He became aware of a ruckus then, a crow, squawking a riot at him. It landed beside the faerie and the Magruwen waved his hand once more so that the crow fell still, frozen in place with his wings arched protectively over the lass.

The Djinn needed quiet.

What he had just seen was impossible. What he now felt was inexplicable. He looked hard at the faerie. Just a lass, and yet, with his sluggishness banished—what had she done to him?—his senses felt cleansed, and there was something familiar in her, some hint, some wisp that sang to him.

He needed to look at the Tapestry.

For millennia he had resisted looking at it. His dreams had been haunted by its unweaving and he couldn’t bear to see it in life, its ragged runs and ruined glyphs, its faded threads. Now he wrenched opened his long-blind inner eyes and waited for his mystical vision to clear.

The Tapestry was the very fabric of existence, woven long ago by seven fire elementals spinning in an eternity of nothing. They spun the threads of living light as a net to catch their dreams and keep them from dissolving into the blackness. Fever-bright they burned, fed unwaveringly by their one ally, the Astaroth, an elemental of the air, the world-shaping wind.

And the Tapestry grew.

It was simple in the beginning, a latticework of light, but the dreamers honed their craft, and the dream grew great. When at last it was ready they grasped its edges and shaped it into a sphere, its seams sewn tight, and within it bloomed a world. When they stitched closed the seams they did so from within. They sealed it around themselves and they knew they could never leave, not without letting the blackness in and annihilating everything the Tapestry sheltered.

They dreamed water and earth and populated them with fanciful creatures. The Magruwen dreamed dragons first and he doted on them, Fade most of all, the truest thing he ever fashioned. The great dragon lay curled round the Djinn while they wove and wove.

They dreamed faeries later and gave to them, as to dragons and to a lesser extent imps, something other creatures didn’t have, a sensitivity to the Tapestry. They couldn’t see it or alter it. Simply, they felt it. It was the pulse and vibration of their world and, like harpists plucking strings, they could make it sing.

This was magic.

What the Magruwen thought he had witnessed when the lass stung him awake—the impossible thing—was a faerie spinning a new glyph into the Tapestry. Not just playing upon it, not plucking a thread, but creating one.

Weaving.