He sat at the window staring down at the busy world, watching with glazed and apathetic eyes as the mortal tapestry continued on in its sickness far below him. Was the world continuously woven in bright glorious colors, woven in moving pictures? Were the simple meaningless lives of the mortals woven into silken threads by the three Fates? His world was of lonely darkness, and solitude.
He sat in the window, upon the sill, still as death in his darkness high above the eternal tapestry. His head was bowed and his eyes were of a startlingly deep ocean blue, fringed by thick black eyelashes. He peered incuriously down through a curtain of thick vast midnight hair. It seemed that the only color in him apart from the azure of his eyes was the faint hint of color on his lips, glossed over with the faint orange of dusk staining the sky, a touch of color to contrast with his ivory skin. He was shrouded in crimson red velvet that hung from his shoulders and pooled around his legs in shimmering folds. His ability to see all those weaved into the threads was a wonderful gift. His ability spanned to see the past and future in the treads of the weave. He watched and he waited.
Far below the Tapestry wove on.
The Tapestry... it was the mortal plane, a place he would never see from anywhere other than his incarceration here in his darkness. He would never breathe the earthly air of daylight and never have the chance to taste anything grown in mortal soil. Before his darkness there may have been some chance for him to see the place where mortals dwell. They walk the Earth, but now he didn’t even have the expectation to be able to walk free again in mortality, much less visit the day. All he could do was watch the lives of the creatures in the weave below in the night.
The amount of time he had spent in his internment watching the Tapestry had benumbed him to the wonder of it. He no longer had any interest in the way the weaver, Thayla, who with her careful hands had spun the silken strands of each life out of the vast void that surrounded the edges of the Tapestry, where it frayed only slightly and dissolved away into nothingness. He had no more interest in how Kearwyn decided the length and destiny of each life. Her brow furrowed in concentration as she tamed each individual strand into the weave. He had no interest in the third sister, Mulana, as she moved with her razor-sharp scissors, severing each strand at the appointed time.
Strands that snapped without the assistance of the inexorable Mulana and to a destiny not decided by the Dispenser of Lots were lives lost to chance. A murder in an abandoned storehouse somewhere, an out of control buggy hurtling down an embankment were all lives lost to accident.
Occasionally the Tapestry was shot through with glittering and endless metallic threads of silver and bronze. These were the lives of the supernatural Kinfolk – from Demons to Angels – who resided on the mortal plane. The metallic threads that did end tended to cease with shocking abruptness, more often than not occurring in the midst of the severing of many mortal strands because the taking of an immortal life was not an act without price.
Suddenly below Thayla paused.
This feat in itself was enough to capture his attention. He bent forward from his crouched position by the window, his pale hands emerging from the soft folds of velvet to wrap around the cold iron bars of his immortal darkness. Ignoring the burning sting of onset of dawn he pressed his face out to see what event had been momentous enough as to give the weaver pause in such an act of magnitude as weaving the Tapestry was.
He ruffled his wings in agitation when he couldn’t see what it was that had caused Thayla to take pause, aching to spread his wings but unable to with the pressing of day. It was too dangerous to stretch and too risky to lean any farther forward. This darkness he was incarcerated in was a hell within Hell.
The Fate began to spin again and from her fingers he could see a thread appear unlike any other in the weave. It was like bright flames shining, burning with the hotness of a fire. This new thread was woven into the weave by Kearwyn amidst a close-knit community of immortals recently rocked by conflict – a community he had other reasons for watching.
As he watched he saw a young child, Gaelen, placed into the care of the Sage, Rioradian. Who was this Gaelen, to be given over to the greatest and wisest of the Four Sages?
Rioradian’s thread gleamed like brightly polished silver – a hue matched only by the threads of the other Sages that appeared sporadically within the weave – and in a sense, they were tarnished. Four fallen angels, given over to hell, fallen from heaven and the grace of God. Rumors that abounded within the realm were that the Four Sages were Cherubim of the First Hierarchy of angels, fallen when they sided with Torok after his own fall.
The gentle breeze that stirred his hair and lightly ruffled the raven-black feathers of his wings that were folded gently against his back, a breeze that carried the teasing taste of freedom, and the smell of hunger’s delight. A glimmer of hope developed at the thought of the chosen one releasing him from his debt—a debt paid by centuries of shadow.
The presence of the chosen within the weave was a welcome distraction, and he took great delight in watching the way the child developed under the tutelage of the Sage who had, at first, appeared bemused by the presence of this child in his life. So intent was he on watching the life unfolding before him that he forgot about his darkness for a while.
Occasionally Gaelen’s thread would vanish from the weave, only to reappear further along somewhere in the endless tapestry. When this had first happened he had been startled and taken aback, even shocked. His attention had been momentarily diverted from the weave and when he looked back there was no sign of the child or his mentor. Surely, Gaelen and Rioradian were not dead? Yet there was no uproar within their community, nor was there the sudden cessation of mortal life that he had come to associate with the destruction of an immortal. Eventually he realized that the disappearances were in fact the Sage and his charge moving to ascension, somewhere where the Fates did not weave – or at least did not weave in this Tapestry.
Knowledge of who Gaelen was grew slowly within him too. He knew the child had to be someone of prophecy in both the mortal plane and in this realm. If he had been exposed to a world outside of his incarceration he would have realized sooner that the young boy was in fact, Gaelen Kinstar the heir to the Elven Lands and proposed to be the future consort of the Highlord Torak. What he had been the continual witness to was the growth and development of their future ruler. Perhaps then the world would be free of the evil that corrupts all creatures and finally bring peace.
It was this obsession with watching and waiting for the young heir, Gaelen that caused him to miss the return of an evil to the Elven Lands, so still he sits, waits, and watches. This…which is his fate, woven now by those who are the weavers of the threads of time. The watcher can smell his freedom, lingering like the sweet smell of lilac on an early spring morning. His heart pounds with anticipation…
