Steel & Silk

I don’t look at them anymore.

It’s easier that way. The faces, I mean. The eyes especially. They always have that moment - that flicker of recognition when they understand what’s about to happen. Some run. Some freeze. Some try to fight. It doesn’t matter. The silk always gets what it needs.

The first time was in a town square. Cobblestones. A fountain with stone fish spitting water into a basin. I remember the sound of children laughing somewhere nearby. I remember the dress starting to hum - that low vibration that begins in the threads pressed against my spine and spreads outward until my whole body resonates with its hunger.

The man was just standing there, selling bread.

The threads slithered down my arms before I could stop them. Steel plates emerged from the silk like bones surfacing through skin. The dress moved me. I don’t know how else to describe it. My body became a puppet, and the silk pulled every string.

When it was over, the dress loosened. That’s how it rewards me - with room to breathe. A few hours of the threads lying flat instead of coiled tight against my ribs. A night without the barbs pressing into my shoulders.

But if I hesitate? If I try to resist?

The silk tightens. The barbs extend. I’ve seen my own blood stain the white threads red, watched them drink it in like water into sand. The dress doesn’t just punish resistance - it feeds on it. My pain makes it stronger.

I tried to die. So many times I tried.

I stopped eating once. Walked into the wilderness and sat down and waited. After three days, the dress began hunting on its own, moving my body while I slept. I woke up covered in blood that wasn’t mine, my stomach full of something I don’t want to name.

I tried hanging. The silk caught me, suspended me there in a cocoon until I agreed to keep going.

The dress won’t let me die. It needs me. That’s what I finally understood - I’m not a host. I’m a Spinner.

They seeded us. The things that made the silk - we never see them, never meet them - they scattered their spores across a thousand worlds. Let them take root in a thousand species. The silk grows inside us from birth, dormant, waiting. And then one day it blooms, and we become what we were always meant to be.

Harvesters. The silk needs room to grow. And growth requires… clearing.

I step between dimensions now. That’s what Spinners do. We find the clean slates - the worlds untouched by the silk’s presence - and we make room. The dress opens doorways that shouldn’t exist, and I walk through, and on the other side there’s always another world to ruin.

I told a man to run once. Screamed at him to get away. He made it maybe fifty feet before a thread caught his ankle. The silk was angry with me for that. The barbs stayed extended for three days.

I hate it. God, I hate this dress. I hate the way it hums when it’s satisfied. I hate how the threads stroke my skin like a lover’s fingers after a kill. I hate that it knows me - knows my body, my rhythms, my breaking points.

And I hate that it loves me. That’s the worst part. The silk doesn’t see me as a prisoner. It sees me as a partner. A purpose. It has waited its whole existence to find me, and now that it has, it will never let go.

There is no noble suicide. No sacrifice that sets the universe free. No final act of defiance that means anything at all. The silk is patient. The silk is eternal. And the silk is wearing me until there’s nothing left.

I dream of fire sometimes. Of burning the dress away, thread by thread, feeling it scream as it turns to ash. I wake up covered in blood and tears, the silk humming its contentment against my skin.

It knows the dream. It’s not worried.

The universe is big enough to ruin forever.