Or she could follow the list to the end. Item 13 was the last, but it wasn’t the first. The first mistake—the original errata—was the weaver’s own existence.

Aris picked up her smallest scalpel. She could cut the knot. Un-weave the weaver. Stop the flood by preventing the tapestry from ever being made.

She looked at the weeping sun-woman. At the rising thread-sea. At the tiny, perfect knot.

Aris’s gaze fell to the final entry, written in a shaky, desperate scrawl:

The list lay open. The next item waited. And somewhere, a doorhinge of reality groaned, stuck halfway between the world that was and the world the tapestry demanded it become.

Item 13: The weaver himself is a mistake. He stitched his own birth into the border—a single black knot in the lower left. Remove the knot, and he was never born. The world will remember a different maker. I am sorry, Master. But the flood is coming.

Aris checked the tapestry. The third silver tear had indeed been stitched falling into a stylized ocean. But beneath the top layer of thread, a faint, older stitch led directly to the tiny, burnt-umber cluster of Veruda. Someone had changed it. Purposefully.

Now, under the magnifying lamp, Aris had found it.

Item 4: In the southern swamp, the creature with twelve eyes has only eleven. The twelfth was a lie told by the weaver’s wife. To restore the lie, use a needle of thorn from the black acacia.

Item 9: The tower at the world’s hinge was never meant to be whole. Its collapse, omitted from the final weaving, has kept the hinge stuck for four hundred years. Cut three threads—red, grey, and the color of a forgotten name—to let time turn again.

The official Mola Errata List was a single, vellum page glued to the back of the frame, written in the spidery hand of the artist’s apprentice. Every restoration project had errata—corrections, mistakes, second thoughts. But this list was different.

Aris sat back. The tapestry wasn’t a map. It was a machine. Each stitch was a gear, each color a command. The artist had woven reality into wool, then made mistakes—or perhaps intentional corrections—that altered the fabric of the world. The Errata List wasn’t a list of fixes. It was a list of undoings . The apprentice had caught the master’s secret revisions and recorded them.

A strange, sick feeling bloomed in Aris’s stomach. Errata were for technical mistakes—wrong color, broken warp thread. Not for lies. Not for consequences.

But why?

Aris’s breath fogged the glass. She looked at the lower left border. There it was: a tiny, tight black knot, indistinguishable from the thousands of others unless you were looking for it.