out by a smiling infant. A book with its pages half burned. A girl cradling the head of a wolf in her arms.

The woman put down the shuttle and sighed. The things she read in the Loom were never in words, but the message was clear. Something was coming. Something monstrous. She could not control every event in the mortal world, no matter what stories were whispered about her in mortal mythology – day-to-day events were Chance’s domain – but she could and often did manipulate events so that the mortals turned away from the more horrifically destructive possibilities.

Chance. She would have to tell him. No – she couldn’t tell him. He was too impulsive, too passionate, too involved in the present to think about the past and the future. He would demand explanations, justifications, other possibilities. And she could not – could not – jeopardize the single thread of hope she had seen running through the visions in the Loom. To one who had not been trained in the reading of the Loom, the wrong choice would seem far sweeter than the hard and bitter path that would lead to survival. She could not trust Chance to make the right choice. She simply would not tell him until the entire Council knew.

Even if he hated her for it.

The woman rang a bell, calling one of her Adepts into the room. The Adept on duty slouched into the room, the sullenness that some Adepts showed to the Aspect that they were bound to emblazoned on her face. Every Aspect took many apprentices from the mortal world to train as their successor, but only one, the best of the best, was chosen as the next Aspect. The rest of the apprentices were made Adepts, relegated to the tasks that were not important enough to trifle their Aspects with. For most that was enough, but the for the more ambitious, it chafed.

The woman never reprimanded them for this attitude. Why scold for something that wasn’t really their fault?

With a scowl, the Adept sketched a curtsey that exactly fit Council protocol and muttered, “Yes, lady?â€