Story Outline

The story opens on a small garden where a girl is tying candles between trees using woolen threads, suspending them so they hang in the air. When she finishes and steps back, the perspective shifts into her imagination. The candles are no longer tied to anything. They float and drift all around her, and she moves among them, playing in the warm light they cast.

But the candles begin to melt. Slowly at first, then faster, the world around her dissolves in wax. She looks for a way out but the melting closes in from every side. The world she built fades to black. This represents the loss of her family.

The girl wakes up in a white, empty world with no texture or sense of place. She gets up, looks around, and begins walking in one direction. In the distance she spots something and moves toward it: a dense tangle of grey threads forming a barrier. When she reaches out to touch it, it pushes her back. She tries again and is pushed away again. There is no way through.

With nowhere else to go, she turns and walks the other way into cold, empty space that is difficult to move through. Then she spots a single woolen thread lying on the ground, stretching ahead of her. It is the only warm thing in this world and she follows it.

As she walks, objects begin to appear around her, floating at strange heights and in odd sizes. A doll, a cup, a picture frame on the ground. Things she recognizes but that feel distorted and out of proportion. She keeps following the thread until it disappears underneath a pile of rubble.

She cannot figure out how to move the rubble, so she looks around at what else is nearby. She finds a second barrier of threads, this one not pushing her away but still not letting her through. On the other side she can see a blue tin of Danish cookies. Looking more carefully at the threads, she finds they are all part of one connected system: tied to the rubble and to an upside down television hanging above. She finds a piece of ceramic and uses it to cut through the threads. Everything shifts at once: the rubble moves away from the yellow thread and the tin becomes reachable. She opens it eagerly but finds only knitting materials inside.

The knitting materials remind her of the doll she found earlier. She goes back toward it and notices on the way that the rubble has fully cleared from the yellow thread, revealing a woolen sweater beneath it. She puts it on. It is warm and it feels familiar in a way nothing else here has. She picks up the doll and is about to start repairing it with the knitting materials when a cloud of smoke appears from behind her. She does not know what it is but she runs from it instinctively. The smoke follows. Running without looking where she is going, she reaches the edge of a cliff and falls. Her sleeve catches on a branch on the way down. She disappears below and we are left looking at the branch with the torn sleeve hanging from it.

She lands in a grey forest. The trees are still and coated in wax. She looks up and can see her torn sleeve hanging from a branch above, out of reach. Unlike the world before, this one reacts to her presence. Each step she takes causes the wax on the nearby trees to recede and wool to grow in its place, bringing color and warmth back into them.

Deeper in the forest she comes across a wax statue. The ground around it stays cold and does not react to her the way the rest of the forest does. She looks at it for a moment, feeling cold and unsettled, then moves on.

A rustling sound draws her into the trees where she finds a woolen ball with its thread caught around a trunk, struggling to get free. She carefully untangles it. The ball moves around her gratefully and stays close, becoming her companion. She leads it back to the tree where her sleeve is caught and points up at it. The woolen ball flies up and brings the sleeve back down to her.

With the sleeve recovered and the knitting materials she already has, she looks for a good place to work. She finds a wide open field and uses a paper pattern she has been carrying to warp the space around her into a loom. She mends the sleeve back onto the sweater. By the end of it the woolen ball has become threaded into the sweater, connected to it. She sits down in the field to rest. The comic pauses briefly to show the wax statue back in the forest, unchanged.

Before she can fall asleep, a fire breaks out around her. She tries to control it the way she has been shaping the rest of this world, but nothing happens. The fire does not respond to her at all. It is the first time her presence has had no effect. With no other option she runs, and the scene deliberately echoes the chase from the previous chapter. She runs until she reaches a vast open edge. Across from her she can see waterfalls of wool, but between her and them is a wide sea of wax. She stands at the edge looking at it. This is where the chapter ends.

She dives into the wax sea. As she sinks, the wax around her slowly softens and begins to transform into wool. Objects from her memories drift past her one by one: the doll, the cup, pieces of her house. The last thing to appear is the picture frame from the first chapter, now close enough to see clearly for the first time. Inside it are her parents.

She surfaces back in the white world from the beginning of the story. She still has her repaired sweater and her woolen ball. She walks back to the grey thread barrier she could not pass through at the start and reaches it again. This time the threads part and let her through. On the other side is a completely empty space: no ground, no sky, nothing at all. The woolen ball understands that this is where it must say goodbye. The only way forward from here is to let go.