The glowing skeins of the Tapestry began to grow clear in his vision, starting out as traceries, curls, ribbons, and streamers of light and settling into their intricate patterns, moving and living and connecting all things. For a long time he held the crow immobile with one small finger of his mind and studied the Tapestry with the rest of it. It was much as he feared from his nightmares. There were ragged shreds and tatters held together by the thinnest of filaments. With the death of the Vritra many threads had dissolved altogether and the fabric was slack as old skin. Blackness peeked through the threadbare patches, taunting. The Tapestry was falling apart.

And then, among the dimming strings and patterns of the failing weave, the Magruwen’s eyes detected bright points, and he looked closer. He saw new glyphs. From one to the next, skipping over the vast fabric, he followed them. Messy they were and clumsy, brilliant and shining, childlike, impatient, artless, ingenious, and impossible. Some small fingers had been plying new threads through the old. Short and tangled though they were, in places these new stitches were all that held great gaps from yawning open.

While he slept, someone had been reweaving the Tapestry.

Magpie awakened with a groan, still blind, seeing only white. She smelled sulfur and knew she was still in the Magruwen’s cave. She smelled stale cigar smoke and knew Calypso was near. “Feather?” she said feebly.

“I’m here, ’Pie” came his soothing singsong voice, and she felt his feathertips caress her face.

“What did I do?” she whispered, remembering nothing but the light pouring from her fingertips.

“I don’t know, ’Pie,” the crow whispered back. She heard fear in his voice and struggled to sit up, tried to blink her vision into focus.

“Faerie,” hissed the Magruwen’s voice. “Who are you?”

“Magpie Windwitch, Lord,” she said in a wisp of a voice. She began to see shapes in the whiteness.

“Windwitch? Elemental?”

“I am granddaughter of the West Wind.”

To himself the Magruwen muttered, “That explains nothing.”

“Lord Magruwen,” Magpie said, “I’m sorry I offended you. And I’m sorry faeries have forsaken you. But I beg you, don’t forsake us back. Give us a chance to deserve the world, to become what we can still become.”

“This is not an age of becoming,” he told her. “It is the age of unweaving.”

“Unweaving again! What does it mean?”

“It means the darkness will rush in like a tide and sweep everything back into the endless ocean.”

“But sure we can stop it! With your help.” Her vision was returning and she squinted to look at him.

“It is already too late,” said the Djinn.

Magpie clenched her fists in frustration. “Neh!” she said forcefully, getting to her feet and leaning heavily on Calypso.

As she did so, a gleam caught the Magruwen’s gaze and drew it to her knife hilt. He hissed, “Skuldraig . . .”