1.10-Eyes of Weavers

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Psychic zoetropes are a new thing. Only really started being used about a thousand years ago. Zery likes to remind me they're older but so are a lot of things. Hamark and I met her when she was a junior weaver on Hakelm Adi. Mystic place. Busy now that word has gotten out. Ships washing over the planet like locusts. Zery pilots whenever we go. Hamark can’t see the oracle interlace and I’m not much better. You can feel it, though. Like a shadow passing over you. Beautiful, grand, invisible. Hakelm Adi is industrially barren. No metals on the entire planet. It’s all crimson oases  and quartz desert dunes. Colossal tents tower into the atmosphere. Augur Weave. Kites of a thousand strands and as long as comet trails hold them aloft. You can see them from the surface, sparkling in the solar winds.Zery doesn’t leave the ship. I’ve never understood her disgust. Hamark and I take my old dreams to market having finally found a buyer. Dense, the scent of old bodies and young dreams. People from all over. Money changing hands and hands changed by their money. Bronze chimes mark the vendor stalls. The sibyls and their astral looms work in the shade. Boys bring them cool vapor stills and the weavers inhale it deeply through their trident nostrils, glad of the relief from the heat.Elder woman is the buyer. Down the stairs, below the sands, other dreams hang from the ceiling in her shop. Psychic Zoetrope in the corner holds a tick. A bowl of inhibitions sits next to it. A pet. Deal as agreed. I hand over my discarded dreams. She flips through them, eyes a light as she evaluates. Those three pupils lock on me, catch me staring. I want to ask.I give Hamark the bolt of weave and we head back to the ship. Shadows like caustics ripple over the sands. The kites overhead part, the Augur Weave unfolds as a godet ray leaves for space made entirely of astral canvas. Zery is watching it when we get back, eyes fixed on the billow fabric taking flight. Again I want to ask. Instead, Hamark takes us into orbit, Zery still watching the godet ray until she takes the controls, that look in her eyes seeming all too familiar.