When Arth wakes up he realises that he is half-formed. He looks at his stumped black limbs and feels the concave cavities that are his eyes and decides that he is half-formed like an unborn foetus.
There is no-one else. Nothing else but an endless cloudscape of soft grey beneath him and dark grey above. Arth decides that nothing will happen unless he tries something, anything, and begins to walk across the fluffy surface to see what he can find.
The stitching begins not too far from where Arth woke up. He kneels down with a click and blows away cloud until he can see it. The thread is white and luminescent, and when Arth looks from one side to the other he can see a whole range of things that are new and Arth looks and thinks and remembers and he decides that these are 'colours'.
He reaches down to try and grab the thread to see if he can carry some of it with him, but the stitching is tight; binding together a rip in the sky. For a while Arth follows, walking upon it, savouring the feel of something solid beneath his toes.
The clicks are the first thing he hears of them. The same sounds that comes from the motion of his own bones. Arth follows the clicks and finds them; a whole crowd of other squat black figures, all with deep white cavities for eyes.
They see Arth and all click in unison. He asks them if they are half-formed too and they say no and tell him that they are all half-forgotten beings of the otherplace.
Arth tries to remember. Memories before this otherplace are hazy and dreamlike—a few brief seconds saturated in the same technicolors of the thread.
The otherlings nod and click their heads; it is the same for all of them. Arth asks if the others have names. Few do. He asks what they are doing and they tell him they are going to give things back to the undersky.
The crowd moves and Arth goes with them, clicking as his stubby legs move back and forth. They're looking for treasure. They say it appears in the otherplace in the same way that Arth did but that the treasure does not wake up.
When they find it, it is a bright colour called pink. One otherling says that it is a pony and clicks his head. They ask what a pony is and someone else calls it a creature. Arth comments that the treasure cannot be a creature because surely a creature would wake up. Another says the treasure is from a carousel. The otherlings click their heads in discussion. No-one knows what a carousel is.
The pony is big. The otherlings swarm underneath and lift it up high with their stubby arms and carry it above their misshapen heads.
At the lip of the tear where they leave the pink carousel pony there are more treasures. Piles and piles of colours and names that Arth does not know. He looks over the lip, the gaping wound that has not yet been healed. Beyond the frayed cloth of broken sky he sees the spinner with its needles and reels of the thread, he sees the tall buildings the of the underlings that grow up and try to reach them. The undersky is like nothing else. Everything has a colour.
He asks the otherlings about the treasure. They tell him that it comes from the undersky and that it belongs to the undersky. They return it. Everything in the otherplace once came from there. Arth asks if this means that they come from the undersky.
The otherlings say nothing.
___
note: written as a semi-continuation of this
