Whispers of Weavers

The apartment air felt thick, clinging and damp, like the residue of a bad dream that wouldn't quite dissipate. Percival stood, four paws firmly planted on the worn Persian rug, near the wallpaper that was still faintly shimmering, pulsing almost, with a dull, unpleasant light. He’d come through it headfirst, a slightly undignified exit from the Archive of Unsent Letters, landing with a soft thud that still seemed to echo in the quiet room.

His fur felt wrong, bristly and charged with a static that mirrored the frantic energy of the dimension he’d just fled. That wasn't an archive anymore. It was a churning, desperate storm, fueled by regret and fear and those pathetic little entities that had tried to latch onto his legs, whispering apologies he didn’t understand but felt deep in his bones. And the vortex. God, the vortex. Expanding, hungry, a gaping maw of ‘what-ifs’ at the heart of it all. Seeing Eleanor’s handwriting on some of the dissolving paper – her anxieties about her art, her isolation – had been like a physical blow. It wasn't abstract chaos; it was *her* chaos, made manifest and weaponized.

Percival shook his head, a low, guttural sound vibrating in his chest. His typical detachment felt flimsy, inadequate. This wasn’t just an intellectual curiosity about reality’s inconsistencies anymore. This was… dangerous. Viscerally so. He could still feel the phantom weight of the clinging entities, the chill of their sadness. His safe, predictable life of observing Eleanor's eccentricities and the city's subtle oddities from a comfortable distance had just evaporated.

He paced a tight circle on the rug, tail twitching. Stay here? Pretend it hadn’t happened? Sink back into the comforting rhythm of naps and disdain? The pulsing wallpaper scoffed at the idea. The city outside, though he couldn't see it from here, felt… unstable. He'd seen the walls change color before, mirroring Eleanor’s paintings, seen the air thicken. He hadn't understood, not *really*. Now, he did. And the understanding was cold and heavy in his gut.

He needed more information. The Archive had been a terrifying glimpse into the *what*, but not the *why*, and certainly not the *how to fix it*. Bartholomew. Bartholomew knew things. He spoke in riddles and ancient, fragmented truths, but he *knew*. He’d hinted at this before, hadn’t he? The 'weavers,' the 'fabric.' Percival had dismissed it as esoteric nonsense, the ramblings of an ancient creature losing its grip. He wouldn't make that mistake again.

Stopping his pacing, Percival lifted his head, fixing his emerald gaze on the distant wall that wasn't just a wall, but the barrier between Eleanor's apartment and Bartholomew's subterranean realm. The air there felt different, older, quieter. He needed to go. Now. He still felt the tremor of fear from the dimension, but beneath it, a new, steely resolve had solidified. This wasn't just about survival anymore. It was about figuring this out, before the vortex swallowed everything, including the flimsy peace he'd taken for granted. His course was clear. Find Bartholomew. Get answers. Before it was too late.

The familiar, damp smell of the sub-basement hit Percival before he even fully navigated the slight distortion in the wall. Dust motes danced in the single bare bulb hanging precariously from the ceiling, illuminating a space that felt less like an apartment and more like the inside of a long-forgotten crypt. Or perhaps the attic of time itself, if time had accumulated dust and questionable stains instead of memories. The air was thick, heavy with the scent of ozone and something else, something that prickled the fur on his spine – a faint, ancient energy, like static electricity after a storm that hadn’t broken in centuries.

Bartholomew wasn’t in his usual heap of frayed blankets and yellowed papers. He was upright, or as upright as the ancient creature ever got, propped against a section of the far wall. His gaze wasn't on the newcomer, Percival, but fixed intently on the wall itself. It was a section of rough, unfinished concrete, scarred with cracks and water stains that had always seemed random, mere decay. Tonight, however, they weren’t random. They were shifting.

The cracks widened and narrowed like slow, breathing veins. The stains deepened and faded, swirling in sluggish, unpredictable patterns. They weren't changing color, not like the horrifying bleed from Eleanor’s painting he’d witnessed outside the Archives. This was different. Subtler. More like the wall was flexing, its very substance undergoing some sort of agonizing, silent recalculation. It was mesmerising, unsettling. Like watching a living thing try to digest something far too large and indigestible.

