Free The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament and the Ascendancy Veil by Chris Wooding

stained. In the centre of the room was an octagonal bathing pool. Its waters were murky, scattered with floating bits of debris and faeces. At the bottom, staring sightlessly upward, was
a naked boy.
    Everywhere there was evidence of the Weave-lord’s terrible appetites when in his post-Weaving rages. All manner of food was strewn about in varying states of decay. Fine silks were ripped
and torn. Blood stained the tiled floor here and there. A scourge lay beneath the broken bed. A corpse lay in the bed, several weeks old, its sex and age mercifully unidentifiable now. A
vast hookah smoked unattended amid a marsh of spilled wine and wet clothes.
    And in the centre, his white, withered body cloaked in rags, the Weave-lord sat cross-legged, wearing his Mask.
    The True Mask of the Weave-lord Vyrrch was an old, old thing. Its lineage went all the way back to Frusric, one of the greatest Edgefathers that had ever lived. Frusric had formed it from
bronze, beaten thin so it would be light enough to wear. It was a masterpiece: the face of some long-forgotten god, his expression at once demented and horribly, malevolently sane, his brows heavy
over eyes like dark pits. The face appeared to be crying out in despair, or shrieking in hate, or calling in anger, depending on what angle the light struck it.
    Frusric had given the new Mask to Tamala tu Jekkyn, who had worn it till his untimely death; it was then handed on to Urric tu Hyrst, a master Weaver himself. From Urric, it could be traced
through seven subsequent owners over one hundred years, until it had come into the possession of Vyrrch, given to him by his master, who recognised in the boy a talent greater than any he had
seen.
    The True Masks took all their owners had, draining them, rotting them from the inside out. They kept a portion of what they took, and passed it on to the next wearer. It changed them,
imbuing shreds of its previous owner’s mind and memories and personality. With each owner, it took more and passed more on, until the clash of influences, dreams and experiences became too
much for the mind to bear. The older the Mask, the greater the power it gained, and the swifter it drove the wearer to insanity. Lesser apprentices would have died of shock at just putting this
Mask on. Vyrrch was laid low three seasons, but he mastered it. And the power it had granted him was nothing short of magnificent.
    What it had taken from him, though, was less glorious. He was nearly forty harvests of age, but he creaked and wheezed like a man of thrice that. His face had been made hideous. A thousand more
minor corruptions and cancers boiled in his broken body, and the pain was constant. And though he did not realise it, the Mask had subtly been eroding his sanity like all the others, until he
teetered daily on the brink of madness.
    But he felt none of the pains in his body now, for he was Weaving, and the ecstasy of it took him away on a sea of bliss.
    Like all Weavers, he had been taught to visualise the sensation in his own way. The raw stuff of the Weave was overwhelming, and many novices had found its beauty more than they could bear, and
lost their will to leave. They wandered forever somewhere between its threads, lost in their own private paradise, bright ghosts mindlessly slaved to the Weave.
    For Vyrrch, the Weave was an abyss, a vast, endless blackness in which he was an infinitesimal mote of light. And yet it was far from empty. Great curling tunnels snaked through the dark, grey
and dim and faintly iridescent, like immense worms that thrashed and swayed, their heads and tails lost in eternity. The worms were the threads of the Weave, and he floated in the darkness in
between, where there was nothingness, only the utter and complete joy of disembodiment. A creature of sensation alone, he felt the sympathetic vibration of the threads, a slow wind that swept
through him, charging his nerves. On the edge of vision, huge whale-like shapes slid through the