As you may have gathered, this is also a story about Laurel Gray. It took me a while to find her drifting through the blue, so wired and sullen and lonely.

To explain how she ended up in this mess, stuck on the other side of the universe, you need to know one thing about Gray: she didn’t love winning nearly as much as she hated losing.

She quit everything she couldn’t win, from chess competitions to part-time jobs to dead-end towns. There was no point in sitting around and waiting for defeat. When life dealt her a shitty hand, she walked away from the table. At some point she ran out of tables.

To SEIDR, she was a perfect candidate. They preferred to hire people with no other options. The Reality Weaving Academy didn’t ask for a resume—just a steady hand, a meticulous eye, and a knack for secrecy. So she took the bait and sank deep into a reverie of red caves and black water, gliding between Oshun and Earth, living a waking dream.

Weaver madness was the only flaw in SEIDR’s machine. Though it stalked along the outskirts of her perception, stealing strangers and acquaintances and sometimes even friends, she never thought it would take her.

She didn’t like being wrong. It was one of those things that happened to other people, like losing, or delirium, or dying.

But she was wrong about weaver madness, and it caught up with her eventually. She had never been doomed before. It was an insidious feeling, casting a long shadow.

It whispered in her own voice: you are going to lose everything. Not yet, but soon. And so, by degrees, it drove her insane.

This was hardly unusual. There were dozens of weavers living the same story alongside her. They all went down to the Erdos Asylum eventually, and none of them came back out. Only Gray escaped that fate ever-so-narrowly. When she’d first taken the Clarity, bolting through the shipyard and pulling herself blindly across time and space, it felt like victory.

It took her a while to realize none of it mattered. This was just a change of scenery. Prisoner or not, she was going to die.

Dying free sounded better, in theory, but she still preferred living.

***

Gray’s escape was a narrow one in several ways.

The Erdos Asylum was pitted with crevices, running through the halls and cutting across the ceiling, but most of them went nowhere. The caves petered out, or dropped into vertical shafts that no human could possibly scale.

In Gray’s cell, a thin crack ran across the back wall. It ended after a few feet, so no one bothered to seal it off. When Gray lay on her cot at night, she could feel a faint draft blowing across her toes.

One day she realized that the crack had no ceiling. She tilted her room’s lamp toward the gap, peering up into the dark, but there was no end in sight.

It took her nearly three hours of climbing in the dark—bracing herself against the parallel walls, hands pressed to the rock. Eventually a side passage split off from the main chimney. She followed it until the glimmer of light from some faraway lantern caught her eye. Even at a distance, it was bright enough to hurt.

From there, she simply ran. Her feet knew the path to the shipyard, and her hands knew the loom by heart. She didn’t have to think about any of it.

Isthmus was the real test. SEIDR required two weavers on every crossing, but Gray didn’t have the luxury of backup. If she dropped the thread, the ship would be lost instantly.

She gripped the prismatic loom with white knuckles the whole way, but she made no mistakes. When the Clarity finally emerged from the isthmus, she staggered up the stairs and came face-to-face with the wild blue yonder.

She’d never felt such startling relief. It was enough to pull her to her knees as she gasped in the fresh, bitter air.

Gray had travelled to Oshun before, but never by herself, and never so desperate. The scale of the universe left her breathless. It seemed to promise an answer to all her questions, a cure for everything that ailed her, if only she knew where to look.

She began circling the warm deck while uncertainty crept in around the edges. She was keenly aware that the ship was all she had, a thin skin of wood to separate her from the alien sea underneath.

And Oshun was a strange and terrifying sea. In all of its blue emptiness, in the pearly bubbles which floated through the void, in the silhouettes of the stalking skelfing which prowled the aether ceaselessly, it held only the barest speck of humanity: the Clarity. Gray was alone.

Her ship drifted into a thick white cloud that smelled inexplicably of mint. Tiny wisps of fog poured through the pergola and dissolved over her head. The world was hushed and still.

She sighed, looked down at her hands, and almost screamed.

Both of them had turned blue—a deep, mottled royal blue that saturated her fingertips, stained her palms, and faded away at the wrist.

Gray had no gloves, of course. She’d gone straight from the asylum to the ship, knowing there was no time for hesitation. For hours, she’d been weaving with her bare hands. It was strictly forbidden, but no one was there to stop her. The rules seemed meaningless now.

The fabric of reality felt oddly cold, soft and ephemeral as melting snow. As she’d pulled the ship across isthmus, her fingers spun over invisible threads, pulling them back as the Clarity soared forward. The blue marks appeared slowly, livid and dark as bruises. She hadn’t noticed them, between the flickering candlelight and fearful concentration.

Now she stared, appalled, flipping her hands over to examine every blotch under the light of the star. She tried to wipe the color away with her shirt, but her hands remained stubbornly blue.