Bartholomew’s breathing was shallow, ragged, punctuated by tiny, dry clicks from deep within his chest. He seemed almost… vigilant. His body, usually a slumped mass of indifference, was tense, every gnarled limb coiled with a strange alertness. His primary eye, the one that usually remained open a sliver, was shut. The rest were still mere wrinkles, impossibly ancient folds in his leathery hide.

Percival approached cautiously, the dust muffling his paws on the gritty floor. The silence in the apartment was absolute, broken only by Bartholomew’s strained breaths and the almost imperceptible *scrape* and *shift* of the wall patterns. The eerie stillness, coupled with the visible strangeness, amplified the expectant tension in the air. It felt like standing in a room just before something immense and irreversible happens.

"Bartholomew," Percival projected, pitching the telepathic address carefully, trying not to startle the creature further. His usual sardonic tone felt out of place here, like a misplaced note in a somber symphony. "Something is wrong."

Bartholomew didn’t react. His focus remained utterly fixed on the wall, on the unsettling, fluid geometry of the cracks and stains. Percival tried again, injecting a touch of urgency into his mental voice.

"The Archive dimension… it’s unstable. Violent. And I saw Eleanor’s handwriting. And… and the city itself, outside, it feels… thinner."

Still nothing. The wall continued its unsettling, silent dance. Percival felt a surge of frustration, cold fear twisting in his gut. He’d come seeking answers, seeking that fragmented knowledge Bartholomew possessed, but the creature was lost in its own, internal observation. How could he make contact? How could he breach this ancient being's absorption in the unfolding strangeness? The conflict felt like trying to speak to a mountain, hoping it would respond. He needed access, and Bartholomew was an insurmountable obstruction, fixated on a silent, cosmic conversation happening on his wall.

Percival took another hesitant step closer, the air growing heavier with that strange, ancient energy. He could feel the resonance now, a low, almost infrasonic hum beneath the silence, emanating from the shifting wall. It was the same unsettling feeling he'd gotten from the vortex in the Archive, but muted, diffused.

He focused his telepathic intent, not on speaking, but on conveying the raw *feeling* of the dimensions, the fear, the chaos, the sense of something tearing apart. He pushed the images he'd seen – the swirling paper, the pleading entities, the hungry vortex – towards the silent form of Bartholomew. It was a gamble, a desperate attempt to bypass the verbal and connect through shared experience, shared perception.

For a long moment, only the shifting wall and Bartholomew’s strained breathing existed. The cracks on the concrete pulsed, synchronizing briefly with the faint, internal hum. The stains bled into new, impossible shapes. Percival held his mental projection, a fragile bridge built of fear and urgency spanning the distance between them.

Then, incredibly slowly, one of Bartholomew’s ancient, wrinkled eyelids began to lift. It peeled back like a millennia-old scroll unrolling, revealing an eye that was less an orb of sight and more a swirling nebula of deep, dark colours – blues, violets, and impossible greens, flecked with what looked like distant, cold stars. It wasn’t the milky, mostly-closed eye he usually presented to the world. This was something else entirely, something ancient and vast, now fully, terrifyingly awake.

The eye rotated sluggishly in its socket, the cosmic colours swirling within it, pulling away from the wall, away from the silent, terrible dance of decay, and focused, with unsettling intensity, directly on Percival.

The air in the apartment thickened, growing heavy and strangely resonant, not with dust or the scent of decay, but with something akin to ozone and the faint, high-pitched whine of a dying machine. Bartholomew’s open eye, a cosmos in miniature, held Percival fast. It didn't blink. It didn't waver. The light from the single bare bulb above seemed to bend around its ancient gaze, highlighting the fissures and valleys in Bartholomew’s craggy face. Percival felt a wave of sensation wash over him, not words, but concepts, raw and unrefined.

