The Time Weaver

More about The Time Weaver

In the valley of Drahm, where time flowed in spirals and days were counted not in rows but in circles, there once lived a woman called the Time Weaver. Her name was Thyra Nesh. No one knew where she came from. Some said she fell from a crack in the twilight, others that she was born from a drop of mercury forgotten by the hour itself. The only thing that was certain was that since she appeared in the valley, the clocks began to whisper. Thyra lived in a workshop made of mirrors and gears. Nets of fine wires hung everywhere, on which tiny vibrations danced like light in water. In the center stood a loom made of bronze and glass, its spindle turning even though no one touched it. With every movement, Thyra pulled threads from the haze of seconds, spinning minutes into patterns, hours into fabrics, days into long, shining sheets of memory. People came to her to mend broken time: a child born prematurely, crying in its own future; a man who had forgotten the hour he was loved; a woman whose shadow had run away from dawn. Thyra wove her time back together, but each time a thread remained with her—a thin strip of loss clinging to her own hands. After many years, she began to see the world differently. Time was no longer a stream to her, but a fabric fraying at the edges. In her dreams, she saw the hours like butterflies flapping against the walls of the world and knew that somewhere in this pattern, there was a gap, a hole through which everything slipped away. She called it the unspun place. Thyra searched for it, day and night. She listened to the ticking of the clocks, the patter of drops on the windows, the breathing of the earth. Finally, she found the tear—inconspicuous, barely larger than a broken thread in the morning's cloth. But behind it, something shimmered that shocked her: her own face, older, distorted, as if she herself were the thread that had long since snapped. She understood that she could never mend the gap because she herself was the flaw. Every hour she had woven had been pulled out of her, every mended life had taken a piece of her own time. Her body began to become transparent. When she spoke, only dust came from her mouth, like the ashes of past words. Then she took the last vestiges of her strength and spun a new cloth—one that bore no pattern, only a circle of light, endless and empty. As she spun the last thread, the world stood still for a breath. Then the circle closed, and Thyra Nesh disappeared. Her loom was found many years later, overgrown with moss and dormant metal. The spindle still turned, slowly, as if waiting for someone. When the wind blows through the workshop, the threads clink softly, and for a heartbeat, everything around you seems to stand still—a breath in which past and future touch. The Elders of Drahm say that at this very moment, Thyra Nesh is looking over her shoulder.