Years ago, when she was still in the Academy, they’d explained the consequences of touching the fabric directly. But the memory was foggy and distant, and she had more pressing issues to deal with.

While the Clarity rolled gently through a clear sky, Gray began a methodical search of the interspace-ship, rounding up all the supplies the crew had left on board.

In the tiny galley kitchen, she found bags of dried fruits and vegetables, salted meat, a few loaves of moldering bread, and various drinks. Pure water was impossible to transport across the bio-organic barrier, so most ships carried plenty of juice and beer.

It was enough food for a crew of seven to survive a few days. For Gray it might last a month, if she rationed herself.

She poured a wooden cup full of orange juice and ate a couple of dry biscuits. They dissolved into a flavorless mush on her tongue.

A month of sailing alone. After that, all bets were off.

In the hammock room, she discovered several bins full of clothes. They were a mismatched collection from the Clarity’s former crew, varying in size, color and style. Gray picked out a soft shirt and a pair of comfortable trousers. She even dredged up some spare leather gloves for weaving.

Once she was dressed, she tossed her old white uniform off the side of the ship. It fluttered away like a ghost on the breeze, neither sinking nor rising.

There were a few more interesting finds in the depths of the ship: a roll of thick paper and several pencils that presumably belonged to the Clarity’s scribe; a few leather-bound books; and finally, a massive red weaving jacket bundled inside a hammock.

Gray was delighted to find the red jacket, but it was far too big for her. She had to wear it draped over her shoulders, more like a cape than a coat.

She went prowling around the ship, but found nothing else worth mentioning. Finally she tried opening the first book, just to check the title.

She missed the cover.

Gray blinked. The book should have flipped open, just like every other book, but somehow her hand had skipped right past it. She gave her fingers a nervous glance, just to make sure they were still attached, and tried again.

Her index went right through the cover. Her thumb stopped short, pressed against the title.

Gray yanked her hand back. Her eyes were wild. She knew exactly what she’d seen, and was only trying to convince herself it wasn’t real.

Finally she recalled, with a lurch in her gut, what it meant to unravel.

In her first year at the Reality Weaving Academy, she’d been warned to keep her bare hands clear of the loom, and never let her skin touch the distilled fabric of reality. They didn’t explain unraveling until her second year, when she was already too invested to leave.

It didn’t happen often, but sometimes a careless weaver would let their gloves slip down past their wrists. Or perhaps a crewmate would stand a little too close to the loom at the wrong time. It only took a moment.

The faint blue lines appeared a few hours later. They marked the point where your body and the fabric began to meld.

As reality took hold, you would slowly disintegrate, stripped away one line at a time. Under a red light, the process was even clearer. You could observe the actual movement of the threads as they pulled you to pieces.

Gray stared at her deep blue hands, swallowing the bile in her throat. She imagined, for a moment, that she could feel her skin peeling back.

That was ridiculous, of course. It took months, if not years, for the unraveling to spread.

For the first time, she was almost comforted by delirium. It gave her a sense of grim satisfaction to know she would be gone long before the fabric could do anything about it. She shoved both hands deep into her pockets, resolving to keep them out of the way until she needed them.

***

Weaver madness was harder to ignore.

In everyone it went a little differently. Some people caught it fast and hard, and went from lucid to lost to dead in a week. Sometimes it took a year.

For Gray it started like this: one day, there was a quiet noise in the back of her mind.

It was not quite a whisper. More of a faint scratching. A tapping, really.

It was so soft and so easy to ignore, she didn’t even realize it was happening—not at first. And then one morning as she lay in bed, with no loud thoughts to occupy her head, she realized she’d been hearing it for months.

When she concentrated, it grew a little louder, but its steady pace never changed. An ever-present knock on the door in the back of her mind.

It crept up so gradually that she wasn’t frightened at all. It didn’t seem dangerous. Just the idea of a sound. If it sounded more and more like something was trying to get her attention, from the other side of the door, Gray simply chose to ignore it.

It was her mind, after all. She decided what to let in and what to keep out.

But the sound never stopped. It was always there, tapping away, polite but insistent. Whenever she was alone, or tired, or distracted, she could feel it pushing against the borders of her perception.

It had to get in eventually. Her guard was slipping.

Sometimes she would catch herself turning toward the door and wondering why she’d kept it so tightly shut. Sometimes she would catch herself reaching for it.

In her dreams she was surrounded by doors, walking through enormous warehouses where doors hung from the ceiling and lined the walls, falling through open doorways in the floor, stuck in a blank space between two impassable doors. Locked in, locked out.

Gray sensed the end was coming long before it arrived, for her stubbornness was breaking down into a curious indifference. She wanted to let it in, just to see what would happen. She wanted to know what it was.

