Weaveworld

by Clive Barker

“There are worse things than existence,” said Immacolata. “Oh?” the Hag replied. “Can you name one?” Immacolata thought for a short while. “No,” she conceded, with a soft sigh of distress. “You may be right, sister.”

for it seemed all loss was one loss, all forgetting one forgetting.

As they worked, Cal mused on how often the Fugue and its peoples had confounded his expectations. Here they were on their knees digging a grave with a gaggle of children: it was not what his dreams of being here had prepared him for. But in its way it was more real than he’d ever dared hope — dirt under the fingernails and a snotty-nosed child at his side blithely eating a worm. Not a dream at all, but an awakening.

They meant nothing of course, those names, except in the human perspective; they were just tags bestowed by some stargazer who’d seemed to see a pattern in the scattering overhead: a bow and arrow, a bear, a plough. They meant nothing in the cosmic context. But it was a necessary comfort, to see the stars and call them by name, as if you knew them as friends. Without that courtesy the sight might break a man’s heart.