Weekly Writing – April 27 2024

They had started writing her myth before she’d even been born, so there really wasn’t anything she could do. In accordance with its opening paragraphs, her mother had started teaching her how to weave as soon as she had enough grace in her tiny hands to hold the wool.
She hadn’t heard the story behind it, behind her, until she was eight. She had wept then and refused to weave for a week, but her mother, her father, her grandparents and the village elders one by one, all came to her locked bedroom door. Through the wood, while she lay in bed and tried to stop up her ears, they reminded her how the story was supposed to end in plenty and happiness. Any story acted out faithfully enough became true, and this one would make their village prosperous for centuries to come.
How could she deny them that? She had already suffered through eight hungry winters with the rest of them. She had seen how the roofs of shabby huts collapsed on those huddled inside sometimes, the wood around the village too rotten to safely build with anymore.
It was why they’d written her story. She would weave until the line she wove was long enough to stretch from the village to the sea. Then, full of sorrow for their hunger and suffering, she would dye the wool with her own blood as an offering to the gods. Thellia, the keeper of the divine hearth, would be so touched by the sacrifice that she would take the wool to knit her own cloak, leaving just one thread to weave prosperity through the village’s fate for as long as it lasted.
It would be a beautiful story. But it would take all of her blood, and she was supposed to be the one who chose to shed it. So she wept as she wove, and later, maybe they would say it was because she was just so sorry for the village that had birthed her to die.