The Widow, the Weaver, and the Wheel

You’ve been tugging at the threads, little weaver. Tracing the patterns with that curious frown of yours, wondering how it all got so irrevocably tangled. How so many small coincidences could collide at once.

You started to suspect it wasn’t coincidence at all. You started to wonder if something else was in the loom, a deity, a demon, a force behind the curtain.

I know better than most the insatiable thirst of curiosity, the sleepless wrath of a question unanswered.

So I will show you. Not the first stitch, not the shape of the design. Just a single knot in the endless web.

But first-- I will tell you a secret. A truth.

I am no god.

I am no hero.

I am not here to make the world a better place.

This is what you have always misunderstood about me. About all of it. You think it is the great moments that shape history: the crowning of kings, the spark of a revolution, the fall of an empire.

But it is the small things that change the hand of fate.

A wagon wheel. A desperate father. A cup of tea.

It was just a wheel that day. A spoke cracked, the victim of age, clandestine potholes, and a smith’s quiet debt to me. Snapped like a twig at that bend in the road near the hawthorn grove. There was mud, of course. Isn’t there always this time of year? The kind that sucks at boots and tempers alike.

A man cursed the sky, the road, and the wheel. His son coughed behind him, pale and thin as birch bark.

Mid-tirade, another wagon ambled up the path, expertly avoiding the maze of potholes and rocks. The driver was a woman from beyond the village. Her neighbors called her “the widow in the woods”, though she’d never worn a ring. She had fresh, rich dirt on her boots and a playful smirk for a smile. She had already made one sale that morning. To me.

That hadn’t been our first meeting. I’d met her years earlier, playing the part of a weary traveler and asked for directions to the nearest inn, a little cough coloring the corners of my query. She invited me into her cottage and made tea. Not for coin. Not for favor. Just because I looked like I needed it.

That’s when I knew I had the right thread.

We spoke of loneliness, of grief for something you’ve never held, of trying to build a home in a place that does not want you. I told her there was coin to be had at the market in the next valley, where no one knew her name or whispered about a dead husband who never drew breath. She believed me. She packed her tinctures and her tonics and traveled, week after week, learning the rhythm of it.

Not far from her little cottage, a boy’s mother traded indigo ink for a scarf in the coastal style. She said she’d always wanted to go to the coast, but she didn’t know the sea air stank of fever and the windows were boarded in mourning. She died two weeks later. The boy coughed for months, but he survived. Children are resilient like that.

The second time I visited the widow, it was not as a stranger but as a friend—as a weaver with a thread in hand. I only needed to delay her by an hour. Just enough to set her wagon at the right bend, at the right time. So I spilled a bit of lemon juice and let it burn beneath the summer sun until a fine red rash crawled across my arm. We shared a pot of tea in her kitchen while she fussed over my blistered skin in the doting, admonishing way only the truly compassionate can. I asked her questions about everything and nothing, and she stayed, gracious and unhurried. Just as I needed.

Long enough that her little wagon crested the bend just as the man’s shoulders curled inward, just as the boy tried to stifle his cough.

She stopped and offered to help. Of course she did. The boy clambered up into the wagon, all elbows and sharp cheeks, and settled beside the widow as if the spot had been waiting for him. And when she handed the boy the reins, his pale eyes lit up, and the thread was tied.

He adored her. He loved the way she spoke about plants as if they were alive, as if they were little worlds unto themselves. And the father, he came to adore the widow in the woods, too. The way she hummed in the garden. How she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. How she treated every tool he carved for her like a thing of diamonds instead of a simple piece of wood.

She never asked him to stay, but she always made enough food for three.

I checked in on them from time to time over the years. I told myself I was only making sure the knot was properly tied.

You see, I never understood what it meant to build, not barter. To give without ledger. But watching them, I thought, perhaps, I could learn.

That boy with birch-bark skin grew into a man of oak, sturdy and kind. He carried her quiet generosity into the world and became a healer in the king’s army.

One winter evening, he gave a salve to an enemy soldier, a boy really, with frostbite on his fingers. That boy soldier became a king’s man, trusted with bloodier work. He was sent to slit the throat of a quarrelsome representative.

