The Night Midnight Wouldn't Leave the Corridor

Midnight is not a creature who lingers. He circles, he witnesses, he moves on. That is his nature — the great sapphire dragon does not stay in one place long enough to be studied. So when he spent three nights in a row crouched on the rooftop directly above the corridor, nobody said anything at first. But everyone noticed.

It started the evening after the tapestry went up.

Luna was the first to mention it, because Luna notices things she isn't supposed to and says them anyway. She came in through the back on the second night, Cinder and Ash at her heels, and stopped in the corridor doorway. The tapestry hung there in the low light — the Tree of Life in deep, living green, root to crown, the kind of green that doesn't look painted or printed but grown. Like someone had pressed a real tree flat and preserved it in cloth.

"He's been up there since yesterday," Luna said, not looking away from the tapestry.

Chelle came out of the back room with a mug of something warm. "I know."

"Does he do that?"

"Not usually."

Cinder sat down in the corridor. Ash followed. Neither of them seemed inclined to move either.

The tapestry is tall and narrow — made for exactly this kind of space, the long corridor between the display floor and the back room where the light is always a little different than everywhere else in the Attic. The green of it deepens in low light. The roots at the bottom look like they go somewhere. The canopy at the top looks like it's still moving, very slowly, the way trees move when there's no wind but something is breathing nearby.

On the third night, Chelle stood in the corridor for a long time by herself. She put her hand flat against the fabric and felt the texture of the weave — smooth and substantial, threads that held their color without bleeding, each layer of the tree distinct from the one above and below it. The Looms of Destiny had taken their time with this one. You could feel it.

She understood, eventually, why Midnight wouldn't leave.

Some things that come through the portal are objects. Some are places. The Rootweave is the second kind — a piece of somewhere else, preserved in cloth and hung on a wall so that the somewhere else doesn't disappear entirely. Midnight had recognized it immediately. He was keeping watch over it the way he keeps watch over the portal itself. Because it was, in its own way, a door.

He left on the fourth morning. The tapestry stayed.

It's still in the corridor. It will probably always be in the corridor. Some things find their wall and that's the end of it.

What will you find?: The Rootweave — Tree of Life Chakra Tapestry