What the Loom Remembers

In a society that has outlawed the past, a young weaver secretly creates tapestries from forbidden scraps. When an elder discovers her secret, she expects punishment, but instead receives a piece of history that could unravel their entire world.

Her loom, a clumsy thing she’d built herself from scavenged timber and plumbing pipes, took up most of the small space. The rhythmic clack-thump of the shuttle and beater was a quiet rebellion against the enforced silence of the settlement of Verdure. On the warp threads, an image was slowly forming. A cityscape. Not the orderly, low-slung earthen structures of Verdure, but a vertical forest of glass and steel, pieced together from salvaged scraps of grey linen, black cotton, and shimmering, unidentifiable synthetics.

Today, she was adding the sky. She held the new scrap in her hand, a piece of heavy blue serge. It was part of a uniform, she thought, with a single, tarnished brass button still attached. An Enforcer's uniform, maybe, from the old days. Just holding it felt like a crime. The Elders taught that the Before Times were a plague, a madness of consumption and pride that led to the Great Fire. To preserve any relic was to invite the sickness back.

Tanya didn't believe them. The scraps told her a different story. Not of madness, but of complexity, of colour, of lives lived in a world of staggering variety. She carefully threaded a strip of the blue serge into her shuttle. It would be the sky above her tallest tower, a patch of defiant colour in the grey.

Thump. Thump. Thump. The floorboards above her creaked with heavy, deliberate footsteps. Tanya froze, her heart hammering against her ribs. No one ever came down to the root cellar except her. She moved with frantic speed, unpinning the tapestry from the loom's frame, rolling the delicate work into a tight bundle, and shoving it into a hollowed-out potato crate. She threw a dusty burlap sack over her loom just as the cellar door scraped open, spilling weak daylight down the earthen steps.

It was Lily. One of the oldest of the Elders, her face a roadmap of wrinkles, her back bent but her eyes as sharp as shards of flint.

"Tanya," Lily said, her voice dry as dust. "I thought I might find you here. The water reclamation pump for Sector Gamma is clogged again. Your father sent me to fetch you."

"Of course, Elder." Tanya wiped her sweaty palms on her trousers, trying to keep her breathing even. "I was just… sorting the winter stock."

Lily's gaze swept over the cellar, lingering for a moment on the loom hidden beneath the sack. Tanya was certain she could see the shape of it, that the entire ruse was transparent. But Lily just nodded.

---

"This settlement was built on forgetting," Lily said, not looking at Tanya but at the stone walls of the cellar. "We decided that to survive, we had to cut away the past. Burn the books. Melt the machines. Plough the ruins. We thought it was a kindness. You can't miss what you don't remember."

She took a slow, creaking step towards the covered loom.

"We were wrong," she whispered. "Forgetting isn't healing. It's just leaving the wound to fester in the dark."

Lily reached out a gnarled hand and pulled the burlap sack away. Tanya's creation sat there, half-finished, its forbidden threads exposed in the dim light. Tanya held her breath, waiting for the condemnation, the alarm to be raised. Waiting for her life to be over.

Instead, Lily reached into a deep pocket in her own homespun robe. She pulled out a small, folded square of fabric. It was white silk, yellowed with age, but exquisitely embroidered with tiny, colourful flowers.

"This was part of my mother's wedding dress," Lily said, her voice cracking with an emotion Tanya had never heard from an Elder before. "She wore it on a day when the sky was this same colour." She gently touched the patch of blue serge Tanya had just woven.

She held the embroidered silk out to Tanya. "A city needs flowers," she said. "Even a forgotten one."

### A Conspiracy of Weavers

Tanya stared, first at the impossible gift in Lily's hand, then into the Elder's eyes. She saw no trap, only a deep, profound sadness and a flicker of the same defiant hope that lived in her own heart. She took the fabric. It was softer than anything she had ever touched.

"There are others," Lily said, her voice barely audible. "Others who remember. Others who kept things. We were too afraid to speak. But you… you weren't. You gave our memories a place to live."

The rhythmic clack of the loom would no longer be a solitary rebellion. It was about to become the heartbeat of a secret revolution, a conspiracy of weavers stitching their broken world back together, one forbidden thread at a time.