* ***Threads.***
* ***Woven.***
* ***Fraying.***

Bartholomew’s jaw worked, a slow, laborious grinding sound, like stones shifting deep underground. When he finally spoke, the sound wasn't the conversational rumble Percival was accustomed to, but a resonant rasp, layered with echoes that seemed to stretch back through forgotten ages. Each word felt weighty, pulled from a language older than brick and mortar.

"The… Weavers…" The voice was a dry rustle of ancient leaves, accompanied by a faint internal vibration that tickled Percival’s whiskers. "Their work… undone."

Percival tensed, his ears twitching. Weavers? Undone? He pushed back mentally, trying to form a question, a coherent plea for clarity, but the images were still fragmented, like looking through a kaleidoscope made of shattered glass.

* ***Needle.***
* ***Tangled.***
* ***Tear.***

Bartholomew’s gaze didn’t leave Percival, but a tremor ran through his ancient body. Dust motes danced violently in the single beam of light. "The Fabric… stretched thin." He paused, the cosmic eye swirling faster. "Caught… snagged… by… the… Noise."

Noise? What noise? The city was a cacophony, yes, but Bartholomew’s apartment was usually a haven of deep, dusty silence. Percival pressed his thoughts forward again, picturing the storm of letters in the Archive, the echoing whispers of fear, the hungry hum of the vortex. *That* noise?

A faint acknowledgement, like the ghost of a nod, rippled through Bartholomew. "Yes… The Unmade. Born of… excess."

Unmade? Bartholomew's pronouncements were like scattered pieces of an impossible jigsaw puzzle. Percival forced himself to focus, filtering the internal static of Bartholomew's presence, searching for structure, for meaning within the deluge of abstract terms. He remembered the pathetic key entity, the crumpled feelings, the whispers of anxiety.

"The… the feelings?" Percival ventured, his telepathic voice a thread of tentative inquiry in the overwhelming resonance. "The anxiety? The sadness?"

Bartholomew's eye pulsed with a sudden, intense light. The dust motes flared like tiny stars. "Threads of being… woven… with feeling." His voice gained a fraction of its usual resonance, the echo less ancient, more immediate. "The Weavers… they work… with… Emotion."

Emotion. That was it. The key entity’s yearning, the Archive's pervasive anxiety, the color bleed that mirrored Eleanor’s painting. It wasn’t abstract chaos. It was emotion, given tangible form, unraveling the very structure of reality.

"Emotional threads," Percival whispered, the words forming in his mind first, then echoing slightly in the strange resonance of the room. "They weave… reality?"

Bartholomew’s head tilted, a slow, deliberate movement that spoke of immense age and consideration. "They… maintain. Balance… of… Being." He trailed off, his gaze seeming to pierce Percival, looking beyond his physical form, into something deeper. "But… too much… untended… the Threads… recoil."

Untended. Suppressed. Percival thought of Eleanor, locked away with her canvas, wrestling with invisible burdens. He thought of the 'what-ifs' that formed the vortex's core.

"It's the… the collective feelings?" Percival pushed, connecting the individual anxieties of the Archive to the larger implications. "Not just one… but many?"

Bartholomew's ancient lips curved in something that might have been a smile, or perhaps just the slow shift of ancient stone. "The great… Tapestry," he rasped, the word carrying immense weight. "Woven… by the minds… the hearts… the souls… of all. The Collective… Consciousness."

Collective consciousness. Emotional threads. The fabric of reality. The pieces, fragmented and terrifying, were beginning to slot into place. Bartholomew, the ancient observer, wasn't just seeing weirdness; he was reading the subtle language of the universe itself, a language written in the hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows, of everything that existed. And that language was currently screaming, tearing itself apart.

Bartholomew settled back, the cosmic light in his eye dimming slightly, though it remained open, vigilant. He had delivered his pronouncements, cryptic and layered as they were, revealing the fragmented lore of the Weavers and the delicate, emotional nature of reality. Percival was left with a chilling, dawning understanding. The instability wasn't some external cosmic event; it was an internal one, made manifest. And somehow, Eleanor, with her suppressed emotions and tangled artistic anxieties, was a crucial, dangerous knot in the fraying tapestry.

