Loom-Cutters of the Given-Over Warp — an age of a high mountain silk-terrace guild whose grand tapestries are woven on a colossal vertical loom strung across a wind-gorge, the warp-threads themselves anchored to the far cliff so the finished cloth spans the gap like a bridge of woven light; the Loom-Cutter is the one who rides the completed weft, harnessed to the loom's top-beam by a single waxed silk cord she has kept dead-taut through the whole weaving, her craft to HOLD the beam-line steady against the gorge-updraft that boils through the warp — but the rite's true secret is the appointed cut at the finishing-knot, when she severs the last warp-anchor with the shears at her belt and the up-draft catches the loosed cloth and lifts both the tapestry and the harnessed weaver clear of the beam, and this Cutter is caught in the first three heartbeats of the going-with, no longer bracing at the beam but rising through the gorge on her own finished weaving, learning that the wind she fought the whole season was carrying her up into the sky she wove