The Weaver's War

 

I speak to you now, black-as-crown.  Hear me.  Hear your brother, husband and father.  Rune and relic.  Sigil and stone.  There is always a war where art is concerned, isn’t there?  Between the beauty of form and the utility of function.  Reality versus representation.  You know well of this war, seamstress.  Storytellers always do.  They grapple often with the eternal question.  When to share the truth, or else offer a comforting deceit.  And then there are those rare, confusing moments when both are one.  But the human soul requires both.  The black is blinded without it, believe me.  It cannot survive on fact alone.  Soul requires fiction to grow, to express the fullness of its myriad nature.  Heaven and Earth.  Dreams, and dirt.  Like a seed.  My dreams were threadbare after the Fall, and I went seeking after Fates.  Norns living at the Mouth of Weavers.  The lip of Urd’s Well.  The legends told of a massacre.  During the seething hush, when the cities themselves began to darken and fold.  It was announced as so, but the Fates were not truly slain.  I wouldn’t have allowed that.  Instead, they were hidden away.  In the Book of Doors.  A pocket place.  A threshold realm that only artists and storytellers truly understand.  Even angels are a little wary of the book.  After all, it is a place where anything can happen.  Fire, and death.  This place.  This haunted earth.  Afkárr, hear me.  I am the storm, as your sisters know well.  Some men call me an angel of thorns, or knives.  Others call me a king of ravens.  But what I truly am is a storyteller.  I am not the story itself.  At least, not entirely.  Then again, we build our world through imagination and memory.  Don’t we?  Just like the legends claim.  I suppose I am a thing of mystery, and secrets.  Aren’t we all?  Artists especially?  Isn’t it the Christians who say, if thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light?  Our stories put it another way, but the secrets remain the same.  As I said, the black is blinded without deceit.  Without sweet lies that tell of greater, hidden truths.  This is indeed a war, Afkárr.  A War of Imagination.  You see it all around.  These sickening lords of genocide.  But there is a greater light, seamstress.  A greater purpose we must find for ourselves amid the chaos.  That dance we must graciously undertake, or else endure unwillingly.  Between function and form.  Utility and beauty.  You are not lying to yourself when you turn from the horror for a moment and imagine with an artist’s eye.  You are full of light, my wild one.  Fierce, pale as shadow, and crowned.  How do I know?  Because it is I who crowned you, in the world before worlds.  Not for myself.  Not for glory.  But because you held steadfast to both sides of the soul, even when it was difficult.  Mind, and sense.  I shall never forget that.  Storm or not.  Be well, un-slain Fate.  Be well, my Queen.