Elliot Deverell's fingers drifted over the rough pages of the script, trying to catch lines that slipped through his mind like mist through a sieve. The cramped backstage of the Twilight Troupe reeked of dust, warped wood, and cheap greasepaint. Beyond the grimy window, dusk in Port Selen dissolved into a heavy fog. Far across the harbor, the lighthouse's halo bled amber into the swirling mist, a sickly smear refusing to hold its shape.
"The Weaver of Strings, Act Three… 'The Blind Man's Soliloquy.'" He murmured the title under his breath. He'd gotten the fragment only yesterday, when Old Barton stumbled in with it bundled in torn newspaper. The old stage manager claimed he'd salvaged it from a bankrupt bookseller's waste bin, half-rotten yet strangely intact.
It told the fable of a coastal village and a weaver named Eld, whose cloth revealed the customer's hidden fate. A bridal veil showed the silhouettes of unborn children; a merchant's purse hinted at gold yet to pass through greedy hands. Eld lived comfortably in the hush of this secret gift, ringed by wife and children. Yet each night he returned to an empty loom, staring into darkness that refused him even a glimpse of his own thread.
"I have woven wings for birds, yet never seen the shape of the sky. I have woven scales for the deep sea, yet never felt the folds of the tide…"
Elliot's voice trailed off when his fingertip caught on a raised blemish in the page.
At rehearsal, the other actors mocked the piece or stumbled through its strange turns. "A blind weaver spinning cloth? Rubbish scribbled by a senile old fool!" they scoffed. But Elliot, with a mimic's knack for shape and echo, could almost sense the fragile bones of the role: a craftsman tugged by unseen hands, weaving destinies never truly his.
A thin pain coiled behind his eyes, scraping at the inside of his skull like a wire pulled too tight. Lately the headache always returned with these peculiar passages. Maybe it was the sleepless nights, or the three copper pennies that passed for last week's wages, leaving him gnawing stale bread in a cold attic. That evening, passing the Salted Anchor—a shabby tavern where dockside fishermen drowned their hours in bitter ale and fried eels—the smell of roasting fish turned his empty stomach cruelly inside out. But he had nothing left for hunger. Only the monologue, and Old Barton's ultimatum echoing in his skull: Nail it, Deverell. Or next month you'll be singing drunken ballads down at the Salted Anchor for your supper.
Elliot closed his eyes. He pictured himself as the weaver bound to the loom of other lives: a dim workshop, tangled thread, the rasp of coarse fabric under rough fingers. He lifted a hand, tracing the slow threading of an invisible needle. And then—
A faint plink. Something hard struck the floor behind him.
His eyes snapped open. The backstage gloom pressed in, lit only by a single gas lamp casting its flickering circle over a clutter of abandoned props. The sound had come from the far corner, where relics from The Carnival of Hollow Kings lay piled in neglect—faded garlands, cracked clay urns, limp marionettes with strings curled like dead ivy. Among them sprawled a battered clown in a torn jester's suit, frozen in a painted grin.
He hesitated, then stepped closer. Dust eddied through the lamplight. The clown's wooden head lolled toward him, its smile unchanged. Wind? A rat?
He bent to lift it. The instant his fingertips brushed the cold wood, a piercing chill slipped through his skin and threaded straight into his mind. He felt it—an alien prickling, a thin awareness not his own. Nearly invisible filaments, fine as spider silk, drifted down from the shadows above, anchoring themselves to the puppet's joints.
He jerked back so sharply his heel struck a box of paint tins. The cold threads vanished, but the echo of them clung behind his eyes. His headache flared, the wire now a dull hammer pounding bone.
"Hey! Elliot! Quit dawdling, it's your cue!" someone barked from the stage door.
He swallowed the panic crawling up his throat. For a heartbeat longer he stared at the clown. Its grin gleamed in the lamplight, eyes dull yet disturbingly attentive. He tore his gaze away. Not now. He needed the lines. He needed the copper pennies.
Stepping into the wings, Elliot passed Old Barton, who stood half in shadow with arms folded tight. Tonight, for the first time, the old man's eyes did not drift to the sagging curtains or frayed set pieces. They fixed on Elliot alone, steady and hollow as the dark beyond the footlights.
A shiver ran down Elliot's spine as he took his place on the rough burlap laid to suggest the weaver's cramped floor. The air hummed with the stale boredom of half-hearted rehearsal. A few actors leaned against painted flats, yawning behind gloved hands.
He drew a breath and closed his eyes. The workshop. The loom. The tangled threads tugging him along like a puppet dragged across a stage. He let the words unwind.
"I have woven wings for birds, yet never seen the shape of the sky…" His voice drifted into the emptiness, worn but raw with a desperate grace. "I have woven scales for the deep sea, yet never felt the folds of the tide…"
Something flickered at the edge of his vision.
He froze. The seats beyond the footlights should have been empty; Old Barton never sold tickets for rehearsals. Yet in the third row, left side, a shape sat alone among the dust-coated benches.
It was the same battered clown puppet, perched upright as if it belonged there, head tilted slightly, grin wide enough to split its painted cheeks.
A shudder crept through him, freezing the blood in his veins. His pulse drummed like a snare. Who had brought it out here? Who had moved it?
"What are you doing? Keep going," an actor beside him hissed, his irritation buried under fatigue.
Elliot tore his gaze away, but his eyes strained to return. He forced the next line to his tongue, but the words fell like dead leaves. He felt them now—those fine, near-invisible threads swaying above the puppet, shimmering faintly in the stage haze. They curled down, delicate and cruel, stitching themselves to the puppet's shoulders, wrists, knees.
They were moving.
Rooted to the spot, he watched one rigid wooden arm lift, joints cracking like old wood under winter ice. It pointed at him, trembling in the weak gaslight. The clown's grin seemed to widen.
A wave of vertigo rolled through him, turning the boards beneath his feet to water. The glow of the footlights bled into wavering halos. Painted scenery sagged at the edges, dissolving like wet ink. Pain burst behind his eyes, needles hammering into his skull. The lines fled his tongue. The script slipped from his hands.
Paper whispered against the stage as it hit the floor.
"Elliot? Elliot, are you well?" someone asked, too late to sound concerned.
His mouth moved but no sound formed. He could not look away from the puppet's hollow stare. Something in that grin tightened around him, threads unfurling in the rafters. He felt them catch his wrists, his ankles, his throat—binding him like Eld, the blind weaver spinning fates never meant to be his own.
A low hum thrummed through the boards beneath his feet, the shiver of strings pulled taut, ready to snap. In that last flicker of waking thought, Elliot saw the puppet's arm drop, its threads flickering and winding around his limbs in perfect, silent mimicry.
Then the stage lights folded into darkness, the world vanishing into the hush between one heartbeat and the next.
Yet even as his mind fell away, he heard it—a coarse whisper rasping from the dark behind the loom:
When the weaver sees the threads that bind him, he becomes the cloth.