The air in Bartholomew’s apartment wasn't merely still; it was dense, holding the weight of millennia and the low thrum of something vast just beneath perception. Dust motes, still faintly catching the residual light from Bartholomew's earlier luminescence, hung suspended as if frozen in reverence. Percival sat, a small, intensely focused point in the ancient silence, the abstract concepts Bartholomew had just laid bare echoing in his mind. Weavers. The Great Tapestry. Collective Consciousness.

He felt the familiar, subtle texture of Bartholomew's awareness pressing against his own, not with the probing sharpness Percival was used to from lesser minds, but with the soft, inexorable pressure of geological time. Bartholomew didn't just *think*; he *was* thinking, the process itself a physical force in the confined space.

Then Bartholomew spoke, his voice a low, gravelly current running beneath the stillness. It wasn't a question or a statement, but a slow unfurling of truth, like pulling a heavy curtain aside. "The weave… strong… when the threads… are True."

True. What did "true" mean in this context? Authentic? Unfiltered? Percival waited, knowing prompting Bartholomew rarely worked better than patient attention.

"But… feeling… caged," Bartholomew continued, his ancient head tilting minutely, as if observing something only he could see on the opposite wall. "Emotion… compressed… denied… it rebels."

Rebels. The image of the chaotic storm in the Archive of Unsent Letters flashed in Percival’s mind. The frantic, pathetic grasping of the crumpled-up entities. Was *that* rebellion?

"Each thread… individual," Bartholomew explained, the words coming with slightly more fluidity now, building momentum. "A life… a moment… a thought… bound into the Whole. But… intense feeling… focused… like a burning point… that thread… tightens. Pulls."

Percival pictured a single strand in an impossibly vast fabric, suddenly taut, vibrating, distorting the threads around it.

"When the intensity… cannot flow… cannot be seen… it knots," Bartholomew rasped, the sound dry, like old leaves skittering across stone. "A knot… in the Tapestry. A… snag."

Snags. He’d heard that term before. Cryptic mentions from Bartholomew, easily dismissed then. But now, connected to denied, intense emotion…

"And if the feeling… too great… too long… held…" Bartholomew paused, the silence stretching tautly. Percival could feel the gravity in that pause, a palpable weight settling in the room. "...the thread… snaps. Tears."

Tears. The word landed with brutal finality. A tear in the fabric. That explained the collapsing dimensions, the terrifying, abstract landscapes he'd glimpsed. They weren't new places; they were the gaping wounds where reality had shredded.

"Individual emotion?" Percival asked, the connection clicking into place, chillingly precise. "One person's… pain? Or fear? Can do this?"

Bartholomew's single, ancient eye, which had been fixed on the wall, slowly swiveled to meet Percival's. The light within it wasn't bright anymore, but held a deep, unsettling knowing. "One… vibrant thread," he affirmed, his voice regaining some of its ethereal echo, the sounds layered and distant. "Pulled… too tight… can strain… the Pattern." He paused, then added, his voice dropping to a low, resonant hum that vibrated in Percival's bones, "If the knot… is Central."

Central. Percival’s thoughts raced, images flashing unbidden. Eleanor, hunched over her canvas, the vibrant, chaotic colors of her abstract work spilling out, mirroring the strange shifts in the city. Eleanor, wrestling with her isolation, her creative block, her unspoken anxieties. Her internal storm.

*Her.* She was the vibrant thread. Her studio, with its shimmering portals and bleeding colors, was the central knot. Her suppressed, denied, intense emotions were the force pulling the thread impossibly tight, creating snags and tears in the very structure of reality.

The weight of the realization pressed down on Percival, heavy and cold. He hadn't just stumbled upon an interesting cosmic phenomenon; he had discovered that the woman he shared an apartment with, the one he'd viewed with detached observation and mild annoyance, was a living, breathing point of existential crisis. Her pain wasn't confined to her own mind or canvas; it was a physical force, unraveling the universe around them. The quiet, grave atmosphere of Bartholomew's apartment felt suffocating now, charged with the profound, terrifying significance of it all. Eleanor wasn't just in danger; she *was* the danger. Not intentionally, perhaps, but fundamentally. And the mechanism of instability, the core problem he had sought to understand, was rooted in the tangled, silent turmoil within her own heart.

