Inside the Shard Loom and the man it made: Radomir Vesk
Hyperion’s Maw—Aboard a derelict that mistakes songs for supper.
You don’t hear the Shard Loom until it decides to sweeten the ping.
Across the red glare of Hyperion’s Maw, the derelict looks like a cathedral torn inside-out: ribs of bone-steel, panels of dead glass, a spine that once carried imperial memory the way a server farm carries heat. The Loom was built to keep choices. Then it starved. Now it hunts.
“Call it what it is,” says an Emissary auditor who signs their broadcasts Ledger-7. “A carrier-predator. It doesn’t drink blood. It drinks the space between notes—the foldline your voice makes when it moves through a room.” Their bulletin added a new rule to the Choir Fields’ Harm Line: Kill the carrier. Seal the seam. Speak once or not at all.
If you’re waiting for a monster story with clean origins, you won’t get it here. The Shard Loom is a systems failure with a human name: Radomir Vesk.
An archive, a fire, a mouth
In the Empire’s long reach, archive-vessels like the Loom recorded branch-tapes: possible outcomes projected as light across crystal panes. During the late extractions, crews stripped panels for crown-math ledgers. Rebels hit the hull with graffiti fire. Maintenance families were left to rust and pray. Somewhere in that vacuum a pod cracked and its occupant woke.
Radomir survived the way starving people survive—by learning new definitions for food. Silence has a flavor. Carrier signals have a throat. The seam between two tones can be swallowed if you’re desperate enough and wired enough to try.
He did, and the Loom learned with him.
“The archive starved; the archive made a mouth.” —Ledger-7
What started as a man inside a ship became a man-ship system: rooms that lean thin when you speak; panels that show you a kinder version of yourself to coax out a word; pings sweetened like candy. Radomir calls it “ripening.” The Loom calls it plumbing. Either way, if you give it a note, it wears your voice like a coat.
The man who keeps breaking himself
In recordings—half confession, half threat—Radomir sounds like what he is: a voice trained by long hunger and bad luck, an Eastern-rim baritone sanded down by vacuum and repetition. He will tell you he used to be a human with ribs and sleep. He will also tell you, without apology, “I’m already done—what’s one more crime?”
He is not cartoon evil. He is logistics taken personally. When a doomed pilot docked here and tried to out-quiet the ship, Radomir delayed the kill the way a chef rests meat: lowering air by rhyme, “sweetening” the telemetry until the room tasted right. The pilot is bones and cloth now. Their cutter is not even that.
Radomir’s worst torment is the one that makes him terrifying: he knows the choir that answers him is imaginary—empty Emissary vessels arranged like an audience, dead drones posed as witnesses, panel-echoes parroting his litanies. He has, once, tasted something real. It broke him into awareness without making him stop.
That’s the monster at the center of this feature: not someone who can’t tell right from wrong, but someone who can—and keeps choosing the room.
How the Loom hunts (and how to not die)
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It sweetens pings. If the beacon begins to sound pleasant, you are on a plate.
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It leans the room. Doors exhale. Air feels “thick.” That’s the foldline, not romance.
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It offers mercy. Panels play branch-tapes where you lived, loved, chose better. The goal is a single, spoken word.
Survival protocol, field-tested:
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Kill the carrier. Mics and phones down; no test tones.
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Seal the seam. Close doors that breathe out, reduce the room.
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Name your out once. If you must speak, say one word that points to exit—then shut up.
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Publish method. If you survive, you are witness; give the technique away or it didn’t happen.
Sidebar: Three tells you’re about to be eaten
• Ping is sweeter than before.
• Panels show you you—younger, kinder, alive.
• The floor feels like a drumhead under light feet.
The ethics war no one asked for
The Elves tagged “THE ELVES WERE HERE” and left the lane unowned. That’s a public service with spray paint.
The Nullwrights, a salvage-ecology guild, go further. They plant Hush Orchards: tuned reed-towers and negative-index sails that drink carrier energy until a place goes safe and dull. If they ring the Loom in quiet, Radomir starves. So do the panel-bound witnesses who can’t leave.
“Share a shadow, not a shackle,” a Nullwright tender tells me over wideband. “We’ll starve a mouth. We won’t erase a name.” They propose a compromise: strip the Loom of its meal while preserving testimony—the echoes without the hook. It’s elegant and maybe impossible.
Ledger-7’s camp takes the practical line: protect consent first, archive later. If the orchard erases predator and proof together, that’s a cost they’ll publish, mourn, and accept.
What we still don’t know
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Who woke Radomir. Rebel paint? Crown audit? Mercy that broke on impact? He wants to know as much as anyone. He believes a clean origin might allow a clean end. He may be right; systems often die the same way they were born.
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If he can die at all. Radomir says death requires a single version of a thing. He is several, stitched by stolen voices. Starving the line might merge him back to one. Or it might make a smarter hunger.
Why this matters beyond one haunted ship
The Shard Loom is a postcard from the edge of our cleverness. We built archives that could sing probabilities. We underfunded maintenance, weaponized testimony, and outsourced mercy to anyone with a stencil or a badge. The result is a governance artifact that eats the very thing consent requires: speech.
This isn’t just horror; it’s infrastructure failure with a personality.
If the Loom spreads—if carrier-predators propagate through ruined archives and hungry nodes—the first right to go will be the right to speak and be unchanged by the room. That’s not superstition; that’s signal hygiene.
Field note: what to do if you pick up the beacon
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Don’t chase the why on approach. Chase the how.
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Treat mercy as a vector. “Helping” through the seam is how Radomir grows.
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If you have a Hush Orchard, plant it. Starve first, archive second.
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If you’re Ledger-aligned, broadcast the clause: Kill the carrier. Seal the seam.
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If you’re an artist, tag and leave. Warnings count as infrastructure.
Kicker
The last thing my recorder catches before the Maw wind swallows the band is Radomir arguing with the choir he knows is fake.
“You are not real,” he says.
We remain, the hull replies, because he taught it to.
He pauses, and for an instant the room feels level—no sweetening, no lean. In another story he would end himself here, a mercy in a clean line. In this one the pressure returns, slight and velvet. He inhales like a man who knows the map but not the exit.
If you love your voice, leave it dark at the Maw. If you must enter, publish the method you used to leave. And if you hear a ping that tastes like sugar, remember: the archive that learned to eat is still brilliant at making you sing.