Threads
Sister Lavyry is young and her fingers are straight, but she has the same hunger in her eyes that I once had, that we all had. I have never caught her in the act but I know she practises the movements when she's alone — she watches me too closely for it to not be so.
Any contact with a foreign object is fraught with difficulty now, with jolts of searing pain and the sudden weakness which causes the hand to drop what it's holding. Elder Igranor has been learning to write holding the pen between her wrists. It's slow — it takes her minutes to write a single line — but she refuses all assistance even though she can no longer even cut her food on her own.
But that is the cost of the gift we all share. The twisting of the bones, the cracking and bulging of the joints, the weakness of the muscle and the tenderness of the nerves, these must all come when one reaches out and pulls the threads. But when I part them and spool them with my ruined hands that can barely hold a cup my warped bone and wracked flesh sing with their thrum and all the pain is forgotten.
Eventually — no, soon — I must take Sister Lavyry as my apprentice and begin teaching her. Then she will wrap her own hands as she now wraps mine after they have been lashed by the frayed threads slipping from her grasp through her too-straight fingers, and she will bite back tears and look me in the eye and thrust her chin forward as she asks me to show it to her again, and again, and again, until one day her hands too like mine are twisted and the threads no longer slip past them like water or sand but spool when they ought to and slide when the should. And at length the hunger in her eyes will dim and they will grow cloudy and fragile as Elder Igranor's, as mine will then be.
But not yet. Let her hold my hands and ask if it's too tight for a few more nights.