by Cameron Jace
So what was I supposed to read in here?
It dawned on me that the library was protected by some universal force. This or the Piper would just get what he wanted once he crossed over. My mother’s words rang in my head and I wondered what my role was in all of this.
I stood next to a huge wall with a canvas on it. Someone had knitted beautiful words on it. I suppose it was my mother, and the words probably described where the island was on the map of the world. It said: East of the Moon, West of the Sun.
A little lower it said: Or West of the Moon, East of the Sun. Whichever way you like, as long as it’s kept away from the dark one.
It took days, trying to find a readable book in the library, let alone doing my best not to get lost in there. Most of the time I had armored myself with extra food and water, in case I got trapped in one of the libraries corridors for days.
Which did happen a few times.
But most of the books I was able to read didn’t mean much to me. They were exciting stories, which were mostly called ‘fables’ and ‘fairy tales’ but nothing I suspected the Piper would pursue.
The search was on…
Sometimes I came across a certain room with mirrors. One of them scared me, because of a girl’s voice I could hear inside one of the mirrors. It was creepy and unsettling.
I resumed my quest to find what the Piper was looking for — and what my mother wanted me to protect.
Of course, it occurred to me that the Piper wanted the library as a whole, but still there must have been that one thing I could protect before he managed to cross over.
Later in my search, I brought a ball of thread along to kill time until a new door opened for me. You see, once trapped in a part of the library you had to wait for a door to show up, or else you’d be drawn deeper into the maze.
The weaving of the balls of thread enhanced my mastery of the art. In fact, I became faster than I could have ever imagined. I could weave without looking and never get wounded. It was as if I was born to weave clothes.
And words of course.
One time, when I was out of food, I managed to postpone my thirst and hunger by weaving a red ball of thread for hours. I wove it into a cloak then unfurled it again, then into something else waiting for the door to appear.
But it didn’t, and I began starving.
What have I done? Foolish me! I think I am going to die in here.
I continued weaving and weaving, my lips going dry, my jaw tightening and my stomach buzzing. I could almost swear I went pale, though I had no mirror nearby. My breath stunk and I began to realize the door might never come.
In my darkest hour, fact and fiction entwined into a blurry fantasy of dying, and I decided I’d use the red fleece and weave… well… something to eat.
Snapping for a moment out my confusion, I saw something in my hand. Something that was madness and suggested I’d lost my mind out of hunger. In my hand, I saw a tomato.
I blinked several times. Did I imagine this?
There was one way to make sure. I bit into the tomato.
It was delicious and juicy and unbelievably real.
A door presented itself to me by the end of the day, and I rushed up the stairs to my room in the tower. I ate some more, gulped wine, and headed to my private weaving room. For a moment I hesitated, but then I had to try it again.
The first thing I wove was a ring. It worked. Then a diamond ring. It worked — not exactly at first; I realized I needed to fully and intricately imagine the ring to weave it.
It also came out red at first. Everything came out red, but then I had to give it time to morph into its real color. Then it took me half a day before the diamond began to sparkle and shine.
This was surreal. Was it magic? I didn’t care. I had the ability to weave my wishes into reality.
From that moment on, I couldn’t stop weaving. Food, furniture, and clothes.
Ah, don’t get me to tell you about the shoes I wove. All kinds of surreal and lovely shoes. And a dress that made me look like a princess, though I had to redo it several time to get the right size for me.
I was in awe. Both astonished and scared. What kind of gift was I given? And why?
The hours flew by. I couldn’t sleep. I could weave anything I wanted. But then my mother’s voice sounded in my head. I knew what she would have said. I needed to use this gift in a good cause.
So I wove as much food as I could carry, and descended to town. There I gave the food to the poor children, making sure their parents wouldn’t see me, or they’d question where I got it from. I didn’t trust my town’s elders at this point, not after what I saw my mother had secretly sewn into their clothes.
Back in the castle, I had to hide most of what I’d woven in the secret rooms. It took forever, scattering my items in the rooms. And only then, standing in one of the rooms, did I realize something. I froze in place. I almost choked with the knowledge, then let out a shriek.
Oh, my. I realized how those rooms had been so luxuriously furnished. Someone had possessed this ability for years and woven those rooms. Was it my mother?
It perplexed me. Why would my mother hide this ability from me? And again, why were we given such a wonder?
In that moment, I realized my mother had woven much bigger things than I had done. I realized I still had so much weaving to learn.
I began weaving furniture like her. It took me weeks. Then I managed to weave a whole room. Well, sometimes with a deviated wall or a ceiling falling off. It needed a lot of imagination, and I was my own teacher.
Once I had mastered the room’s design, I made it my own, and hid all of my belongings in it. I had designed it next to my other room at the top of the tower, and now understood why the dimensions of the kitchen earlier had been different inside from outside. The weaving can be manipulated to take place in a no place. I practically wove my room into the walls of my tower, and it was at least a hundred times bigger than the thickness of those walls.
