The Glint in the Corner of Her Eye

Where the unseen asks to be remembered

At first, it happened—a flicker as the candle’s flame bent unnaturally, as if drawn toward the loom, shadows stretching long against the walls. Elen felt it—a quick, unsettling shift in the room. Her gaze followed, and for a moment, nothing was there. Only dusk lingered in her workroom, casting trembling light over bottles of dye and glass jars filled with moth-wing pigment.

She exhaled. The day had been long; maybe her eyes played tricks. The colours in her weaving always shimmered and breathed before the light faded. She grasped the fabric, fingertips brushing its fine, rough surface, warmed by the room. Lavender oil mingled with wool’s earthy aroma, anchoring her to the tangible. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something had just slipped out of sight.

The loom waited, half-finished. Threads of gold and grey criss-crossed in a pattern she didn’t recall choosing. The tapestry was meant to show Lareth at sunrise, but the scene had taken its own shape: towers leaning too far, streets curving back, windows reflecting nothing. As she ran her fingers across the warp, she paused, a thought drifting into her mind: ‘Why does this pattern feel like a stranger’s memory?’ The fibres were cool.

Then, again — she saw a flicker. This time, it was not behind her, but appeared to move within the threads themselves.

She leaned closer. For a heartbeat, the pattern shimmered, and she saw something impossible — a figure standing among the woven streets, facing her. Small, indistinct, its outline rippling like heat.

Elen blinked. The figure was gone.

She left the loom that night and barred the shutters. The city beyond was quiet, smothered beneath the thick fog that rolled down from the high quarries each autumn. The lamps along the riverfront burned dim, their reflections trembling in the water. From her window, she could just make out the tower of the old bell-house, its outline leaning slightly eastward, as though listening.

Elen had come to Lareth to forget. All she truly wanted was to find peace, to live quietly without the burden of unwanted visions. Out in the mountain villages, they still whispered about the ‘Thread-seer’ — the weaver whose tapestries showed what had not yet happened. She had denied it, of course. She was no prophet, only a woman with a good eye for pattern. But there was the time when a merchant dropped one of her tapestries at a fair, recoiling as if he’d been burned. The whispers spread quickly, heads turning, fingers pointing. Under their breath, they spoke of the fire foretold and the child who vanished after her weaving showed a face they couldn’t recognise. People stopped buying her work and started crossing themselves instead.

She had hoped the city would silence the rumours. Instead, she’d found herself haunted by echoes she couldn’t explain.

Tonight, as she blew out the candle, she whispered the old warding charm under her breath:

Threads to threads, light to light, dreams stay bound until the night.

Sleep came late.

In the dream, she was back at her loom. The room glowed with a strange, soft light, though no lamp burned. The tapestry was complete now. The figure she’d glimpsed earlier was still there — clearer, closer. Its face was veiled, its hands pressed against the inside of the cloth as though testing the surface.

“You see me,” it said.

Elen stepped back. “Who are you?”

“You made me.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Then who wove the door?”

Before she could answer, the threads on the loom began to move on their own, loosening, twisting, unravelling. The fabric collapsed inward like water folding over itself. A familiar rhyme whispered at the edge of her mind, like a child’s chant from long ago: “Round and round, down you go, spinning through the rabbit’s hole.” The ordinary echoed within the extraordinary, and she felt herself falling through it, colours spiralling around her. As she awoke, Elen’s heart pounded, and she noticed a sharp pain in her hand. Glancing down, she saw a thin thread, as if spun from the tapestry itself, wound tightly around her wrist. A small cut oozed a crimson bead on her fingertip, a tangible mark of the encounter she couldn’t dismiss.

She woke to the loom creaking.

The candle had gone out hours ago, but the room was not dark. A faint light pulsed from the tapestry, each thread glimmering like a nerve beneath skin. The figure was gone, yet the woven streets now seemed deeper, almost three-dimensional. She could see shadows between the towers, movement in the alleys.

She told herself she was dreaming still, but when she reached out, the air near the loom felt cold — unnaturally so. And then, at the very edge of her sight, something moved again.

She caught a glimpse of a hand.

Not woven — real.

It brushed the underside of the loom’s frame, pale and slender, before slipping back into the pattern.

Elen lurched backward, knocking over a jar of pigment. Gold dust fanned across the floor like sparks. Her heart hammered.

“Who’s there?”

No reply. Only the faint rustle of threads tightening on their own.

The tapestry changed as she watched: now it showed her room, with a woman at the loom, herself, perfectly rendered. Behind her, another shape formed: tall, faceless, waiting. A chill wrapped her thoughts. What if this creation knew her better than she knew herself? A terrifying question loomed in her mind, ‘What if the loom is weaving me?’ She couldn’t shake the sense that the figure bore some unnamed consequence, just beyond understanding.

By morning, she had thrown a sheet over the loom and locked the door. She spent the day in the market square, sitting beneath the awnings with the other traders, trying to ignore the whispering hum that seemed to follow her even there.

