Chapter 6: To Rip a Heart Out

Wrapped in tulle with lace running into her veins, the coroner laid motionless beside Loomia. The prophet didn’t have a mark on her from battling off the rest of the hellhounds. The hounds got what they had come for. A loose spirit. Like blood in the water, it called to them, to satiate the hunger that ravaged the feral beasts. Once they hauled the dislodged spirit away and Loomia locked Edwina into the Material it only took her a few fleeting minutes to dispatch the rest of the stragglers in the pack.

Warden walked about the room as he pieced together the most acceptable story to explain what had happened here. They needed the office to remain intact and the coroner be able to return, but the attack and the blond man’s—Finn is what she called him—death were glaring events that would take a good narrative to take hold. Warden looked back at the coroner, her face calm and soft. His stomach lurched as a sort of beauty about her gripped him. Her soft brown hair scattered in waves around her head, her eyes flitting behind lucid dreams, and the red pout to her lips. He admonished the thoughts.

“I found what was left of the files of these two.” Warden gestured to the two intact bodies still in their slots. “Seems this one had no family. You could alter the face enough to look like Finn. There was already a break in last night, and a body went missing so another wouldn’t be too suspicious. I also found this coat and hat, and by the pay notes in the pocket it looks like they were owned by a Benton. Could frame him if we needed too.”

Dr. Sharp’s fingers clenched, and her jaw tightened as she audibly growled, blood spilled from her mouth, and she began to choke on the crimson liquid. Loomia sighed and moved her hands to sew more lace and tulle into the woman’s body. The needles piercing delicately into the battered skin of Dr. Sharp and after a few moments the distressed coroner quieted.

“She is fighting me.” Loomia hummed, but Warden could sense her annoyance.

“Did I fight you?” Warden pondered the idea.

“You were a drunk. Your mind was malleable. She is intelligent, and nearly immovable.” Loomia touched around Dr. Sharp’s face, bright threads lacing into her forehead in intricate patterns. The woman shifted and grunted before softening into a whimper.

“Did you just call me stupid, Loomia?” Warden feigned offense, crossing his arms, and pouting out his thick bottom lip. Loomia looked up with her statuesque stare.

“If I were to call you something I would just say so.” Her voice was flat and unwavering, betraying nothing of her intended meaning.

“I was— never mind.” Warden went back to the files, deciding against explaining sarcasm to the prophet. “When will he be here?”

“He is on his way.”

“Will she live, even if he doesn’t decide to bond with her?” Warden wondered honestly.

“It is unlikely.”

“You’ve always been a delightful conversationalist, Loomia.” Warden quipped.

“It is less of a matter if he will accept her, it is if she will accept him. She doesn’t seem to want to live.”

“When you said she was fighting you, you meant she is fighting the will to live?” Warden asked in disbelief. When Loomia had offered him life he clung to it like a child gripping their blanket. He was a desperate man walking the line of death, and the lifeline was everything. The idea Dr. Sharp was trying to throw it away baffled him.

“Yes. She is fighting my attempts to heal her body and strengthen her mind. She has her memories carefully guarded. I have been unable to touch many of them.” Loomia’s voice wavered, as if anger caught her. The slip caught Warden off guard.

“Stop trying to touch the memories of Finn.”

“The blond boy?” Loomia seemed genuinely surprised.

“Yes, I suspect she loved him and if you’re messing with those memories, it is no wonder she is fighting you.”

“I altered your memories of your wife. You didn’t fight me.”

“That’s different. She had already moved on. She didn’t love me anymore. I had already lost her months before you found me. This Finn, she didn’t lose him, he was taken from her less than an hour ago.” Warden felt at the numb section of his mind. The lace of Loomia’s mind-altering magic hiding away his shame. He knew it was there, but he felt nothing. At times new emotions around the subject would worm their way into his forethought. Wondering if it had been the right choice to mute his love for his previous wife. It felt like a betrayal in a way to section off those memories and silence those emotions, but he had already betrayed her. She trusted him. She forgave him when he begged with remorse and promised he wouldn’t fall into belligerence again, but he did, and she paid the price for it.

