The Wonders of the World

Out there was a world of wonders, her mother always said. And so when Spindle was of age, she began to travel the world.

Each night, her mother had always told her stories of the world out beyond their tiny village. She spoke of the rising and falling of civilisations, the ebb and flow of ocean tides, the spectacles and marvels in every country. The stories painted her imagination with deep broad strokes, a precious tapestry of colours in their entire spectral multitude. Spindle yearned to see mountains tall enough to reach the clouds and deserts wide enough to match the sky. She longed to see teeming throngs of different peoples with their cultures and architecture and inventions. She wanted to see all the minutiae of life as it was, the day-to-day humdrum of friends and neighbours and lovers. The wide and wondrous world was there, just within her reach.

After her mother passed, Spindle left in the early hours one day, when the frost still clung to the leaves and her breath still fogged the air, and the sun had not yet risen to witness her departure. She took nothing but her mother’s old jewellery box, the precious stones within a remembrance of the precious stories her mother had spun.

Spindle’s journey took her from forest to town to city, from buildings to farms to wastelands. She padded unseen and unheard between the shadows, watching and listening and learning as she traversed the many continents.

The world, it turned out, was a very different tapestry from what she had imagined.

The mountains and deserts, she found in the west. Mountains of people, smuggled from far deserts, marked different only by the colour of their skin. It was a mountain full of greed, a desert barren of compassion. Spindle saw, and she shuddered, and she slipped away, leaving this sight behind her in the dust of time and space.

The teeming throngs of peoples, she found in north. People packed tightly, wasted body to wasted body. There was a new culture of superiority and extermination. There was a new invention to burn through these lives as efficiently as possible. Spindle saw, and she shuddered, and she slipped away, leaving this sight behind her in the dust of time and space.

The friends and neighbours, she found in the south. Neighbour turning against neighbour and friend against friend. Streets running red as men of all walks took up their machetes and exacted a decades-old vengeance on their fellow men. Spindle saw, and she shuddered, and she slipped away, leaving this sight behind her in the dust of time and space.

The tapestry of the world, she learned, was not one of mere colours. It was woven instead with all the complexities of mankind – horror and hope, greed and generosity, cruelty and courage. The end result was nothing like what she had imagined as a youngling, laying by her mother’s side and listening to wondrous tales.

And so she would unravel it, she decided. She would be the spindle of the world. She would undo the ugly frayed knots and snip every single thread. And these threads – every emotion, every hope, every dream, every life and soul – would be locked safely in her mother’s jewels.

After each jewel was filled to the brim, shining brightly with all the world’s passions – perhaps then the sight would be as wondrous as her mother had always told her.