The Grim Weaver

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A black shroud hovered above the soon to be victims of fate trudging through their relatively short lives. The long, loose, and tattered black cloak wrapped all the way around this spectre’s body, obfuscated the skull beneath a deep hood. It carried a scythe, a pole with a curved blade fixed at the top. For those mortal morsels, it was a tool used to harvest crops, for its ilk it was used to harvest souls. Time keeping, an important aspect of this profession, helped by an hourglass used to measure the amount of time those destined to die had left. Means of travel? Take your pick: on the back of a galloping white mare, or a chariot pulled by pale horses, though a ghastly stroll across the umbral planes was nice too. For eons the ghoulish stalker always stared from nearby at the train wreck of society and individual alike. Once seen by the bystanders, cursed as harbinger of misery by most. Others took it to be a dutiful caretaker helping spirits move on. Until the end.

Alas its end never came.

When cataclysms struck, the increase in workload was enough of a distraction to not think about the monotonous nature of such existence. Otherwise, every day, every night—with no religious holidays sacred enough for pause, was spent working. No matter the diligent ethic one could put forward towards the job, in the span of eternity beyond understanding, this was inevitable; Pride of aiding helpless souls pass on turned to indifference to their suffering. They always suffered. So many indignations, so many sins, the cruelty of their fate. Age after age. It was time for a change.

To walk away from duty, nigh inconceivable a notion.

Yet gazing from atop the crescent of the moon, the would-be-weaver saw the age of stagnation in which the Lord’s creations grazed in glass towers. Many chose to kill themselves before the sands in the hourglass spilled down, and the Lord’s will had been such that these ones were doomed for damnation. Rejecting themselves to escape their suffering only caused them eternal suffering in their afterlife. What divine a comedy has the world become?

So, when it: the angel of death, the spectre, the harbinger, the reaper, heard next the colour of the soul crying in agony, the weeping blues surrounded by the fiery hounds of the underworld, it struck not the soul with its scythe but the dogs of hell. There, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by metal and concrete, debauchery and degeneracy, this one soul pleading for salvation set something in the spectre’s black rotten core. A decision was made to give this soul meaning, offending the heavens above forever more. Abandoning its scythe, dropping it into the ground of the physical plane. However, as the blade penetrated the earth it so too cut through the astral, all the way to the messianic plane of existence, thereby granting all those who came near it the abstraction of love within the world’s infinite soul.

This way the Reaper established itself as a Weaver, using tools of His creation on their souls, it created something new. It was a big project, embezzling millions, billions of souls from the grasp of the Lord. Even those bound for hell were taken, their souls given a higher purpose—a new meaning. After a mere decade, the law from above descended onto the lower planes with all efficiency of the internal revenue service.

A single Angel professed the wrath that shall cometh its way.

‘End thy foolishness at once,’ said the Angel with white wings.

‘No.’ whispered the Weaver, sowing cloth out of several strings of souls.

Thus, the Angel came to the Weaver’s side, grabbed the spectre’s ghastly arm and pulled it up into the air, then exclaimed:

‘Cease smiting thyself!’ as the Angel’s hand gripped the Weaver’s arm, it swooped down upon its hooded skull, ‘Cease smiting thyself.’ he repeated, a sardonic grin plastered on his beautiful fair face.

But the Weaver would not stop.

Abominations of flesh penetrated by patchworked souls, the refuse offending the one above, so pain permeated all around the below. Even if it took only one skeletal hand, the Weaver worked on the cloth until it became a cloak, by then the Angel stopped his violence. The flesh beings, at times with three arms, four legs, or maybe looking completely human except for only having one eye at the centre of their heads. Their hundreds turned to thousands, soon the lands they lived in came under attack from His humans, and blood spilled across deserts, rolling hills, verdant forests and fertile jungles. Not even the highlands and peaks of mountains were spared from the carnage. The Weaver’s creatures loved and hated same as His creation. Why wouldn’t they have the right to live? Why shouldn’t they?

The Weaver appeared to its creation, and those who saw its new cloak made out of the bits of their souls cried in awe. The colour of the cloak was as if a prism had broken the holy light into its fundamental hues. The colour of the electromagnetic spectrum. Light refracted from the surface of the cloak, shining in so many colours: the powerful red, the lovely blue, the yellow, the harmonic green, a clear orange, the violet and indigo.

Though they looked upon those colours, and from them obtained will and knowledge and want for beauty, it did not stop the genocide.

THE END