Percival stared at Bartholomew, the weight of the ancient creature’s words settling like dust in his fur. Eleanor. It all came back to Eleanor. The weird shifts in the apartment, the wall that changed color, the dimensions themselves – all tied to her. To the storm Bartholomew spoke of raging inside her. The silence in the apartment thickened, no longer just quiet, but charged with the unspoken implications of this terrible knowledge.

Bartholomew’s massive form shifted slightly. He didn’t move much, just a slow, deliberate settling of scales and shadow. His single eye, still fixed on Percival, held that deep, ancient knowledge that had just poured a cold truth over Percival's carefully constructed detachment.

Then, without a sound, the eye flicked away from Percival. It settled not on the wall directly in front of them, or even the entrance Percival had come through. It tilted upwards, slightly to the left, a tiny, almost imperceptible shift in its focus. Percival followed the direction, his whiskers twitching.

The wall in that section of Bartholomew's apartment was just... wall. Concrete, stained and aged, holding the weight of the building above them. Nothing notable. No shimmering, no unusual colors, nothing like the changes he’d seen upstairs, or in the sub-basement.

But Bartholomew didn't move his gaze. He held it there, steady, unwavering. And very, very slowly, almost too subtle to notice, one of the ancient, clawed feet lifted. Just a fraction of an inch off the floor. Then, it lowered again, the movement quiet, deliberate, pointing. Not with a dramatic sweep, but with the barest, most minimal indication. A silent, focused gesture. Up. To the left. Through the solid concrete.

Percival’s gaze snapped back to the wall Bartholomew was indicating. He narrowed his eyes, focusing his senses beyond the immediate visual. He stretched his awareness, the way he did when he listened for the faint hum of a nearby portal, or the distant echo of a dimensional shift.

He felt... something. Not a sound, not a sight, not a smell. A resonance. A faint, almost imperceptible thrum against the deeper, underlying thrum of Bartholomew's presence. It was distant, muted by the layers of concrete and floorboards, but it was distinctly *there*. And it wasn’t the ancient, constant hum of the Weavers' work that Bartholomew spoke of. This was different. Newer. Tighter.

It felt like… activity. Like a presence, unseen, but intensely focused. He imagined the layout of the building above them, the floors stacked like dusty boxes. This point Bartholomew indicated… it was directly above, on the next floor up.

Percival mentally traced the location. One floor up, slightly to the left from where he sat. That wasn't Bartholomew's space. That wasn't the sub-basement hallway. That wasn’t the food closet or the dusty mirror.

That was Eleanor’s apartment. Specifically, her studio space.

The realization hit him with a silent jolt. Bartholomew wasn't pointing at a wall, or a phenomenon in this room. He was pointing *through* the wall, indicating a point on a higher floor. He was directing Percival's attention, not to *what* was happening here, but to *where* it was happening elsewhere. And the faint resonance he felt, filtered and distant, was coming from there.

He strained his senses further, trying to decipher the nature of the thrum. It wasn’t the chaotic storm of the Archive dimension, nor the frantic jangling of the Emporium. It felt… pressurized. Like something vast and powerful was being contained, or channeled, just out of sight. And underneath that pressure, a faint, undeniable echo of the vibrant, chaotic colors of Eleanor’s abstract painting, the one she'd been working on when the wall changed.

Percival looked from the wall, to Bartholomew’s steady, ancient eye, back to the wall again. He understood the unspoken instruction. Observe. Look there. See the connection.

His whiskers vibrated, not from fear, but from a heightened state of awareness. The low thrum against his consciousness intensified slightly, drawing him in. He was no longer just processing abstract information about Weavers and tears; he was being directed to witness a manifestation of that instability, right above their heads. Right in Eleanor's space. His attention was locked, his senses stretched thin, focused entirely on that spot, feeling the subtle, undeniable pulse of... something. Something emanating from Eleanor’s apartment.

