"So it is. Oh, that tapestry's pretty."

"Yeah, it's cool!"

"It's not very, hm, archetypically tapestry-ish, though."

"I can't say I'm that familiar with the genre."

The fabric is dark, and intricately embroidered with shades of blue and purple and green and red and a deep lightless black. It's hard to tell if it's meant to depict anything in particular; the colours form a tangle of ambiguous shapes, and searching for meaning there feels a lot like looking for lambs among the clouds.

"I like it, though. It's spooky."

"What does an archetypal tapestry look like?"

"You know, medievalish? Like the kind of thing you'd expect to see on the wall of some kind of King Arthur story or what not." She goes over to examine the tapestry more closely.

"Huh. Yeah, I couldn't imagine King Arthur standing in front of this, unless it was some kind of modernized reboot."

It's not immediately clear what type of fabric that is, or what type of thread. The coloured threads are beautifully vibrant at their brightest, fading to a smoky dimness in places, but the fading looks intentional; the black threads remain uniform throughout. Anna wanders over for a closer look.

"Don't the backs of these things always look like total garbage," wonders Cass, "or is that only when it's like the tag on a fancy shirt or something?"

"Textiles aren't really my forte, but I think it might look like garbage..." She flips a corner over to see.

It's messy but not that messy. And those black threads are unexpectedly cool to the touch, almost like they're made of metal, except they're also extremely soft and flexible in a very un-metallic way.

"Disappointing," pronounces Cass. "I was picturing it way more garbagey."

"Like what?"

"I dunno, just, like with the colours more all over the place and tangled up and stuff? And instead it's almost tidy."

"I don't think these things are usually tangled."

"Aren't they? Lemme see that."

She reaches for the tapestry to turn it over.

"Oh, careful, you might snag something." She tries to take her hand away and frowned. Like metal, the dark threads had warmed quickly under her touch, and when she tried to pull her hand away she found they had become kind of sticky. "...Which might be easier than normal, these threads are behaving weirdly."

"...yeah, that's weird all right." She doesn't touch the tapestry, but she peers at it.

She tries to carefully remove her hand from the sticky.

Despite her best efforts, a couple of threads at the edge of the cloth are pulled out into little loops, and the tapestry shifts a little. Cass steps back to try to get out of the way, but one of the loops snags on the zipper of her skirt pocket, and she stumbles and falls over and the whole tapestry comes with her, scrunched up and tangled in a knot of pulled threads.

"Aww man!"

"Augh! ...Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine - sorry about your tapestry - it was really nice, too..."

She tries to disentangle herself from the fabric. It doesn't work very well.

"It's a real shame, but it's not like it was your fault." She bends down to try to help detangle her.

"It was probably just really old. We probably shouldn't be handling all this stuff so casually." She will also assist.

With Anna's help, they manage to get the tapestry detached from Cass's clothes.

"Yeah, I feel bad about it and I wasn't even—"

And then they are no longer touching the tapestry, or in the same room as the tapestry, or indeed in the house at all.

"—what the actual fuck."

They are on a dimly lit hilltop, surrounded by dark springy grass and small tangly bushes bearing enormous ghostly-white flowers.

Around them, the horizon is a high and jagged shadow against the deep blue of the night sky, matched by another such shadow looming above, like they're sitting in the open mouth of some enormous mythical beast - but the 'teeth' go all the way around; the roof of the planetary mouth appears to be a huge flat bowl exactly like the one in which this hilltop sits, complete with arrangements of lights that look like smaller, dimmer, bluer renditions of the patterns of lights you see overflying a city at night. Between the two halves of this inside-out planet, suspended in midair by no discernible means, masses of vegetation float in enormous grey-green tangles.

In four places, the dimness of the sky is broken by a slash of light: two softly glowing vertical silver-white bars standing exactly opposite one another, and two diagonal lines of blazing gold running opposite one another at identical angles, as though the silver and the gold are two rings in some enormous cosmic gyroscope. Their light shines in on the floating jungles, whose green peripheries are therefore the best-lit objects in view.

"Remember when we were wondering if there was any other magic floating around. And when we found a neatly-wrapped bouquet of roses in one of these rooms."

"I guess there was some other magic floating around!"