“You’ve made a mess, Loomia.” A dark penetrative voice growled in the back of Warden’s mind. He hated the sound as its scratching made his skin prickle.

“Tailuur.” Loomia stood to greet the other prophet, her stoicism faded as she said the name with a clenched jaw.

The male figure was near exactly her height. He stood arched dramatically with a perfectly tailored wool suit that fit his thin stretched figure. Structured pieces of stiff wool jutted out from the suit at odd angles, pointing off his shoulders to make for an imposing silhouette. He wore a large brimmed structured hat, lined with hundreds of onyx teardrop beads that dangled, glittering starry reflections. A single crimson silk rose tucked into his double-breasted coat pocket. The deep red looked as though it thrummed with the echo of a heartbeat, but the silk may have been merely flickering the lights overhead.

“Reeth said you found me a threadbearer.” the male figure stated.

“Reeth decreed you bond with the next possible candidate, as you haven’t bonded in a decade.” Loomia softly gestured to Dr. Sharp.

Warden felt like an ant among giants. Tailuur hadn’t even bothered to acknowledge his existence nearby. They towered over him just on the other side of the veil. Their dramatic lines haloed by the odd illuminations floating in streaks of stars that burst into a wild display of colored lights in the Fabric realm. Warden awkwardly began puttering around the morgue. Loomia and Tailuur had begun speaking—more like arguing—in a language Warden didn’t understand. It was a strange low vibratory sounding language. Warden would never learn to speak it as it required their unhuman tongue to make the syllables. Their tongues split four times, two on each side, and then pointed into an odd line of muscles.

Loomia hissed so hard that Warden could feel the vibration in his chest. He felt it might have been the equivalent of shouting some sort of horrendous curse word because Tailuur reeled back and paused defensively. Warden stopped moving, as if he were a small mouse, hoping the cats that fought nearby wouldn’t see him if he just stood still long enough. He had never seen Loomia display so much emotion. She was always calm and flat in all her words. They had met with another prophet and threadbearer in passing once before and the exchange was as emotionless as he expected. This seemed filled with animosity. There was a history here that Warden could only guess at.

“Is it because she’s a woman?” Warden drew attention to himself and immediately regretted it as the two prophets snapped their black satin eyes towards him. “It’s a problem for some people. Women get pregnant and all. Some places won’t hire them because they can’t work…” The giants stared at the little mouse. “You do know what pregnancy is, don’t you?”

“I do not need you to explain what human procreation is.” Tailuur spoke in his low humming voice.

“That’s good.” Warden nodded, relieved he didn’t have to hold an impromptu anatomy lesson. “So, what is it?”

“She has everything to lose. She holds many connections to the Material. It is better when someone gives themselves over to threadbearing that they do not hold so many connections. Demons prey on them.” Loomia explained, “She is stubborn and won’t allow me to access much of her mind. Tailuur would be going into the connection blind. Tailuur is also stubborn. The match might do him well.”

Tailuur made a guttural hiss towards Loomia, and she returned the foul thing. Warden stifled a smirk at Loomia’s passive aggressive statement. So, she was calling him stupid. He began to quite enjoy watching her antagonize the other prophet. Tailuur stalked away pacing up and down the street in deep thought.

“He seems nice.” Warden sat on the edge of an overturned table. The thing was wobbly and didn’t support his weight well. He adjusted himself a few times before finding the delicate balance between sitting and toppling over.

“He is not unkind.” Loomia regained her flat tone and Warden frowned, having hoped he would get some time with the more animated version of Loomia.

“So, that’s why you didn’t have me meet her sooner. When we found out she had the sensory primal essence I was sure you were going to have me seek her out.” Warden had received a Fabrication identification request from her office a month prior. Dr. Sharp sent over a small medical device that was found on a deceased woman. It turned out it was an item one would press up against their throat and it would open up the airways for people who had difficulty breathing. Even though Dr. Sharp had not identified it, in her correspondence with Karie she had accurately indicated it would go inactive by the time it got to Warden’s office. Only someone who could see Voile burn off would be able to tell that.