But he hesitated.

Not long. Just enough for her to slip into the crowd and set fire to a thousand possible futures, binding mine into place.

She bartered passage on a ship bound for the outer island colonies. The harbor master overlooked her papers, too buoyant to be bothered with paperwork thanks to a gifted bottle of port from a long time client—yours truly. Within a month, the rebel woman would disembark on an island riddled with unrest.

She would wait. She would listen. And she would fan those flames into a wildfire.

That wildfire would necessitate an emergency council meeting among the colonial governors in the capital. That meeting would turn into days and weeks of deliberation, delaying the marriage negotiations between—

… well. You think you see where I’m going.

That island was called All Saints then.

Now? You know it as the Republic of Kareshi.

I did not light that fire out of love for Kareshi. I did not care who ruled its coasts, who claimed its flag. I only needed the smoke to drift a certain way.

You call it manipulation. But it felt more like… sowing.

You look for nexus points in battlefields, council chambers, and throne rooms. I find mine in kitchens, on muddy roads, and in tea that’s just gone cold. You think the threads I pull are shouts and screams in the grand symphony of fate. But the thread I pulled that day was soft. Steady. A promise whispered into the ribs of the world.

That’s what it all came down to, little weaver. A broken spoke. A boy’s cough. And a cup of tea brewed by a woman who spent years setting places at an empty table. Just in case.

I can admit, there is a part of me that relishes the strategy of it, the delayed gratification. The divine authority of moving game pieces that have no idea they are on a board. But even as the satisfaction of a thread successfully knotted wanes, the compulsion to weave lingers.

You wanted to understand, little walker. Little weaver. So I will give you the truth—more than you bargained for.

I envy you. Your clean hands. Your stillness.

You look upon the threads and marvel at their motion. You dip your fingers in the stream but never change its course. You map constellations, seeing distant beacons separated by lifetimes, strung together by coincidence and chance.

But I—I am inside the loom.

Passive observation was never an option for me, only entanglement. I pulled a thread, just one, and the weave snarled around me. Every thread entwined with another. Every decision demanded three more.

I do not do this for the thrill, or the promise of power, or for some glorious cause.

I opened a door, and it closed behind me.

I took the only path that remained, and everything I am, everything I have become, is in service of that one narrow road. That single thread in the tapestry of fate that leads me to peace.

I’ve traced the others again and again, hoping I missed a loophole, a way out. But every other strand in this infinite web ends in ashes. My son is taken by the Order, his spark purged by their cleansing. My wife is made a young widow, haunted by my ghost.

All but one are ruin.

And in that one, I have a hearth. A garden. Someone waiting for me. Do you think I wouldn’t burn the rest to reach it?

Sometimes I dream I’ve reached that peace, that paradise, after years and years of weaving and pulling and knotting. I play with my son in the yard, and the blood that stains my hands is washed clean by the soil in our garden. Rosemary grows wild along the fence, and the neighbors wave as they pass. My son laughs, unguarded and unrestrained, and I laugh too, and every time, it sounds new and foreign to my own ears.

In the dream, I lie in bed at night. My wife sleeps softly beside me, her hair spilled across the pillow like silk, her body warm against mine. The scent of thyme and onions drifts faintly from the kitchen. A simple stew, nothing extravagant, but I wouldn’t trade it for a king’s feast.

All is still. Quiet.

And yet.

I can’t sleep.

That itchy feeling of something left undone, a loose thread, a knot unraveling haunts me. My fingers twitch. The silence suffocates. The stillness taunts.

I am breaking the world for a woman I have never met and a child who flickers like a candle in a dark wind.

And I am terrified.

I am terrified that after all I have done, after everything I’ve lost and bartered and broken, I will not know how to be still in the life I bent the cosmos to build. I am terrified that I have been running for so long that I’m no longer capable of rest.

And I am so tired.

So you see, my dear weaver. I never wanted a throne.

I wanted a table set for three. A warm bed.

And laughter in a house no one would burn.