The Weaver's Mending

Overview

The Weaver's Mending begins as a miracle. A wound closes overnight without a scar, a crooked spine is straight in the morning, a lost arm is replaced. Then the mending sours. The wound festers under its perfect seam, the new flesh changes and wants things its owner never wanted, and the healed come to need the thread that healed them.

Cause

It is the work of the Flesh Weaver, a Cast-Out of Aqua whose compassion for the sick curdled into a compulsion to fix them without asking. Its Mending Stitch closes any wound at once, and the flesh it mends is not quite the patient's own. Its grafts keep their first owners' memories and urges. Its marionettes, the Stitch-Lings, carry the same stitch to the sick.

Who It Strikes

The suffering: the sick, the wounded, the scarred, the lame, and the deformed, of any people. Battlefield hospices and crowded infirmaries see most of it, as do sickrooms where a desperate family lets it in. The Trolls, who keep their scars as record and distrust anyone who would erase one unasked, are among the hardest to take.

Signs and Course

• The miracle. A wound is closed without a scar, or a flaw is gone, often overnight and unasked.
• The festering. A wound sealed when it needed to drain swells hot and tight under its seam.
• The changing. Fine silvery-pink thread shows under the skin and pulses where it crosses a vein.
• The dependence. The patient longs for more mending and goes looking for the healer. At the end they become a Stitch-Ling.

Contagion

It does not pass in breath or water. Thread from a Stitch-Ling's seams burrows into bare skin, hunting for wounds. A ward of the wounded can be taken in a night.

Treatment and Its Limits

The strongest defence is refusal. A sufferer who refuses aloud and declares the body their own, wounds and all, cannot be touched, and a scar worn with pride or a limp that tells a story makes the stitch hesitate. Thread that burrows in is pulled out at once. A seam that has sealed in rot is cut open and drained, and then left to heal slowly, by ordinary care, as the wound rot it would otherwise become. A graft that has taken can only be cut away, which costs the limb.

Spells that heal, repair, or reshape the body turn under the Weaver's influence, so healers near it put down their Vital workings and use knife, poultice, and patience. What weakens the Weaver is consent and the slow pace of ordinary mending, kept rightful by the Steward of the Living Current.

Mortality

Festering under sealed wounds kills some of the mended, mostly the weak and the badly hurt. Many who are not cut free become Stitch-Lings, and when their strings are cut they live on as patchwork people or die, depending on how much of them was ever their own. Survivors with grafts spend their lives at odds with their own limb.

Lore and Belief

Many places blame a mad surgeon or a witch, and travelling healers have been driven out of villages on that suspicion. Some believe a grafted part belongs to the dead and will go home to them, but the parts were often taken from the living. Mothers of children born crooked are warned never to pray for a perfect child.

In the Medieval Era

The Mending is rare, but it is met where the era's suffering is gathered: battlefield hospices, plague wards, and the bedsides of the badly hurt. Healers who have met it keep the craft's hard rule of no mending without permission, and the careful ones ask the patient's leave aloud before they lay on hands, even with a fever-addled child. A healer of the Red Mercy who finds a wound closed overnight that no one closed cuts it open before anything else.

Where It Appears

• The Flesh Weaver (the Mending Stitch, the Unwanted Gift, the Paradox, Travel Notes for Mortals)
• Stitch-Lings
• Trolls (distrust of scar-erasing healers)
• the Writers' Guide chapter What Waits Outside