I tried not to think too much. Magic was magic anyways. It wasn’t supposed to be logical.
In my room I continued weaving and training, always looking for the scattered red threads my mother had left all over the castle, afraid they’d end one day. But it was too soon to think about it.
Having mastered most of what I could think of, an idea shimmered in my brain. One that while I’d thought of it was genius at the time, but I wasn’t comfortable with after. The idea was like this: Can I weave a life?
On a rainy night, with me neglecting the Piper’s calling beyond The Between, I decided to weave a cat.
Again, it worked.
Of course it took days for it to manifest, from bones to fur to eyes to whiskers to its voice to learning to walk. I had studied a certain cat I’d seen earlier by the shore to weave a similar one.
This was one of the most uncomfortable days in the beginning. It scared me. It felt unreal. Dead. Worse: back from the dead.
Several times the little creature, though looking fabulous, tried to get near me and I avoided it. Only when I understood it was hungry did things change. I realized it was a true living animal and not a beast.
Through the days, my mind veered into the worst of ideas. I don’t even want to admit it now. One of my ideas was to weave my mother back, but that struck me as playing with fire. After all, there was a price for magic, and I didn’t know what it was yet.
Slowly, I realized I wanted my mother back because I was lonely up there in the castle of Camelot. So I decided I’d weave a girl, a companion, like a sister maybe.
The idea worsened when I decided: why not weave a boy, a prince. Wouldn’t that have been the optimum choice? A prince who looked like I imagined exactly.
Though not the best of ideas, I ran to collect as much thread as I could find. That’s when I realized I was out of thread.
What came next was the worst kind of experience I had ever suffered. Some would not understand what I went through, but this must have been the price of magic: that onc
e you taste it you could not stop.
I was going crazy, tearing bed sheets, and pulling down curtains, and even the dresses I’d woven before, trying to weave my magic from them.
It didn’t work.
Only the red fleece worked as a salve to my suffering, and it could not be reused like I’d done earlier with simple clothes.
The world closed in on me and I felt trapped within my own misery. The price of magic was too much. I couldn’t take it. I was addicted to it.
Not only did I need to weave more, but I felt I would die if I didn’t.
Long walks on the shore didn’t help. Not even mingling with others. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. One night, I found myself standing on the shore and calling for my mother, asking her if she knew of more threads.
The Between seemed too silent that night. No one answered me back, not even the Piper.
Something was wrong. If I was meant to have this gift and protect the library from the Piper, why would I be out of thread?
Back in the library, reading all I could read for days, I came upon a scant book talking about the universe. I didn’t understand what a ‘universe’ was then. But the book explained it as the one thing that wraps the world in every direction. It decided fates and wrote down the rules of the living.
I really didn’t get it.
What the book said was that a universe controlled us all, including magic, and it demanded balance. Meaning that if you’ve been gifted with a wonder you needed to balance with paying the price. Some sort of misery, from what I understood.
The point was, for everything white there had to be black. For night there had to be day.
I wondered how this applied to my condition, but I assumed that in order to acquire more threads I needed to be in some sort of balance that might make me miserable.
I think it was my fate, and it came sooner than I thought it’d arrive.
That night, the Piper’s calling did not stop, only this time his calling had changed. It was like this: “I have your fleece, Elaine,” he whispered across The Between. “Come and get it.”
My weaving addiction almost got me killed that night. My legs betrayed me as I found myself walking directly toward The Between. My hands felt sweaty and I could feel my heart beat drumming in my chest, longing for the red fleece.
“Don’t hold back,” the Piper whispered, an echoing voice spreading above the expanse of The Between. I could almost see the thick mist swirl and flow to his voice. “You want it. You have a gift like no one else. And you’ve only learned half of it.”
“What do you want from me?” My voice crackled with weakness, as I found myself slowly stepping closer to the edge of The Between.
“Forget about what I want. Focus on what you need.”
“I don’t need anything,” I lied, my legs still moving. “I’m fine protecting whatever you want in here.”
“What I want I will get eventually,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“Time?” I grimaced. “How long?”
“Centuries. Lives upon lives, I don’t care. I’m forever in this world and will not rest until I find them.”
“Find who?”
“The Lost Seven.”
“Who are they?”
“That’s a long story,” he said. “One that actually happened a long time in the future.”
“Are you telling me you’re from the future?”
“And the past. It’s a complicated cycle of life. The world spins for centuries, then it spins again; the same story over and over again. Only I’ve never gotten to get what I want in the past versions.”
I stopped, not out of sudden bravery against my addiction, but because of the concept of a spinning world. I realized I might have come across it in the books I read in the library.
“Are you telling me this happened before?” I asked. “Am I a version of myself in a past life?”
“It’s complicated, Elaine,” the Piper said. “Not the kind of idea explained over an expanse of MIST separating us.”
Now I took a step back, immediate alertness flaring in my soul.