She was undone by her own hand and her desire to understand. As I said, she was a perfect fit for SEIDR.

The madness started in her right eye.

In moments, a darkness bloomed across her vision, consuming the world in front of her, sweeping over her face. It blocked up her ears, her nose, her mouth, and all her senses rapidly faded into a choking silence.

Inevitably, she fell. She could not feel her body or sense her breath. She might have popped out of existence if it weren’t for her right eye, which swiveled and peered into the nothingness which surrounded her.

Out of her right eye, she saw nothing. Almost nothing. Traces of light would sometimes appear. Little sparks popping in and out of existence. Bright motes of dust.

There was no way to track the time, no way to prove she was still alive, and no way to escape once the nothingness arrived. It would disappear on its own, leaving Gray to return to herself, seconds or minutes or hours later. And it was always, always getting worse.

Chess sustained her when everything else failed, because chess had rules and Gray knew all of them. Even in a timeless void, she could map out games in her head, forming puzzles and solving them, running bizarre openings against herself. In her spare time she hunted down theory books and spent days lounging in the New Frog Chess Club, reading and chatting and pouring all her attention onto sixty-four squares. It kept her sane.

When they finally dragged her to the Erdos Asylum, it kept her alive. For a little while, at least. The asylum was sick enough to sour the air and ruin Gray’s concentration. She was always distracted by her neighbors—the new ones who arrived in the night, the old ones who were taken away in the morning—and spent most of her time pacing the perimeter of the four white walls.

That was why she had to leave, in the end. She fell into the dark, blank space in her right eye, and came back to the bright, blank space in her left eye. There was no real difference between them. Black and white and equally empty.

***

Things were better in Oshun. When Gray first arrived, she enjoyed a long stretch of peace. She slept twice and was clear-headed and clear-eyed in between. There was no precise timekeeping—she didn’t bother tracking the marked candles as they melted—but she guessed three days had passed since she left SEIDR.

Weaver madness ebbed and flowed, but with each rebound it grew a little stronger. On the fourth day, while Gray climbed the stairs up to the deck, a sharp pain shot through her right eye. She had just enough time to flinch before she fell.

When she came back to herself she was dizzy, crumpled up at the bottom of the steps, with a dry mouth and a growing headache. She knew it had been a long time.

Once or twice she’d tried counting during the blind spell of delirium, but it was easy to accidentally speed up or slow down without a heartbeat to match pace with. She didn’t even know if time existed in that blank space.

In fact, she had no way to conceptualize it from the outside. It was such a singularly unique experience that she could not even summon the memory of it without a curtain drawn across the jagged details, softening the edges.

It made her angry, though she had no one to be angry at. It reminded her that everything would be lost.

Little by little, she began to loathe the Clarity. Inside, the ship was tiny, stifling, and dark. There were no windows, but the planks of wood were all covered in knots and when her vision blurred they looked like eyes, hiding in the walls, looking back at her from all directions.

It was a warm space, enclosed and feverish. But up above was terrible too. The star stared down at her from its perch in the lofty blue sky, unreachable and immovable. The clouds were the size of mountains, real mountains, and they sailed past her at a glacial pace. The Clarity swam through currents of aether while Gray dithered and wondered where she could possibly go.

The size of Oshun was threatening. Its mere existence squeezed her like the weight of the ocean on a bottom-feeding fish. She felt oppressed by the empty, inescapable vastness. In all that space, there was not one safe harbor, nor a single corner to hide in.

She was getting sick of it. Whenever she passed a bubble, she would lean on the railing and stare at its flawless, iridescent form, caught between awe and envy.

Gray could not venture off the ship, for she had no way to get back to the Clarity. If she chose the wrong bubble, and it turned out to be hostile or barren or deadly, she would simply die there.

Only a wizard could navigate this kind of environment, marking safe from hazardous, hopping freely from one world to the next. Gray knew that without training, even a half-hearted attempt at exploring would probably kill her.

And she was always, always waiting for the skelfing.

She had no way to hear it coming; there would be no warning at all, not that it mattered much. Even if she saw a monster on the horizon, and foresaw her doom, she could do nothing but flee. Sooner or later, one of them would catch up with her.

In the meantime, she was alive.

Gray pulled the ship away from distant storms, finding currents that drew her swiftly into the distance. She fell from high to low, unspeakable and unjustifiable joy to painfully familiar despair, always unsure of what she was doing and how she ever wound up here in the first place.

Her regret was iterative; every time she went back, there was another detail she’d missed, another way to fix the present by rewriting the past. And yet none of it mattered; she could look and look but never touch.

She never quite got used to the quiet. There was the sound of wind in her ears, and her own footsteps, and the creaking of the ship as the currents pulled it back and forth. That was all. Sometimes she sang to herself in a low, humming voice, just to interrupt the silence.