“Tailuur has no choice. This bond has been decreed. No matter how inconvenient.”

“Who is Reeth?”

“He is the eye all tears fall.” Loomia sighed the words as though speaking the prophetic phrase took the breath from her lungs.

“Of course.” Warden pursed his lips and nodded, feigning that this was a perfectly understood answer. “Does he have something to do with Tearsies, the goddess?”

“In a way,” Loomia settled in her mock human sitting, though this time there was no chair, she simply lounged on her tulle bustle. “but they are also one in the same. He is the eye, and she is the tear. He sees all, she feels all. He looks to the future, and she mourns the past. He warns us, she protects us. Their cycle is within all of us.”

“So, when you say Reeth has decreed something, do you mean a man that looks like you,” Warden gestured with open hands encompassing the entirety of Loomia’s form. “told you, or is he something else?”

“You will meet him one day. Not today.” Loomia ended that conversation.

“They were trying to kill her with that creature, weren’t they?”

“I suspect so. Shades are the ones to dispatch potential threadbearers. I do not know what that creature was, that spawned. It had bypassed all connections to the Fabric. I was entirely unable to touch it. That is concerning.” Loomia confessed the words like they were venom searing her tongue. The fact she couldn’t engage the creature that ravaged Dr. Sharp’s morgue made her uncharacteristically angry. Though everything seemed to be making her uncharacteristically angry right now.

Dr. Sharp choked on her own blood again, sputtering a fountain of spit and crimson into the air. It was the slightest pin prick in Warden’s shoulder as Loomia had drawn out a thread. He wouldn’t have noticed it if it hadn’t of been for the shift in his extended inkwell. Sigils churning into place forming a line that had begun to tick down. Loomia was drawing power from him. Her lace worked hard to keep the doctor alive, the delicate threads woven into every fiber of her being, stitching, mending, and rebuilding. Loomia could only do so much for a human she wasn’t bonded with. Warden wasn’t fond of being used as a fuel tank, he could fight her, but Loomia had taught him early she could easily drain him faster than he could drain her. A fairly brutal lesson to teach him to not even try. He felt the subtle fatigue that her magic gave him when she pulled from him so rapidly.

“You are wasting time Tailuur.” Loomia hurried the words, ushering the pacing prophet to step up. “I cannot keep her alive much longer.”

“She cannot even agree to the terms of threadbearing. Reeth is wrong. I will find another.” Tailuur stated, with the grey smoke falling from his mouth, as cold as ice.

“Then she dies.” Warden spouted, the inflation of his chest faltering as Tailuur directed one of the foreign curse words towards him. A flash of tulle flourished in front of Warden and he felt a sudden drain on his vitality.

“You will not step to my threadbearer, prophet.” Loomia stepped in line between the two.

Warden’s stomach flipped between a certain amount of terror and a bit of self-importance as Loomia aggressively protected him. He stifled the urge to antagonize the other prophet and shoved it in a far corner of his mind. That sort of urge didn’t help him in his previous marriage, and it would do him no good now. She inched herself taller than Tailuur and her stone face sculpted into a scowl.

Warden didn’t know how to conduct himself. He fidgeted slightly in place and did his best not to make another sound. The world beyond the few banishing’s he had done and the gathering of spirits was growing rapidly. He did not think the world of these beings was far beyond the lifeline that Loomia had thrown him when he was wallowing in his own desperate filth. Did he really have a choice when he agreed to become a threadbearer?

“Denying your duty will not change what happened to Corval.”

“Do not speak of him.” Tailuur snapped bearing a row of black fanged teeth towards Loomia.

