'Three lone figures walked through the tunnel of time, always separate but longing to meet each other. The fourth was dead, and the fifth gone.
'It was sad, really. A pity how the wondrous five, who'd set out to do so much with ambition that soared far above the pathetic screen, now were broken and discarded.
'Well, one succeeded.'
—————
There was once a creature by the name of Jess. Jess stood at the top of whatever he did, always the best of the best. No-one could beat Jess if he put his mind to it.
He spent his days studying everything he could, showcasing his brilliance in competitions and earning rewards for it, some which were of use to lay down the basics for his foundation, the rest discarded and packed cleanly in little locked drawers.
At the age of ten, Jess surpassed his older brother, Garrett, in weaving, and replaced him as heir to the small estate that the Queens' owned.
A dozen rewards and trophies in the forms of exquisite tools lined every shelf in the giant, sunlit bedroom that had been bestowed to Jess, all neatly arranged according to date. On the one wall on which no bookshelf stood, there was a giant wardrobe in its place. Inside were robes, jackets and trousers, the robes arranged by size, the jackets by colour, and the trousers in two separate piles: long and short.
The bed hung, dangling from silver chains weaved inside the design of the building itself. A silver spiral staircase floated up to the bed, and turned into cloud-like grey particles of silver when Jess went to sleep.
It was a beautiful room—the best the Queens had to offer for their prized child.
You could step into the room, wonder at its beauty and at the number of rewards there truly were, for there were hundreds, before you remembered that you had to go on with your life. It was an idealist room, one some imagined themselves acquiring.
Jess could name every imprint known to Stone by the age of twelve, all the signatures of important spellweavers in Stone-Dwelling history that marked the imprint they made different to all others, how those imprints were then affected by that signature, many influential guards and religions that had collapsed and new ones that had been formed from the rubble, the notable names of all City Lords and their respective families in history, and a good amount of general history.
He, after two intense years of studying, managed to create his own unique signature, and was proclaimed the genius of many years to come.
The Queens' status managed to rise until their estate covered more than a kilometre across on all sides.
And so passed his childhood.
What happened afterwards was not certain, a great amount of it rubbed out from history or torn out of any books or journals that recorded the incident.
Long after his death, Jess Queen was talked of in all notable classes: the boy genius who had created his own signature at the age of fourteen, become a spellweaver so powerful that almost all the known threads were mastered to a degree of near perfection, six found himself.
However, no-one was ever certain of where the spellweaver went, only that he disappeared from history ever since, with no sign that he had ever existed apart from his trophies and rewards, studies and writings he conducted on various different subjects that spanned from philosophy to the nature of how threads came to be.
In a way, it was exactly what Jess would have expected. There was nothing of his life, and they simultaneously had everything that was possible to have.
The cause of the Incident of Jess Queen was actually because the brilliant spellweaver had gone on a rampage, becoming little more than a beast apart from his cruel intelligence which he used against his former acquaintances.
Hundreds upon thousands died in his wrath, with nothing that protected them against the monstrous and delicate boy.
Later, history, time and the Stone-Dwellers changed the story so that it wasn't Jess who had killed them, but by a great and terrible monster that lurked in the depths of the stone, who had taken Jess as tribute in order for the safety of the rest of the city folk.
It was said that Jess himself volunteered, or that he was forced to.
However, no-one truly knew what had happened to Jess: was he alive, or dead, or neither
—————
In a depths of a deep shadowed house, the sound of a chair could be heard creaking with every movement.
'Jess Queen was a genius that broke the laws enforced, and was tortured as a result. That was his ending: he died, alone and cold, despite the threads he wove around himself.'
The creaking continued, as well as the voice, which seemed to come from everywhere all of a sudden. 'Jess Queen found peace at last, with companions whom he trusted and shared his brilliance with. They fought the laws and achieved what none had ever done before.'
The figure who asked the question turned away, so that its face and body were hidden in the shadows again. 'Which is the truth?'