When dusk fell, she returned home to find the door ajar.

Inside, the sheet lay crumpled on the floor. The tapestry glowed faintly in the half-light. She thought she heard someone breathing.

Her eyes adjusted — and she froze.

The figure from the cloth stood before the loom. No longer woven. Real. Its face was still veiled, but she could see a mouth beneath the gauze, moving as it spoke.

“You made me,” it said again. “Now finish the pattern.”

“I won’t.”

The thing tilted its head. “It isn’t yours to refuse.”

It stepped closer, the air around it bending like heat. She could smell iron, dust, and the faint tang of thread oil.

“What happens if I do?” she whispered.

“It ends unfinished,” it said simply. “And you stay the same.”

She didn’t understand, but the words chilled her.

For three nights, she avoided the loom. On the fourth, she dreamed again — of hands weaving without her, pulling the last threads taut, sealing the pattern. When she woke, the tapestry was complete.

It showed her house exactly as it stood, the window, the loom, the chair, but beyond the window, the city was different. The bell-house tower was gone, the river dry. A sky the colour of aged copper arched overhead. It was as if the city’s heart had taken on this hue, a strange copper-tinged light that seemed to whisper of something changed, something quietly corrupted. Each time she glimpsed it, the light seemed to pulse with an unspoken message, anchoring the feeling that Lareth was not the same city she once knew.

She felt drawn to it, like standing at a precipice: afraid, yet compelled.

She reached out. The surface rippled beneath her touch, warm and yielding like skin. As her fingers brushed the fabric, a long-buried memory surfaced unbidden: a sunlit field where she had once danced as a child, laughter echoing against the sky. It was a moment of pure innocence and joy, a time when the world was wide open and full of promise. The memory tugged at her heart, merging with a yearning she hadn’t realised she still held. For a moment, she felt it pull at her fingertips—gently, almost kindly—and she imagined what it would be like to step through, to reclaim that forgotten sense of freedom and possibility.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the glint again — a flash of movement, something darting across the far wall. She turned sharply. Nothing.

When she looked back, her reflection in the tapestry was gone.

By the following evening, the city had changed.

At first, she thought it was her imagination. The streets seemed slightly narrower and the fog thicker. Others noticed it too. The bell-house stood straight and whole now, even though it had been half-ruined for decades. People she passed in the street gave her strange looks, as if they half-finished her and couldn’t remember why. A vendor in the market called out, his usual chant oddly altered, offering not just fresh produce but something forgotten: ‘Sweet persimmons and memories, ripe and ready!’ It was as if the small details of the city were mirroring her internal disarray, making the altered reality tangible.

At the market, an old man selling salt fish squinted. “Didn’t you leave years ago?”

“I’ve only just arrived,” she said.

He frowned. “No, you left. The Thread-seer. You went into the river.”

Elen’s mouth went dry. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

But as she turned away, she caught her reflection in the glass of a shopfront. For the briefest instant, the face staring back wasn’t hers — older, paler, eyes the colour of tarnished silver.

The same eyes as the figure she’d woven.

That night, she returned to the loom. The tapestry was dim now, the glow fading like embers. But when she touched it, warmth still pulsed beneath the surface.

“Is this what you wanted?” she whispered.

From somewhere behind her — or inside the threads — came the reply:

“Finish it.”

“I already have.”

“Not yet.”

The voice was her own.

A wind stirred through the shuttered room, carrying the scent of river silt and rain. The threads shivered. Her reflection appeared once more — not in the cloth this time, but beside her, faint and translucent. It watched her with quiet sadness.

Elen reached out. The reflection mirrored her perfectly, palm to palm, until their fingers met.

There was a sound like a single thread snapping.

When the neighbours finally forced the door open days later, they found the room empty. The loom stood silent. The tapestry hung completed, its surface dull but intricate, depicting the city of Lareth as it had been that very morning, unremarkable, unchanged.

Only one detail differed: in the lower corner, beneath a window, stood a weaver bent over her loom. Her eyes were bright, her hands poised in motion. And if you looked long enough, if you waited for the light to shift, you might see her glance up from her work and meet your gaze directly. What does she see in the world beyond the loom, and what secrets does the tapestry still hold?

As the wind swept through the streets outside, carrying whispers of threads and memories, there came a faint creak in the air—a sound as familiar as a heartbeat, like the gentle, persistent murmur of a loom weaving stories into silence.

Some swore that, out of the corner of the eye, they could see her move.

The guild sealed the house soon after. No one was permitted inside, though apprentices sometimes dared each other to press their ears to the shuttered windows. They always claimed to hear the same sound — the soft whisper of threads tightening, and the faint, rhythmic creak of a loom still in use.

On windy nights, when the lamps flicker along the riverfront, people say a woman can be seen at the far edge of sight, turning a corner too quickly, her hair catching the lamplight like spun gold.

They say if you look directly at her, there’s nothing there.

But if you don’t — if you let her stay just in the corner of your eye — she never quite disappears.