“It is finished Tailuur. Refusing to bond will not bring him back. He is dead. You killed him yourself.” When Loomia spoke the words, she struggled to keep them all in a language Warden could understand. Her passion making it hard for her to translate the words in her head before she spoke them out loud. For some reason she thought Warden deserved to hear this. Though for the life of him, Warden couldn’t figure out why.

The tension grew in the room. The Fabric realm buzzed with energy and Warden was pulled into the transient realm with the prophets as they overtook the area. Warden was familiar with this. Creatures of the Fabric shed their connection to the Material to perform the bond. He was consumed by the Fabric when he and Loomia bonded, and he suspected it was Dr. Sharp’s turn now.

Warden braced himself in the mirrored room of the morgue. The walls angled in a way that would make their construction impossible, but the building stood. Dr. Sharp lay still on the ground and Loomia lifted her hands, the lace she had encased the woman in fell away. Warden didn’t fully remember what had happened the day he bonded, it was another numb part in his mind that he held no emotions for. He prodded around his mind and a shame crept into him as he realized much of his memories lay locked away from him. He knew he ran away from them, letting Loomia cage those parts of himself because he was just too weak to face them. He pushed that shame away to the other side of the hazy barrier with all the other memories he refused to confront.

Dr. Sharp was released from the last of the lace that had bound her body. Her crumpled form lay bleeding upon the ground and Tailuur stood over her like some reaper their to collect her soul. In a way, he was. He shoved two hands down and penetrated her chest. The woman burst to life and screamed with a harrowing terror. Warden’s stomach clenched when he heard the cracking of her ribs. He swallowed his sick and averted his eyes, but the squelching of her body being torn open echoed through his mind.

Tailuur pulled out her heart, strings of crimson continue to pump her blood even as the prophet stretched the connection. Loomia settled back to watch and Warden bolstered his constitution enough to glance occasionally. Tailuur held the woman down with one of his arms and the other two began piercing the heart rapidly, embroidering silver threads into the still beating organ. Dr. Sharp beat against the ground with frightful shrieks that seemed to echo endlessly.

“Did I fight you, like this?” Warden asked again, echoing his previous inquiry.

“No.” Loomia nearly swallowed the word. She didn’t peel her eyes away, but she watched with a stone expression. Warden tried to read her, to see if she was disturbed, but he couldn’t tell.

Tailuur alternated hands from holding her down to encasing her heart with the threads that came from each of his fingers. Warden had a sick feeling the prophet was being particularly cruel with the ritual. It was that or Loomia had done him a great favor in muting the memories so thoroughly that he didn’t know what had truly happened. He was tempted to poke at that part of his mind, but he knew if he continued, he would one day unravel the lace Loomia had in place. When Warden felt like he couldn’t listen to the deafening shrills of Dr. Sharps pain any longer she quieted.

Tailuur had bent down and placed the heart back into her chest. With a delicate care he begun sewing her body back together. Silver threads mending bite marks and jagged gashes that blemished her skin. His voice hummed low prophetic words that Warden could not understand. Loomia whispered their meaning in her soft flute like voice.

By the ink of her tears and the vision of his gaze. Under the weeping indigo sky, I, a Prophet of threads and truths, pledge to you, Threadbearer. Together, we are bound by the will of Tearsies, who mourns the past, and guided by Reeth, who watches all futures.

With the strength of her living ink, I shall shield you, as she shields the fraying edges of the realms. With the clarity of his unblinking sight, I shall guide you, warning of storms and shadows yet to come.

When demons rise from the depths of the Shadow Weave, I promise to stand with you, to wield my power within you, and with you, to banish their chaos to the darkness they spawned. By ink and vision, by thread and loom, we shall mend the broken and hold the line against despair.

To you, chosen Threadbearer, I offer my strength, my sight, my devotion. May my loom sew your strength and weave your power, may your courage and hope fuel my purpose. Together, we will preserve the tapestry. Together, we will vanquish the unravelling storm.

By the will of Tearsies, by the vision of Reeth, may our bond become the thread that holds the realms intact and banishes the devourers of fate.