There was a little boy whose heart was solely consumed with love for
the handmaiden of the shadow weaver: a girl with high cheek bones and
skin as soft and pale as moonlight. All men desired her, for she
exuded the dark fires of the abyss, and yet for the same reason they
feared her and, unable to possess her, they shunned her and called her
'abomination'. But though her heart reflected the icy depths of her
eyes, she did love the little boy, and with words unspoken did they
confess their undying dreams of affection for one another at the
dissolution of the year. 

Thereafter, the heart of the little boy
was shaken between the matchless joy of losing one's self in
enamourment and the insufferable sorrow of a love apart. He longed to
go to the fair young girl, peering through his window into the
blackness of the night, the sky through bare tree branches becoming
her dark hair, the moon her pale face. But the boy was the orphaned
apprentice to a tailor to the king, and while when they met he wore a
paper collar and robes of state, these he cobbled together from scraps
swept from the floor of the tailor's shop.  To court her properly, he
would need manifest a star encased in glass, an artefact made only by
gnomes who had fallen out of living memory into myth, and whose worth
was the price of a kingdom.  Still, the boy saved his pennies in hopes
of this dream, and threw himself into his work, weaving cloth so fine
that one could not mark the individual threads in vain wish that the
tailor would see what he had wrought and reward him for his craft.

But the tailor did not like orphans, and took them in only because he
believed it to make him a better person to play part in the salvage of
the refuse of humanity.  The boy in particularly he disliked, for he would not
marvel at the gentry as was the thing to do, and perhaps he sensed
that the little boy held something in his heart which in his greater
years he still could not grasp.  So the tailor relegated
to the journeyman the task of the boy. He set upon the apprentice the
mending of socks, a chore normally reserved for the blind and other
invalids, and his penny stipend was held.  

But the boy did not give up hope.
Against fear and despair, every night the boy looked out upon the moon
and listened to the ravens as they carried threads of his heart to her,
and of hers to him, weaving over the night sky in insubstantial
wishes, and when the moon was dark then most went his thoughts to her,
the depths of her abyss to which he longed to fall and never return.