The door shut behind Sanriya with a small click that felt like a portcullis slamming shut. Stumbling across the corridor, she slumped against the far wall and slid down to the floor. So this was it: the end of her tutelage at the Loomerie.
“After today, only two of you will continue under my mentorship,” the Principle Weaver had told his three pupils when they’d gathered in his office that morning. Though she’d kept her features placid on the surface, Sanriya had cackled triumphantly inside. Finally she’d be rid of Chloe, that milk-brained cow, with her insipid conversation, and her simpering personality. Agapa would hardly be a more worthy rival, but at least she had the good sense to keep her vapid thoughts to herself most of the time.
Sanriya took a long and slow breath in, and fully emptied her lungs as she breathed out. In, and Out, as her father had taught her when she was just a girl, before she’d come to study at the Loomerie. The smooth stone of the wall leeched the heat off her back, and she visualized feeding more heat into it to cool her fiery temper. She needed calm. She needed to think. What in the twelve hells had gone wrong?
“Your performance in this final trial will determine which of you stand most worthy and deserving of my time,” he’d claimed, but that simply couldn’t be true. He had entranced the three of them in turn, with but a single instruction: Escape. Sanriya had tracked the progress of time by the patch of sunlight through the window. Agapa’s and Chloe’s tests had each lasted through two full flagstones of creeping sun.
Then it had come to Sanriya’s turn to enter her mentor’s trance.
I found myself within a maze with impossibly tall walls of gray marble. Rumbling and shifting sounds in the distance hinted at terrible monstrosities stalking through the passageways around me. Ignoring them, I spun on my heel and set off in the opposite direction than I’d found myself first facing. After several twists and turns, and the occasional back-track, I arrived at the intersection of two passageways. To my left, and straight ahead, the halls turned aside after a few dozen yards. But to my right, the hall stretched away into the distance, ending in a splash of grass-green and sky-blue—barely visible, save for its contrast against the monolithic gray of the labyrinth.
The long hall tugged at me, beckoning me forward; so I turned away. A creature roared from just out of sight beyond the last turn in the path behind me, and ground its prodigious talons against the marble. I looked up, following the lines of the walls into the sky, all converging into a single, infinite point. Four lines, at the corners of the intersection: like the strings of a puppet. I reached out and grabbed one of them, a solid, thick cord in the palm of my hand, then shook it. The string wobbled and bounced. I brought my hands together on it, and began to climb.
She’d come to from the trance and checked the light: barely half a flagstone farther along than it had been when she’d gone under. Beads of sweat flowed through the rivulets of her mentor’s wrinkled skin, and there’d been something indecipherable behind his eyes—had it been fear? Anger? In but a moment, it was gone, and he’d turned away from her.
“Chloe, Aga,” he had said with a voice more tremulous than usual. “Congratulations. You have passed your trials.”
The words had hit Sanriya like a bucket of water in midwinter, shocking the anger out of her before it could form. As she was just beginning to grasp for the straws of an argument, he’d headed her off to nail shut the coffin.
“Before you make a scene and a fool of yourself, San, understand this trial was not simply a test of skill, but of character—and whether you like it or not, you have failed. You are dismissed.”
The door, a slab of solid oak, loomed over Sanriya from across the hall. A simple wooden talisman, signifying the end of her dreams. Beyond the Loomerie was a dangerous world—one that did not look kindly upon hedge witches and base sorcerers who did not possess the sigil and robes of a Weaver. The vast mysteries of the worlds she had planned to delve into within these hallowed walls…
No. She would not be denied them. The Principal Weaver was wrong. She had earned her place here, her tuition paid in advance with blood as well as gold. Sanriya had more skill and power than Chloe and Agapa combined—she was not destined to be harried from town to town by ignorant farmers with their pitchforks and torches like some grimy hedge witch. She rose, and her temper rose with her.
Sanriya was a fucking Weaver.
The Principle’s door had never before been locked, but when she tried the latch, she found it frozen in place by a simple weave. Extending the needles of her mind, she picked the frayed ends of the weft apart until the whole thing unraveled, and then threw the door open.
“Principle, I will not—”
The words died on her lips.
“This isn’t what it looks like!” the Principle Weaver shouted as he yanked his robe shut.
Chloe and Agapa stood side-by-side at his desk, stripped to the waist. Neither reacted to Sanriya’s violent entrance: both had the vacant, glassed over eyes of those lost to entrancement. And Sanriya understood what her ‘failure’ had been in the trial.
“No… No, it’s so much worse,” she whispered, turning her eyes back to her former mentor. The heat of her temper evaporated, replaced by the frigid stillness of furious purpose.
He snarled like a feral rat caught by the tail. “No one will ever believe you!”
“Oh, yes they will,” Sanriya nodded, and the threads of reality began to warp around her hands. “It will be easy to convince them, when mine is the only side of the story left to tell.”
The Literary Diversions of K.T. Lazarus 
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