Chapter Text
He feels the screams before he hears them. Feels them rip through his flesh and muscle.
The only thing in his ears is a loud ringing. A sudden, sharp tang of rapidly heated iron and steel washes over him, powerful enough to taste. It coats his tongue as his nostrils fill with the heady, choking scent of burning flesh and bone. The force had knocked him down, the road is cold and hard under the back of his head, little stones cutting into the bare skin.
His lids open, and then snap closed again as a film of ash and smoke instantly coats his eyes. Throwing an arm over his face, he pushes himself up off the frozen ground and stands.
Something collides with his left side, then his right. Something else briefly crushes his bare foot into the frozen ground. People running every way, each chased by their own fear. The screams are no louder over the ringing in his ears but they are more numerous now. Lowering his arm, he blinks once, twice, three times, and he lets his eyes adjust to the haze. They fall on no particular thing. A city elf clutching the hand of a tiny child, as he holds a second, even smaller child against his chest. Tears are streaked through grime down all three faces. A ram, saddled with rolls of dyed wool charging through a cluster of carts that had, moments before, been a fruit stall. Bits of brightly colored skin and flesh fly in all directions, a bizarre mirroring of the carnage that was sure to be found farther up the road.
As though just noticing it was there, he looks down at the fine leather belt in his right hand. He turns and sees the leathersmith he had been ready to pay before the world had come apart. She’s laying on the ground a few steps away, the bottom half of her body crushed under the heavy, splintered oak beams of her stall.
He closes the distance between himself and the broken woman quickly, but in his movement, there is little of the panicked urgency seething through every other soul around him. Her eyes are open, the clear spring green not yet gone from them. There’s blood seeping out of her mouth in a slow stream, running through her short silver hair and pooling next to her face. Her hand is thrown over her head, as it perhaps had been on a warm afternoon many years ago, as she lay in fragrant sweetgrass staring at clouds. Her hand that then perhaps idly held a spring bloom as she lay laughing at a long-forgotten joke, now clasped a wooden hammer. She had joked with him as she used it to press the running wolf pattern into the grain of the belt he still clung to.
Somewhere in his mind, far away from present, he is certain someone, somewhere sees the deft motion with which this slight man of the People, of perhaps thirty-five summers, moves the crushing object off of her.
They would also see his hand lower to shut the once-merry eyes, long fingers brushing tears from her ruddy cheeks.
“Ir abelas.” I’m sorry.
The words are nothing. A tiny unseen knot in one of countless threads in the tapestry of chaos being woven around him.
Slowly, he turns away, his head bowed. When he’s a few steps away from her, he bends and picks up a staff, wound with leather, and crowned with a silver sunburst tied with quartz and river stones. His fist clenches around the belt he still holds, fingernails digging in and leaving four tiny marks, crescent moons over the heads of the running wolves.
Again, the thought comes as though from a different world. He wonders what that discerning pair of eyes would see if they caught on him, moving through the reeling crowd. Was there shock on his face? He thought there probably wouldn’t be. For there was no real shock in his heart. The smile they would see come over his face would not be easy to place.
He isn't certain of it himself.
Inevitability, he thinks, or maybe mocking? Mocking himself, no doubt. He feels it is the look of derision a teacher might throw at a student who had been warned and was now faced with unwelcome consequence. The smile tells a piece of the Whole wringing inside of him, gripping him until he can't breathe. The Whole of millennia’s worth of plans gone wrong, of intention being turned on its head.
He continues watching the scene weaving itself around him, becoming bloodier as he moves toward the shattered Tower. A human woman with a dwarven man slung over her shoulders, his face a mangled pulp and one of his legs gone below the knee. An elven child, no older than four, walking, searching, screaming for someone to come for him.
“Tapestry of chaos, indeed,” he says to himself.
One, he thinks, for which he has built the frame, strung the warp and threaded the needle.