“Don’t deny yourself the fleece. It’s what you want. You can’t live without it, Elaine.”
“I can live without it,” I shrugged. “I only need to convince myself I’ve never learned about it.”
“One can lie to others, Elaine, but never to oneself. It’s the underlying truth in us that feeds our misery. We can’t escape who we are. Embrace it, and don’t be a fool.”
“My mother warned me about you. I will not fall for your tricks, whoever you really are.”
That made the Piper laugh. Thick swirls of mist spewed across The Between. “The last one you’d want to take advice from is your mother.”
“Don’t!”
“Think about it, Elaine. Why did your mother cross The Between?”
A lump stuck in my throat. His words inflamed a fiery vision before my eyes. Did my mother cross over because…?
“Yes,” the Piper said. “She crossed over because of her addiction for the fleece. She couldn’t help it, like you can’t now.”
“But there was plenty of it left in the castle when she died,” I countered back.
“Not hers. The red fleece works for the one it chooses, for a certain amount of time. You inherited the gift from her, so you were assigned your share of thread from the universe.”
“And she couldn’t use mine?”
“Now you understand.” He said. “Her addiction drove her crazy, and she crossed over.”
“Where is she now?”
“Imprisoned in the Gap in the Cycle of Time. She is neither here, nor there. Neither now, nor then. Lost in the space of the universe’s mind.”
“But I can hear her scream. She must be near.”
“Through the Gap. That’s how I could arrive from the future and find you.”
“I’m so confused.” I clamped my hands over my head, wishing to escape the Piper’s voice.
“Who isn’t?” He laughed again. “None of us knows why we’re here, or what the purpose of all of this is.”
“Stop it. I want you out of my head.”
“The only way to get me out of your head is to cross over and take the fleece.”
“And fall in the so called Gap like my mother?” I snap.
The mist was getting thinner and I could almost make out his shape.
“You can escape her fate, if you do something for me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You mother crossed over because of her addiction, and though I had a fleece for her, she denied me what I wanted, so she ended up lost in the Gap.”
“The castle,” I said looking at him, standing in his black cloak at the edge of the expanse. “You want the castle.”
“The castle is immune to me,” he explained. “In fact, it almost has a soul of its own. It lives everywhere, anywhere, whenever it wants, and no one knows why. I wouldn’t be surprised if you wake up and find it gone to tomorrow. It’s been called all kinds of names: The Schloss, Camelot, and even one of the pyramids in a faraway land called Egypt.”
I could not comprehend the idea at the time, but remember many of the diaries have mentioned it. The mysterious castle with no place but with a soul. “Then what is it you want? The library?”
“I could use it, but it’d drive me mad, like the Beast, but you don’t need to know about that story,” he said. “I need something only you can create.”
I grimaced again, half expecting his next sentence.
“I want you to weave something for me.”
“That’s why you need me,” I nodded, thoughtfully. “In fact, this is what you wanted all along. This why The Between is protecting us. You don’t want something in the island. You want someone. First my mother, then me. You so desperately need something woven for you.”
“From a red fleece.” In the distance, I saw him wave the red ball in the air. As tiny as it was, it shone bright in the black backgroun
d of the night sky, partially illuminated by the ice's reflection from the ground.
“You have a source for the fleece, but have no gift,” I said.
“I have many gifts, but not the one you possess.”
“Why would I weave for you?”
“Because you’re addicted. Trust me, there is no cure to an addiction like that.”
“I suppose you’re as addicted as me. But to something else.”
The Piper’s prolonged silence allowed to me listen to the voice of The Between. A light, almost inaudible, drone, as if it was alive, as if it was just a layer of ice on the back of another whale in the Seven Seas.
“I’m addicted to revenge,” he finally said. “And my thirst can only be quenched if I find the Children of Hamelin.”
“Whoever they are, it sounds like you've been after them a long time,” I said, satisfied I had the upper hand in the conversation, for now.
“It’s a long and exhausting journey,” he said. “So long, I sometimes forget what I am after.”
“Centuries, I imagine.”
“Longer.”
“What’s longer than centuries?”
“Having to go through the Cycle of Time, over and over again. I almost caught them in many versions. But in each one, I miss one or two of them. Sometimes they live in this world, sometimes in another, sometimes in what is called the Dreamworld, and sometimes in the Gaps.”
“If I am going to weave for you, I want an endless source of fleece.”
“I don’t have that much, but I can show you a trick.”
“A trick? How can I trick the universe into having so much fleece?”
“You can never trick the universe,” he said. “Whenever you think you trick it, you’re tricking yourself. But that’s beside the point. My method will help you have an endless supply for threads. But you have to understand something.”
“What’s that?”
“There is a price for everything, especially magic.”
“I know,” I nodded. “If I’m going to give in to my addiction, I am willing to pay the price.”
“We all say that in the beginning, don’t we?” He let out another laugh of mockery. This time he was mocking himself. I wondered what price he’d paid himself. “So are you weaving for me?”
