Through and across the rolling dunes of the planet Altar run threads of powder blue.

For those that live on the world, they are an unavoidable and unsolved mystery,

an always present flourish of color and texture that complicates the palette of the otherwise

orange-brown planet.

The threads are a conversation starter, a common excuse for tardiness and a validiction too.

See you by the threads people say as they leave work or depart from their friends for the evening.

Apologies, you might tell your parents,

I didn't mean to miss dinner. I just got caught up in the threads.

Like satin vines, they climb the Adobe walls of the sanctum of versatility and

crawl across the sacred paths in the Garden of Fidelity. In the Cathedral of

Descent they hang in long arcs from the rafters, a woven

sky above the grounds overturned pews, broken candles, and ever- burning hymnals.

In a temple of black marble and gold flourish,

a fraying twist of yarn stumbles its way into a closed briefcase,

seated on a glass lectern, and from its opposite side emerges a singular

strand of the same soft color, smooth and righteous.

Among the many faithful of Altar, the threads are not only a mystery in the common sense,

but in the Holy One as well.

If a common desire for their parish divines had beckoned the reliquaries to alter, then perhaps these threads in all their forms were the response to devout prayer too.

And so, driven partly by intellectual interest and partly by spiritual need, people began to follow the threats.

Now, after a year of intense study, concluding with a joint expedition between the waking cadent and show

salon's temple of the lost, this impulse was proven correct.

...