Page 1 of Touch of Oblivion (Woven in Time #1)

T here is no time.

No form.

Only becoming, and even that does not belong to me.

A voice, deep and resonant, booms around me in the darkness.

“Place the tether where the tipping point is strongest. Let the continent that stoked the fire be the one to face her judgment.”

A second follows, smooth and feminine, layered with warmth.

“Yes. She must be nestled deep enough in the chaos to feel the earth's rise and fall…its fury, its sorrow, and its slow unraveling. She cannot serve properly if she does not ache when the earth does.”

These are my creators. The gods.

A pause stretches, then a third voice–this one lined with weary clarity in her tone.

“There has never been a weaver created for a world so unstable. The humans cling to chaos…inciting it, even.”

The term weaver pulls against my conscience.

I don’t know what it means, yet I feel the thread anchoring itself within me, coiling down into my core and claiming me.

Another voice breaks through, tugging at my awareness.

“This is why we must get this tether correct. We cannot intervene, but our creations can.”

A low thrum stirs from within.

Warmth spreads outward, expanding my awareness as sensation deepens into substance. I feel the outline of the body I’ve been given.

“We cannot afford another collapse,” the voice continues, “but she will observe. She will decide without our influence.”

“Can we not infuse just this one with our will?” a fifth voice interjects–clipped and sharp, with restrained fury. “Too much rests upon this. The ripple of her decision will extend beyond her world.”

The first voice I heard sighs deeply before his response curls through my mind.

“She will not remember her purpose or our hope for this world. That is the only way we know the tether will take. The planets have rejected every weaver burdened with divine will.”

The soothing, warm feminine voice drifts closer again.

“She will learn the world anew. She and the planet alone will decide what is worth saving. This is as it should be.”

The weary one speaks once more, her tone laced with heavy memory. “You sound attached already, but we must remember, if she succeeds in saving the planet, she sleeps again. She is not to remain. Not to live . Weavers do not linger when their task is done. They cannot walk their planet as gods.”

The words settle into me.

“No name,” the first woman agrees, though this time softened with grief. “No legacy. No future. She wakes, she experiences enough to make a decision, and then she returns until the next reckoning.”

“The tether is beginning its descent.”

I feel the earth reaching for me suddenly–its pain, its weariness, its soft and trembling hope. It does not want to die. It wants more time. It wants to be saved .

A final voice, one I haven’t heard until now, enters.

“She’ll find love, you know,” they whisper softly. “Even without memory. The weaver is meant to seek out light in the darkness, if there is hope to be found.”

There’s silence. For a long time, no one speaks.

All I feel is the fusion of my essence with the earth’s need. It sings through me like a low, living chord. It hums beneath my ribs, threads of its will winding into my spine.

I open to it, and it accepts me.

It does not speak, but I know it now.

The slow churn of its oceans.

The fault lines buried like old wounds.

The flickering chaos of the life it holds.

It pulses through me with the same rhythm that now beats in my chest.

“If she does find love,” the weary one says, “let us hope she can say goodbye to it.”

“The connection is stable,” the warm voice says. “Earth is clinging to her already. It has accepted her.”

The world exhales around me as the voices of the gods retreat with one final whisper.

“I do not know when the earth will call for you, Weaver, but it is my hope that you will enjoy the gift of life in the short time you are needed.”

Then my body is pulled, yanked through nothingness.

Creation unfolds around me. Planets spin and scatter. Stars scream as they are born and devoured. Light coils and bends as I fall through the seam between what was and what will be.

My consciousness shatters and reforms, again and again, until even the memory of the gods is gone.

Through it all, I feel a tether, unbreakable from its anchor within me as it guides me to my home: the heart of the world that chose me.

A core, molten and alive, greets me not as a stranger, but as something long awaited. Its memories, scorched and fractured, whisper through me as I seep through its cracks.

I descend into the hush of stone, knowing nothing, and feeling everything .

As I settle and the planet’s burning veins seal me in, I think, just for a moment, that I hear the earth weep.