The Dragon's Tapestry

She portrayed them as she had last seen them in winterdark: Epsilon, a great airy ball of celestial sapphire, Opo and Non like two pink eyes askew above the horizon, Orbica like a jade bowl in the star-sugared sky.

As the moons began to take shape, Grondil sang her soft chant. She tell capable of her calling, aware of the magic that used her in fathom the being of this new baby and to speak its destiny.

After the moons came flowers, sunrise-colored humelodia and brilliant white ice gozzys. Grondil wondered for a moment why the two appeared together, the one symbolizing life and the other death. Other symbols came: a crown, a key, a rare and beautiful tree such as she heard grew in the mountains of Verduma.

Time dissolved until she felt the warmth of the estwind on her back and arms through her spidersilk.

Hours had passed.

The Song died in her throat, and Grondil realized that she was thirsty, but there would be no food or water until the tapestry was completed upon the baby’s birth. As her own voice became still, she heard Srill’s breath come in rageful gasps. Grondil looked at her. Rivulets of sweat on the young woman’s temples ran into her hair, her eyes were unseeing and her hands were white knots of muscle. Grondil saw but only as if from a great distance. Muttering a spell of comfort, she went back to the tapestry, to the little world she was creating in color and thread.

The magic had never been so strong with her. Everywhere she looked she knew more clearly than ever before the names and beings of each object that fell into her vision. She wondered and waited for the image that would be the next part of the tapestry.

It was a mountain, a true mountain of Verduma, peaked in snow and cloud, a god’s fist of bare jagged rock. Long life the mountain often symbolized, but Grondil had only seen Venutian hills woven into the tapestries.

She began to record it in detail: a tract of snow, a rock, a patch of dirt ... until it almost seemed as if she were there, the pebbles and plants beneath her feet....

Somewhere, she knew, her body still sat before the inkle loom, and her fingers, aided by spells, threaded in the image of the mountain. But Grondil was here. She was looking down into a shadowy valley, a valley that had appeared only as a streak of black on the tapestry. There was no wind, only an airless cold that breathed up from the valley. It was not dark but twilight, the stars pale. A scabbing lichen stained the raw-edged rocks at the lip of the cliff, and the smell of burning filled her nostrils.

“You come by an unknown path,” she heard a voice say slow­ly, a voice that sounded like wind in the grass.

Grondil turned around, her back to the abyss.

“Serpent!” she whispered.

A vast scaled creature haunched before her, lean-loined and diaphanous-winged. A beautiful curl of blue fire from its mouth burned in the air a moment and was gone.

“Who are you? Why have you brought me to this place?” Grondil asked.

“It is I who should ask, ‘Who are you?’” the Serpent hissed in a voice like wind in fire. “This is my prison. You are the intruder here.” The creature blinked its eyes slowly. “But no, I think I know you now—you weave the tapestry of one who will be mine.”

Grondil shivered in the cold windless air. Beyond the dragon she could see a wasteland of black rock thinly covered with grass. To the left was a forested area that stretched to the mountains and climbed to cloud-misted peaks. Trees. She had read about them, heard about them. There were no such trees in Venutia. But even the trees she noticed only vaguely, for the wonder of the dragon filled her vision.

The dragon spoke: “In the valley live those spirits whose tapestries are unfulfilled at the time of their deaths. I gather them like jewels to my kingdom. They are my treasure. The child and her father will be my most precious gems.”

Grondil looked furtively at the creature. Her stomach felt heavy and sick, as if it were filled with a cold stone.

“The souls that come here labor on, trying to fulfill their des­tinies, but it must be done without hope, for I am their king, a jealous master, and I love them. This child will be the jewel in my crown and will establish my throne, for there will be no one else to withstand me. Once there were many dragons in Ve. There shall be again.”

The dragon arched its sinuous neck, and a blazing breath of fire billowed into the sky. In its cold yellow eyes, Grondil sensed the weight of its evil, and she knew that her gentle powers were nothing against it.