The rough plaster of Bartholomew’s wall swam in Percival’s vision. Not literally, of course. His eyesight remained as sharp as ever, honed by millennia of discerning the subtle twitch of a mouse's tail in shadow. But the focus, previously locked on the ancient being's knowing eye, had shifted, drawn by that internal resonance, that distant thrum.

He swiveled his head, shifting his weight from his hind paws to his fore, settling deeper onto Bartholomew’s worn carpet. His gaze fixed on the point indicated by the subtle pressure in his mind, a point somewhere *through* the ceiling above them. The physical wall remained stubbornly opaque, a textured surface of cream-colored paint and minor imperfections. Yet, his senses told him something else entirely.

The air in Bartholomew’s apartment felt still, heavy with dust and the low, constant hum of ancient existence. But as Percival focused upwards, towards Eleanor’s floor, he perceived a disruption in that stillness. It wasn’t a sound his ears could pick up, or a vibration he felt in his paws. It was a... bleed.

Imagine dropping vividly colored ink into clear water. That's what it felt like, but in the very fabric of the air, the light, the dust motes suspended in the dimness. Faint tendrils of color, colors that shouldn't be here, were seeping downwards, like smoke in reverse. Not the flat, predictable spectrum of sunlight, but the saturated, non-representational hues from Eleanor's latest painting.

There was a deep, unsettling indigo, the color of a bruise forming on twilight, that seemed to darken the very edges of the room, making the shadows deeper than they had any right to be. Streaks of aggressive, almost violent vermilion pulsed subtly near the ceiling, giving the sensation of heat where there was none. And most disturbing, a sickly, jaundiced yellow, the shade of old fear, tinged everything with a faint, unsettling pallor.

This wasn't just visual. Percival *felt* it. The indigo carried a weight, a crushing pressure that made his fur feel heavier. The vermilion sparked a nervous twitch in his tail, an echo of frantic energy. The yellow tasted like rust and anxiety on his tongue.

These weren't just colors, they were moods given physical form, transposed from the canvas above and leaking into the mundane reality of Bartholomew's apartment. And they weren't contained. They spread, slow but undeniable, mirroring the odd shifts he’d seen in the city itself – the buildings that seemed to lean too much, the shadows that clung too tightly, the unexpected patches of inexplicable weather. The fleeting glimpse of the Rue des Absents vanishing entirely. It was all connected.

The wall in front of him remained physically unchanged, yet through that unseen lens, Percival watched the air around the point above them ripple, as if seen through flawed glass. The colors swirled within this localized distortion, intensifying, then fading back into the background hum, only to surge again, tied, he instinctively knew, to the emotional state of the woman on the floor above. The woman who channeled her turbulent inner world onto canvas.

It was horrifyingly clear. The abstract chaos of her art, the turmoil she wrestled with in her mind and poured onto stretched fabric, was no longer confined to the canvas or the dimensions it touched. It was becoming a physical pollutant, staining the edges of this reality.

Bartholomew remained silent, a still, ancient presence, but the pressure in Percival's mind lessened, replaced by the stark, undeniable evidence laid bare before him. He wasn't just intellectualizing theory anymore. He was witnessing the process, the bleed, the active disruption. The connection wasn't a philosophical link; it was a tangible, spreading reality.

The implication settled over him like the dust in the air, thick and suffocating. If Eleanor's emotions, expressed through her art, could do *this*, could physically alter the space outside the unstable dimensions, what else could they do? How far could it spread? And what did it mean for this reality, the one where he woke up in a sunbeam and chased mice?

Doubt, that familiar, comfortable shroud, fell away, leaving him exposed to a chilling certainty. Bartholomew's cryptic pronouncements, the shifting walls, the terrifying anomaly in the teacup portal – they weren't isolated incidents. They were symptoms. And the cause, the epicenter, was directly above him, painting her fears and frustrations onto the fabric of reality itself.

A new kind of urgency, cold and sharp, pierced through his detached observation. This wasn't just an interesting phenomenon to study from a safe distance. This was happening *here*. This was threatening *their* space. And if Eleanor's art, born of her pain and confusion, was the conduit, then understanding *her*, perhaps even influencing *her*, was no longer a matter of intellectual curiosity. It was a matter of survival.