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Description
She sat before a loom, as she had for all living memory.  The strands of dreams and fate coiled beneath her hands and were woven into glorious tapestries, which she would never see.  For as long as she had sat in her cave, in warm ground, beneath the life giving tree, she had been blind, weaving the tapestries of life, telling the great tales, and the not so great, but while she gave them life, she did not know them.

Occasional winds would find their way down into her cave.  Sometimes they tasted of the sea:  salt and fish and fresh air.  Sometimes they brought with them the scent of Spring:  fresh flowers and sweet wind after the bitterness of winter.  Her favorites were the autumn winds, which brought with them the taste of people, who she had so long been without.  The weaver paused for a moment and inhaled deeply when the smells of fallen wheat and crushed fruits wafted through the mouth of her cave.

She had been forgotten with the coming of the new religion, which forgot the ways of the old gods, the magics that they carried.  No one came to her cave in search of her weaving any more, and yet she wove on, knowing that someday, someone would come again, needing the magic that she made with every pass of her hands on the loom.

The sounds of a person had been echoing outside the cave for days now.  It was not the young blind girl who would someday come to replace her, as she had taken the loom from the dying hands of her own predecessor.  This one made all of the noise of a man in armor, a man who didn't think himself in danger.  And the winds whispered to her and her hands, telling her that she would be needed.

After many days, he descended into the cave, tentatively, to approach the weaver.  When he paused before her loom, there was finally a moment's silence.  In her quiet rasping voice, once beautiful, but fallen to old age, nearly a hundred years of neglect, she greeted him, "Young warrior, you come here for a boon.  Do you give your greetings to the gods that keep this place?"

He rustled, obviously uncomfortable, and said, "I do not know the greetings."

She smiled, her thin, weathered face clearly unused to forming the expression.  "Then I will teach you, and only then, young warrior, will you receive your boon."

She expected him to protest, for she knew of the new religion, that he must have been a part of, but instead she heard him settle, sitting on the floor beside her loom.  His voice was low and warm, confidence that had not been there before showing itself, "Then teach me, for much has been forgotten, but I have heard the call of the old gods, and I would heed it."

The weaver took her hand from the loom for the first time in years for anything other than eating, and she felt the face of the young warrior who had come to her.  He wasn't of her people, his face was too angular and his cheekbones too high for that, but he was of her land all the same.  Perhaps he would bring the world back to rights in his search for the old gods, and perhaps then a girl would come to take her place, for she was very weary.