The sun was folding itself into the sea when I returned home. Shadows stretched across the porch, and the air carried that crisp evening quiet.
I stopped.
The rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum of the sewing machine echoed through the space.
My mother sat at her table, bent over a swath of pale green fabric that shimmered faintly in the sunset. Her fingers moved as she began to pinch, fold and stitch, like she wasn't guiding the machine, but dancing with it.
Her focus was absolute. Her hair was tied back with a ribbon, one I recognized from years ago.
The machine itself looked almost out of place in this otherwise magic-soaked island life. It was sleek and black, old but well-kept, its gears oiled to silent perfection. Not many people used tech here. Hell, most wouldn't know where to start. But my mother? She was the only one on the island who could make it sing.
I didn't say anything. I just stood there a little while longer, watching her finish the final hem. When she stopped, she ran her hand gently across the dress like she was blessing it, smoothing every invisible crease before carefully unpinning the fabric and folding it neatly.
I followed her out to the old tree in the backyard, the one with the crescent bench built around the base. She sat down without a word, patting the space beside her. I dropped onto the bench, my head leaning against the bark. The sun had slipped almost fully behind the hills now. The stars were starting to stir. She turned toward me.
"How was your day?"
I hesitated, then shrugged, exhaling.
"It was... different." I paused. "I found out what kind of Alteration Flux is about."
She raised a brow slightly, not out of surprise, but quiet curiosity.
"And what does that mean?"
I gave her the shorter version, and told her how Alteration was about changing things based on imagination and will, how it was versatile, and how I could shape it depending on what I wanted most. I didn't overload her with technical details. Just... the core of it. Then I looked at her with a more serious look this time.
"But I don't know what to alter. It has to be something that means something. Something... real."
She gave me a soft smile.
"I don't know much about Flux, sweetheart. But I do know about making things."
She reached into the cloth bag beside her and pulled out a bundle of raw silk, delicate, almost translucent threads that shimmered in the dim light.
"You know where silk comes from?" She asked, holding up a strand and winding it gently between her fingers.
"Silkworms," I replied, watching it catch the starlight.
"Right. But not just any silkworm. They are ones that are raised in peace. They are fed mulberry leaves, cared for properly and only then do they spin the right kind of smooth, strong and fine cocoon."
She held the silk up.
"You take something fragile and natural and, with care, you turn it into art."
Her hands moved as she spoke, fingers threading the silk through a needle, almost absentminded.
"Most people just think it's sewing. But it's not. It's transformation. A thread is never just a thread. It's a choice. A tension. A path. Patterns. And at the end of the day, it makes something nice. Like this dress here."
I blinked. It hit me all at once.
Thread. Line. Fabric. Tension. Choice.
"Mom," I said suddenly, sitting up straighter. "Do you have any yarn?"
She glanced at me, surprised by my sudden urgency, then nodded. From the bag beside her, she pulled out a ball of soft, dusky yarn and handed it over.
I took it without a word, looping it over my fingers. I shifted in my seat, eyes narrowing in concentration, and began to weave the string into a cat's cradle. My fingers moved on instinct, the familiar crisscrossing motions tightening and loosening with gentle pressure. The yarn pulled taut between my hands, then loosened, shaped and reshaped, patterns rising and falling.
She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.
The silence between us was full of meaning.
As I worked, I could feel the metaphor and the literal blending, fusing into something that clicked inside my soul.
To alter thread was to alter paths. To stitch was to connect, to break, to repair. Fabric could hold warmth or reveal weakness. Tension could build strength or unravel everything. Just like life. Just like me.
My heart thumped with something new.
This... this was what I wanted to alter.
Not just thread. Not just objects. I wanted to alter connections.
I wanted to untangle the knots that shouldn't be there and strengthen the ones that should. To weave new meaning into the broken places of the world.
I looked at the cat's cradle in my hands, and for a moment, it shimmered. Not in the light, but in my mind.
The first spark of light came from the center of the cradle between my fingers in a small, flickering pulse of soft cerulean blue. I stared at it, uncertain whether it was just a trick of the dying sunlight slipping through the leaves above us.
But then the thread responded.
The yarn stretched, expanded and twisted without breaking. It glowed with a quiet, electric life that wasn't there before. The thread slipped free from my fingers like silk on water, and I gasped as it began to float upward, spinning slowly in midair like a slow-motion ribbon caught in an invisible breeze.
"Permonelle..." my mother breathed beside me. She reached out toward the air but stopped just short of touching it, as if she knew this moment wasn't hers to disturb.
The threads kept expanding.
They wrapped around us, gliding gently through the air. Each string had a distinct rhythm. Some curled upward like spirals. Others looped into perfect circles, or interlaced with the others midair, forming complex lacework patterns that shimmered like constellations.
They glowed in varying hues of blue that seemed to hum with hidden depth. The whole yard had changed. It was no longer just the back of a house on a hill.
The sun was still bleeding across the sky. And against that backdrop, the glowing strings shimmered, floating above the soil, around the tree and beneath our feet.
Each thread was a choice. Each thread was a possibility. Each thread was a piece of me.
I reached out slowly, my hand trembling. One of the threads moved toward me on instinct. It wrapped around my wrist and I could feel it. It was warm.
And then the metaphor began to unfold in my mind.
I wanted to form connections. I wanted to bring people together, bind what was broken, mend what had been lost. My whole life, even when I hadn't realized it, I had always been tugging at the loose threads of the world, wishing I could pull them tighter. Fix something. Save something.
Believe in something.
I imagined those strings binding people not in chains, but in meaning like relationships and memories. I imagined the string tightening between enemies who could one day understand each other, loosening between those who needed freedom, wrapping gently around those who were falling apart.
And then the literal followed.
For me to reach that dream, my strings couldn't just be delicate metaphors. They had to be weapons. They had to be shields. They had to be salvation and judgment.
I imagined strings that could snap steel and thread veins into fractured cities.
Strings that could hold a collapsing building in place or cut through metal like butter.
Strings that could heal broken flesh or sever a lie from someone's mouth.
I needed strings that could adapt. Shift forms. Become whatever I needed, either a razor-sharp wire or an ethereal bridge. I wanted threads that could alter themselves based on my thoughts, my emotions and will.
And Alteration answered.
The threads flickered again and changed.
One twisted into metallic wire, shining and rigid.
Another curled into a silken rope, flexible and soft.
A third unraveled into something finer than spiderweb, yet radiating a latent danger, like it could slice atoms in half.
My power wasn't static. It grew with me. The threads responded to how deeply I believed in them and how clearly I envisioned their purpose. Every mental image I had shifted them. Every intention I held shaped them.
That was Alteration.
Not just changing the physical, but manifesting what I believed into something real.
I looked at my mother. Her eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted. She didn't say a word. She didn't have to.
And coming with a name for the Alteration Flux.
"I've decided. I'm going to call you, Stringweave."