Work Text:
The kingdom thrives on song. Always has, always will. From the days of the Weavers to the days of the Citadel's reign under Threefold hand. And yet, some songs do not ring loud. They are quiet, hummed and murmured in corners away from prying ears. Out of the sight of the overseers, away from the Conductors and the hymns and the white strands pressed into worker and ruler alike. A threefold melody of its own, an anathema to the melody of the Upper Reaches.
A song of the workers, cobbled together from Weaver Fragments. They were not Weavers, but weave they could even so. And so they spun the song anew, a song sung once before as the Great Mother that the People did not know raged and was bound tight, before the Weavers fled to lands unknown. A song rewritten, unspooled and strung anew.
Their gloom-enveloped eyes are tearless,
They sit at the spinning wheel, snarling cheerless:
"Pharloom, we weave your funeral shroud,
A threefold curse be within it endowed-
We're weaving, we're weaving!
A snarled song of Underworkers as they toiled. Hissed under shrieking blades and groaning metallurgy.
A curse on our Monarch to whom we knelt
When hunger and winter's cold we felt,
To whom we flocked in vain and cried,
Who mocked us and haunted us and cast us aside,
We're weaving, we're weaving!
A wailed song of the Husks in the Whiteward, of the Conductor Mizello as Silken scourge erupted from their very own shells. Shrieked under sizzling ovens and ashen floors.
A curse on the Threefold Rulers, the wealthy bug's chiefs
Who were not moved even by our grief
Who wrenched the last coin from our hand of need,
And shot us, screaming like roaches in the street!
We're weaving, we're weaving!
A wheezed song of Pilgrims turned away at the gates, crushed under Judge's thuribles. Breathed last in whispering sands and stone.
A curse on this lying Mother's nation
Where thrive only shame and degradation,
Where every flower's plucked ere it's bloom
And worms thrive in the dank rot and gloom-
We're weaving, we're weaving!
A song groaned by ghosts of Rulers past, jailed and rotting alive all throughout the lands, betrayed by alliances. Dying breaths of four Kingdoms subdued in forgotten, hidden corners.
O shuttle fly! Loom crank away!
We weave unfailing, night and day-
Old Pharloom, we weave your funeral shroud,
A threefold curse be within it endowed-
We're weaving, we're weaving!
A song murmured in the lands by soft skin hid in hardened shells, calling for change. A call for an end of the Haunting started long ago.
The song was cobbled together, hidden and forged anew hundreds, thousands of times over, written anew with every fallen singer. And yet, they knew innate who wrote it first. A name woven within it. The first song of the Pharloomite Weavers sung against their Mother.
It is a song woven into the Citadel. Into every silk dreg. And it would forever be.