Something From Nothing: A Dark, Powerful Fairy Tale

Before the world stole a century of sleep from me, I was nothing more than a weaver with calloused hands and restless dreams. I wasn’t born from magick or noble blood but from desperate parents who traded me to survive the cold hunger of winter, exchanging their child for the promise of a harvest.

I learned to weave so I could forget them.

The woman I called Mother was not one of gentle love or warmth but of quiet expectations. She taught me the rhythm of the loom and the silence of boredom, and it was during those endless, lonely days in my tower that I discovered how magick weeps from blood and boredom alike. My fingers bled into the yarn, staining shawls and rugs with a restless hunger that felt alive.

Mother’s eyes glowed whenever the shimmer of magick laced through my cloth, and for that flicker of approval, the loom would reappear, along with baskets of dyed yarn in deep plums and ocean blues. I would fall upon them like a starving creature, weaving until dawn, until I could barely stand, until the candles burned down to pools of wax and my head throbbed with the rhythm of creation.

I lived in a world of colors and threads. Books, paints, and the laughter of the world below my window meant nothing to me. My world was cloth. My world was creation.

When I turned thirteen, Mother brought me a spinning wheel and nodded toward my empty basket. “Now you make your own,” she commanded, and so I spun gold and silver fibers into shimmering yarn that became cloaks warm enough to ward off any winter and slippers soft enough to comfort the most aching of feet.

Magick pulsed in my veins with each beat of my heart, growing stronger with every turn of the wheel. Mother would sit in the corner, her lips curling into a rare smile as she watched me lose myself in the rhythm of the loom. I would have woven myself to death if she had not forced sleep upon me, her hand pressing against my forehead to draw the dreams from my restless mind.

But not long after my fifteenth birthday, I woke to find my chamber empty. My woven dresses, rugs, the stuffed animals I’d crafted in lonely moments, all gone. My loom vanished, leaving only the spinning wheel, empty and silent.

“Until you make something from nothing,” Mother’s voice echoed like the rustle of dry leaves, “you will not see your things again.”

My rage was a quiet fire in my belly, and for the first time, weaving could not calm it.

Days blurred together as I spun the empty wheel, pretending air could become thread. But magick does not obey desperation, and the wheel remained silent. It was then that I realized magick wasn’t meant for me the way it was for Mother. Some are born with magick in their veins, but I was only ever alive at the loom, with thread beneath my fingertips.

But the idea came anyway, dark and sharp. My hands, familiar with pain and scarred with the memory of needles, did not hesitate when I slammed them down on the wheel’s spindle, letting blood pool and drip to the cold floor.

Before the world swallowed me in a century of sleep, Mother’s voice stung my ears, “Rampion, you foolish child!”

And then, darkness.

When I woke, it felt as if a single night had passed, but the weight of my hair pooling around me spoke of years I could not remember. My legs, thin and unsteady, ached beneath me, and the door creaked open with footsteps I knew I should fear.

A shadow, panting and heavy, crept over me, taking what it wanted with the cruelty of a beast, leaving behind pain, silence, and a dark anger that settled like iron in my bones. When it was done, I crawled from the bed, dragging my hair across the cold stone, finding my loom where it waited in a corner, patient and dusty.

I cut my hair strand by strand, weaving it into a rope with trembling fingers. Each lock that fell was a promise of freedom. By dawn, I held the rope in my hands, laying back upon the bed as I waited.

When the beast returned, I used the rope to strangle the breath from its body, watching the life fade from its eyes without flinching. It was neither man nor monster, only an empty shell that had tried to steal my spirit.

Mother, appearing in the doorway with a tray of food, froze as she saw what I had done. For the first time, fear flickered in her eyes, and I saw her as she was—a witch who had wanted me to be a tool for her magick.

But she had taught me well.

When I left the tower, the magick pulsed through me, unrestrained and mine alone. I wove again, not for her, but for me, and for the child growing within me, the true creation I had made from nothing, the only thing that made me more than a weaver.

Mother came to steal my child, whispering, “Something from nothing.”

She took her, but I will find her.

And when I do, my daughter will know that her mother made something from nothing, and that even the darkest threads can be rewoven into light.

Moral:
True creation is born from struggle, and no one can steal your spirit when you reclaim your power. Even the darkest pain can become the fabric of your freedom.