All the spaces left in her filled with fire.
Her boots crack the stones. When she hits the door at the top of the stairs, it vaporises.
Fallon’s in the room, on the floor, and over him stands a thing of shadow, blood and murder.
She hits it from the side like a thunderbolt.
It tears in half from the impact, its torso scrabbling for purchase on the unforgiving boards. Shroudweaver reaches the door in time to watch Shipwright as she grabs Slickwalker’s echo by the hair and dashes his skull against the window frame, where it bursts into sticky threads, writhing over the walls.
There is a brief space, a void of furious light around her. The fleeing darkness sizzles. Shroudweaver watches it as his fingers dip and weave, picking atoms from the air, opening paths, switching channels, keeping the energy within Shipwright as stable as he can. His mind is frantically cataloguing the risks involved in stitching so many souls into a single body. He’s seen where a single mistake can lead.
She can handle it though. Right now, he’s sure she can handle anything.
At the heart of the roaring light, Shipwright is laughing, her face wet with tears. Shreds of shadow slip from her fingers and are burnt away like mist in the dawn. So much for Slickwalker.
Shroudweaver starts laughing too. The light and the love are infectious. Shipwright blazes with golden warmth. Beneath her feet, slowly, painfully, Declan begins to drag himself towards the door, lungs rattling like loose stones.
Shroudweaver would help him; should help him. The boards are slick with blood. Shadow flows and drips from holes scored deep into the man’s neck and arms. When it hits the light, it burns with a smell like sweet spice.
Shroudweaver should help him, but the weave cannot be neglected. His fingers twist and spin, closing off divine arteries, silencing songs. Newborn gods want to grow. Inexorably, unstoppably. They need a firm hand.
In the heart of the light, Shipwright turns to look at him. Her eyes are hot amber, her hair floating in unseen winds.
He knows how it feels, the rush of multiplying, stretching beyond the possible. The thrum in your body, the sweetness on your lips. The taste of other lives.
At his feet, Declan reaches up a bloody hand.
Shroudweaver methodically splices, cuts, silences. Ends. Feels a pressure on his wrist, red fingers. Red fingers.
Declan’s face white from shock, his broad mouth working in fury. ‘Help me, damn you!’
Declan pulls harder on his wrist, and Shroudweaver’s arm slips. The rhythm stutters. The red threads run slack.
Shipwright staggers, falls to her knees.
Shroudweaver feels the weaving slide loose. Screaming, he slaps Declan across the face, and pulls his arm free even as he runs forwards.
Shipwright is stooped in front of him, her broad shoulders shaking with each perforating pulse of light. Shroudweaver presses his lips into a thin line, and begins to stitch, deftly and confidently. He can feel the pressure of the weaving against his fingers. Births generally move only in one direction. There’s an inevitability to these things. This god wants to be born.
When Shipwright raises her head again, her eyes are clear and, for a second, he relaxes, lets the threads fall. Before he’s even realised his mistake, Shroudweaver watches the god take hold.
Shipwright’s body stiffens, her lips peeling back into a grin of savage joy. She becomes more solid in heartbeats, the lines of her sharpening against the rest of the useless, soft room.
That doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters now she’s here, properly here, not the imitation he has been loving these past years. If you can call it love. She demands something stronger now, a fiercer affection, a purer offering.
Without thinking, Shroudweaver falls to his knees and raises his head for benediction.
She looms above him, a thousand feet tall. She is gold, and brass and fire. She is love and the sea and the end of things.
His lips move, forming new prayers. Distantly, Declan screams himself hoarse, but Shroudweaver doesn’t notice. Declan’s a voice on the wind, and he’s gazing into the heart of the storm. When the big man’s body slumps to the floor, he barely sees it.
The storm reaches out her hands to him and where she touches him he feels the shadows of the last twenty years slip away. She’s light and life, she’s the salt in the waves and the cry of a clear canvas sky.
Shroudweaver gives himself over to her. Her light spreads through him, bone and marrow, warm and hungry. He feels himself dissolving into it. He’s never been so grateful.
Then like the snap of a finger, the light goes out. Shadow flows into the room like a river and from the shadow, Slickwalker, his face a mask of fury. ‘Really?Really?! Not this again. How many times?’ He raises a shaking hand, and makes a quick chopping motion.
Groggily, Shroudweaver watches something small, black and twisted fray between Slickwalker’s fingers. A thread? No, couldn’t be.
