The Warp and Weft of Creation

"The Devil spoke again and Primo felt himself tumbling, as he had tumbled into his aunt's stories, into a tale so webbed by silks of narrative and enchantment that everything material in the bedroom seemed diminished in size.

"Around Primo flickered the knights and path-finders, the light-bearers, kings and queens and humble folk who had once championed good and justice in his aunt's stories. The Devil's voice led him past these figures, beyond the plateau of the legends his aunt had known. It led him far beyond the sounds of his father's clocks so their ticking and tocking fell away like shattering crystal, taking with them time as he had always known it, and its confines. The Devil's voice, enchanting and alluring, like symphonic sound moving through layers of light, ahead of Primo, urged him not to fall behind.

"Primo had a sense of a membrane tearing and yielding passage to him, allowing him entrance past great walls of galaxies, through the corridors between them where star fields hummed and pulsed. On the tips of galactic spirals, child stars exploded to life; ancient red stars burst and died, showering magma-red across interstellar black velvet. Primo became aware of an extraordinary energy, one that seemed to enter into him and align with his very heartbeat. His whole being throbbed with it.

"He found himself on a great weaving, a work fashioned from pulsing energies and elaborate sequences of light. Successions of time threaded through and into each other, sequined with suns, pattered with luminosities, stitched through with the elements of silver and gold. Colours pure and rich blended with one another; scarlets; green of copper; greens of sap; browns of lichen; sanguinaria; safranine; white opal. Primo recognised the energies forming and re-forming in the warp and weft. They were the energies of forests and oceans, great savannahs and tundra. He was looking at the carpet of the earth but he was not on the earth. He was somewhere else. The Devil said he was showing him God, but this was not God. This was a carpet, a matting, a weaving. He spun round, panicking, suddenly aware of his minuscule size, his inconsequence in relation to this vast, seemingly non-ending masterpiece of design upon which he stood. He was but a small creature standing on a piece of woven infinity, and all about him now sounded a chorusing, a trumpeting of bird calls, the braying of wild beasts, and the sighs of fishes. He fell to his knees and saw that, embroidered into the weaving were tiny beads. Each was a piece of life, a whale, a fish, a serpent, a bird, a mantis, a wasp, a cedar, a yellowwood, a wildebeest...

"He became aware of a deep silence falling. A wind blew, lifting the edges of the weaving and sending a ripple across it. Primo now saw that it was unravelling, that whole pieces had burned away, were charred, frayed, shredded. The threads holding the beads had been torn, so the beads were loose, scattered about, falling off the tapestry. Falling to where? he wondered. Where? Primo scrambled to gather them up, but as he touched each one it turned to sand. He lept to his feet, sweat running down his face, terror seizing him."

Patricia Schonstein A Time Of Angels