There were exactly four books on the Clarity. By the second week, she had finished all of them. Her least favorite was Bullethead, which she read twice; the second time she marked it up with a pencil in the margins, commenting on all the worst bits and underlining the typos.

With the leftover paper, she tried a bit of sketching, but she wasn’t very good, and there wasn’t much to draw. Her only references were the ship, the star, and the occasional bubble. Even her circles were wonky and lopsided, her lines shaky and feathered. She threw the half-finished drawings overboard when she couldn’t stand to look at them anymore.

Her journey was quite uneventful, for the most part, though her mind was a sea in storm. She stuck to the warm teal skies of the fourth stratosphere, where sharks were rare and clusters of bubbles frequently interrupted the horizon.

Whenever she wasn’t concentrating, her mind drifted toward her eventual fate. Perhaps she would die of starvation, when her supplies finally ran out. Perhaps she would collapse and fall over the edge in her next bout of weaver madness. Perhaps a skelfing would devour the ship while she slept. Perhaps her fingers would unwind until she couldn’t steer the ship at all.

The end was the same, regardless, but she was morbidly curious about the details.

***

Gray awoke in claustrophobic darkness. In her right eye, she saw a vast expanse of eigengrau dark. Dots drifted across her field of vision, bright like microscopic sea creatures, tiny and impossibly distant.

She wondered if she was dead. It was a strangely apathetic thought. If this was death it didn’t hurt.

Her disembodiment was almost complete; but she could feel her right eye, still in its socket. She felt it swivel to track the points of light.

Seeing on its own was disorienting. Without a frame of reference, size was impossible to estimate. Time trickled past without any way to mark it. It was hard to keep her mind from drifting into a fuzzy, abstract stupor. There was nothing to concentrate on and no sign of when this would end.

When it passed she was lying in her hammock, gasping, drenched in sweat. A single candle sputtered and cast its meager light through the doorway.

While the madness lasted, she could not steer the ship, or watch for threats, or even feed herself. If she died, she would never know she was dying.

Picturing that, tumbling off into the void unaware and alone, was the worst fate she could imagine. So Gray made a choice.

It was an enormous relief once she finally decided to end it. All that remained was to figure out how. There was plenty of rope aboard the Clarity, but she couldn’t tie a proper noose. And even the ship’s knives were made of wood.

Leaping off the deck, into the bottomless clouds, would almost certainly be fatal. But when Gray approached the ship’s handrail to peer over the edge, a shudder of apprehension ran through her. She didn’t know what awaited her down there, and she had no desire to find out.

The best solution, when she finally landed upon it, was brilliantly fitting. She would go up.

Up, past the layers of molten blue, through the gathering clouds, to Oshun’s star.

Gray knew it was closer than it appeared. It sat in the center of Oshun, with the stratospheres layered around it like rings surrounding the heart of an old oak tree. Its rays burned a bright blue-white through even the murkiest sky.

Immediately she felt better. She would not wait patiently for a slow, creeping death, but seek it in the most glorious fashion. That, in some sense, was victory.

She sat down at the prismatic loom and wove the Clarity into an upward spiral, testing currents to find which ones bore her aloft even while she slept.

I might as well tell you the star pulled in all things eventually—bubbles and skelfing alike—and Gray was drawn with equal fervor toward the center. She thought she was going to die there, but the star had something very different in mind.

As she went up, the world changed color.

It was gradual, a shifting gradient that materialized between gaps in the clouds and in the gleaming reflections bouncing off distant bubbles. The temperature changed, too.

From the warm ocean blue of the fourth stratosphere, she ascended into a pale, cool sky where the breeze tasted like saltwater taffy.

It took three days for the air to grow warmer again, as the color of the sky gradually darkened. From a light, airy powder blue, it melted into a bright indigo that felt oddly crushing. Gray had never seen a sky so saturated and rich in color. It was hot enough that she didn’t need the jacket anymore. The wind smelled like damp earth and ginger.

The Clarity strained and groaned under the sudden speed, borne on swift currents that tugged against the hull, but it held together. Gray was glad it had carried her this far. She hoped they could make it a little farther.

When she needed a break from weaving, she spread a checkered blanket across the ship’s deck and set up her plate and utensils with mock precision, the perfect picnic for one. From the blanket she watched the towers of clouds fall past her, watched the bubbles in the distance dwindle and disappear beneath her.

She was running low on supplies, but that didn’t matter anymore. No point in rationing her last few meals. When she was finished she lay on her back, looking up at the star. It warmed her skin, beaming down between the bars of the pergola.

Gradually, everything else Gray had carried—all the worries and hopes, joys and disappointments, the people she missed and the places she would never see again—slid away. They hollowed her and left her as light as a bird. And so she ascended, free of everything but herself. It was not a long trip.