The errata weren’t corrections. They were a to-do list. And someone—the apprentice, or a conservator before her—had already started checking items off.
She looked at the weeping sun-woman. At the rising thread-sea. At the tiny, perfect knot.
She stared at Item 1. The tear that should have fallen on Veruda. The one someone had re-stitched to fall into the sea.
Item 13: The weaver himself is a mistake. He stitched his own birth into the border—a single black knot in the lower left. Remove the knot, and he was never born. The world will remember a different maker. I am sorry, Master. But the flood is coming. Mola Errata List
The list lay open. The next item waited. And somewhere, a doorhinge of reality groaned, stuck halfway between the world that was and the world the tapestry demanded it become.
Aris’s gaze fell to the final entry, written in a shaky, desperate scrawl:
A strange, sick feeling bloomed in Aris’s stomach. Errata were for technical mistakes—wrong color, broken warp thread. Not for lies. Not for consequences. The errata weren’t corrections
Item 4: In the southern swamp, the creature with twelve eyes has only eleven. The twelfth was a lie told by the weaver’s wife. To restore the lie, use a needle of thorn from the black acacia.
Or she could follow the list to the end. Item 13 was the last, but it wasn’t the first. The first mistake—the original errata—was the weaver’s own existence.
The official Mola Errata List was a single, vellum page glued to the back of the frame, written in the spidery hand of the artist’s apprentice. Every restoration project had errata—corrections, mistakes, second thoughts. But this list was different. She looked at the weeping sun-woman
Aris’s breath fogged the glass. She looked at the lower left border. There it was: a tiny, tight black knot, indistinguishable from the thousands of others unless you were looking for it.
Aris picked up her smallest scalpel. She could cut the knot. Un-weave the weaver. Stop the flood by preventing the tapestry from ever being made.