A deceptively mild wind swept the eternal dust of the valley into a stately pavane as Rajo slipped from shadow to shadow in the lowering sunset. When twilight succumbed to the kiss of night, that same wind would sharpen her teeth, but they had no intention of being her prey this night or any other.
Their mothers would lecture and refuse them if they ever noticed Rajo's absence from their proper place among the other children of their section. The division masters would assign repair work and quarry service for their entire section for weeks if they were discovered - and the other children would thereafter devise punishments infinitely more sharp and varied than their elders ever dreamed of.
Rajo held every respect for the reasons behind their rules, for order formed the warp on which the lives of the people were woven. Winter was an unforgiving season just as much as summer, and the rocs of weather and war and wasting took enough souls through the veils of world already, and more from the people than any merciful god should allow. The mothers and the elders were right to guard the children of the people from their own folly until they were old enough to understand.
Rajo slipped between the patrols and over the edge of the roof with all the grace of a lace-weaver's float, following a different law entirely, one as old as the stars.
A thread alone has no meaning and no real value until it is woven into a greater purpose. The potential it represents cannot even be measured until it is woven, but a single thread by its presence or absence may make the difference between a tapestry and a tangle.
It is woven that the greatest of all virtues, and therefore the greatest of all sins, begins and ends with the people. To take from the people what they cannot afford to give is a grave offense, unless the need of the one taking outweighs the need of the bearer, or the taking may be repaid before the damage is too great.
Rajo's need ran soul-deep, and they would return to the people with the sun as they always did. But tonight, they could not bear to lie alone behind stone walls while the wandering fire danced magic across the heavens. If Rajo's thread frayed for a loss of sleep, they knew themselves spun strong enough to bear it.
Rajo dropped silently to the last shallow terrace above the unforgiving ground. The doors on this level had long since been filled in as the fortress grew, and no one, not even the Rova, ever patrolled here. There was no need: its narrow, worn ledges lay in full view of the terraces above, and frequently served a more deadly purpose than offering one small child a rest in their forbidden adventures. From below, the false doors looked real enough, and the terrace itself served to tempt invaders into lingering on its false safety well within the range of the archers hidden above.
Except - Rajo's golden eyes saw things others missed. Twice in the cycle of each day, the terrace on the eastern face lay draped in deepest shadow for exactly half a candlemark as the sun or her wayward silver lover raced for the horizon. They asked once, drunk on the freedom of indulging their discovery seven nights running, why the Rova set no torches on the empty terraces.
The answer, like all answers worth knowing, came in the form of work. The exhaustion of forty nights spent climbing the fortress walls armed and at speed under the close watch of the trainers was no small cost, nor were the torments of their section mates for inciting it. (For everyone knew the moment the lesson began, as they always did, that once again, Rajo had Asked A Question.) No one, not even a whipcord child of the people, honed by the sands and the will of the gods, can climb the fortress walls from the ground to the first real terrace in less than three quarters of a candlemark. Even a legendary sheikah warrior mage could not have scaled the walls in half that time, and they would first need to survive the barren approach.
Rajo held the second-worst record in their section for speed in every kind of climb, and the fourth-worst time in the flat run, although they could carry three times the weight of anyone else while doing either. No one, not even the Rova, entertained the slightest idea that Rajo might escape over the walls, for it was beyond impossible they could ever make the return climb unseen.
But for one tenth of a candlemark, twice a day, Rajo did not need to climb.
The sun took her last step over the far horizon, and twilight spread its blanket over the sky. Rajo waited, chanting the simplest of look-away charms until the moment the fortress' shadow kissed the eastern cliffs.
It is woven that the worlds of the living and the dead are both separate and joined, like cloth made on a doubled warp. Threads may pass from one to the other in the shadows between the shuttle's pass, binding them together, but the no thread can travel both at once.
Except in the hours of twilight and false dawn, when the shuttle of time slows and the shed draws close in passing power from day to night. An ephemeral magic sparked where the spirits of the living and the lost danced together, as rich in promise as it was poor in time.
Rajo reached out once again, and the shadows embraced them as no one and nothing else ever had.