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He is dead.
He has fallen from the peak of the storm spire and he is dead.
There is a moment when he absorbs his death, and he feels it wrap around him suffocating and heavy like a quilt. Patches of colour stitched together, a labyrinth of fabric and thread that envelops him, its stifling closeness seems as if it will smother him completely and his hands want to tear at the fibres of it, to escape and he finds a thread beneath his fingers, rubs at the frayed edges of it. He pulls on that thread, the first one he touches, and it is fear.
He pulls and the stitches slowly unravel.
He is a small boy.
He is afraid.
It is the first feeling he ever remembers. He is small and hungry, one of many, there are too many of them, mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, a single room that is too small to hold them. His father will come home and he will be tired, and then he will be angry. His father will work all day and there will never quite be enough at the end of it. His mother will sit and sew by the window and then by candlelight, the weft and weave of her needle through the cloth, and still it is never enough. His father’s blank and hopeless rage will come tumbling down over all of them and he is afraid of that, his heart pounds with the thought of it, the terror of it wraps around him. It is unbearable and he will try so hard to go unnoticed, he will sit in the corner, unmoving, but that too will never quite be enough, the barrage will come, fists will fly nonetheless.
He feels fear stitch itself into his skin.
His hands keep moving, test the boundaries, find only resistance, fibres that seem to encompass him and he pulls on the next thread and it is desire. It is thick and strong and it feels as if it goes right through the core of him. There are so many things he desires, he is older now, a boy with wants and needs, a boy who stands at the edges of things and watches. The longing for them fills him up, he feels as if he will overflow with the slow exquisite pain of his yearning. He is in the house of Kpp’Ar, it is full of secrets he wants desperately to know, but there are other desires too. The desire to please his master, to do something well and be praised, the desire for a feeling he never really knows. Desire seems to grow and grow and he is full of it, hot and heady with the craving to fill up some part of him that is empty.
It burns so bright. Feels like a molten needle piercing his flesh.
Desire gets twisted, ravelled in with some other thread, it is impossible to separate them, and they bind themselves together. That thread is ambition, golden and bright. He stands before the Harrow’s father, the old king, he does things for him, becomes someone important, invaluable, he likes the way that feels. He kneels on the ground, head bowed in supplication and he rises a Lord. There are steps in front of him and he climbs them, swaps one master for another, rises higher and higher, becomes almost dizzy with his own success. He is a man now, and his destiny is his own to shape.
And ambition weaves itself into his heart.
His hands move more slowly now, they search and find a thread so delicate it seems as if it could snap in his fingers. It is love, it is twined in with all the others and yet it is so fragile, he knows if he pulls it too hard on it, it will break. He brushes his fingers along its gossamer edge. He is loved and he loves and it is all he has ever wanted, the feeling of another person pressed to him, another mind that melds with his own, to share in his happiness and in his sadness. Faces that make his heart light when he sees them, first Harrow, then Lissa. A son and a daughter that he has longed for, a family of his own. There is a warmth to their shapes but it doesn’t quite reach him, he is cold now, he has become so cold, and he doesn’t know when or why he became this way. Their faces shimmer and shift, panic rises up in him. He reaches for the thread of them but it is never quite within his grasp.
Love flickers, becomes as thin as silk, until he can barely see it at all.
Where his hands reach out blindly for love he finds something else, thicker, stronger, more tangible. His fingers follow its lines and it is power, hot beneath his fingers, he feels the strength in its yarn. He stands beside his king, Harrow, and this thread seems to bind them, they are tangled up within it. They reflect each other and yet he grows darker, becomes like a mirror that has lost its lustre, and the king shines, but the thread is tight around him too, it becomes like a web that they cannot escape, the two of them pulled closer and closer in its choking grasp, they are pulled this way and that, and everything crumbles around them.
Power cuts sharp as wire into them, breaks skin and blood flows out of it.
It is anger that he finds next, a thread of rage that his hands get caught in, and it is rough and uneven as if the spin lacked tension and it fills him, and he could bite and choke on the fury. He is angry for the choices he has had to make, angry with the people who ask him to make them and it is a confusion that lives within him, moves his steps towards vengeance and retribution. There is always something that needs to be rectified. Anger leaves him standing in Harrow’s study with blood and wrath on his hands, leaves him staring into a mirror full of his own despair. It grows and it multiplies, it flows with loneliness and death.
All he can feel is the tempest seething, and it is like a skein wrapped tight around himself.
Yet the anger is mixed with pain, like two different wools that have been spun together to make one, here a delicate thread snaking through it like lace, here growing ever thicker, ever more difficult to ignore. There is the pain he feels physically, each spell he casts cutting its lines into him, each fresh slice growing ever sharper, the ache of it that multiplies. There is the pain that is heavy in his head, the pain of this world that is full of these emotions the human heart could never hope to comprehend.
There is nothing but pain fraying around him, unravelling in his hands.
So he scuffs and he scratches, yanks on the next thread he finds and it is grief. At first it seems as if it’s nothing at all, the shortest yarn, and yet when he looks it is woven into everything and he can feel the way it presses into him, loss after loss after loss. He sees each face, each a person he has loved and they are gone and all that is left is the grief and its sorrow smothers him. He is bound up, and he scrabbles for the threads of it and he pulls and he pulls and the whole shroud seems to come apart in his hands. Little scraps of patchwork that he can’t hold onto, they flutter away from him and he reaches for them and they disappear. The grief is like the very stars themselves, endless, and he is lost in them. He reaches out his hand, stretches it to the heavens and he is lost.
He feels the cold fingers of death tighten around him.
He is dead.
He has fallen from the peak of the storm spire and he is dead.
Death wraps him in its shroud, heavy and dark, a patchwork filled with fibres and threads.
His hands scrape against them, struggle for freedom and as he catches at a thread and starts to pull, he realises that it wasn’t the death of him that was hard, but the living.