"She has the weaver's hands," my mother used to tell people. She would say it proudly – holding out my hands for the family to see, and people would nod approvingly. I did have weaver's hands, they agreed; long fingers, dexterous, and even as a very young child I worked hard with little details, and was gentle with delicate things.

My grandmother wasn't so easily convinced. She stared this way and that at my hands, turning them over, splaying the fingers, pulling at each one. Then she would stare long and hard into my eyes. Her answer was always the same: "maybe next year."

It always seemed to break my mother's heart. She would wander around the house for days afterward, scrubbing anything that I might touch so it would be clean. Consequently she would make sure I washed my hands over and over, convinced they were never clean enough.

I loved my mother very much, and I would do whatever she wanted. I washed my hands, and tried never to touch anything dirty, and listened when she babbled about my hands. I was very young, of course, so I don't remember much, but I remember that I loved my mother very much, and my mother loved my hands.

My mother was more and more insistent every year that I had weaver's hands, and my grandmother's insistence that I wasn't ready yet seemed to make her more unhinged every day.

There was one day – it was in March, and I remember it was very cold, and I was excited for my seventh birthday the next month. We had a big fireplace in my house, and there was always a roaring fire in the hearth. We had just come back from seeing my grandmother – eighth time in the last year – and she had rejected my hands again.

My mom made me wash my hands over and over and over that day, until the knuckles on one hand – my left hand – started to bleed. I tried to hide it – because I loved my mother, and I didn't want her to be upset – but she saw it anyway.

She started screaming, and crying, and apologizing. She ran to the kitchen, and I thought she was going to get our little first aid kit, so I waited by the fire. I didn't want her to worry; I just wanted her to be happy.

I loved my mother very much.

She came back from the kitchen with the biggest knife we owned. She told me to hold very still, and it was a sharp knife, and it wouldn't hurt bad. And she cut off my left hand, and threw it in the fire.

I loved my mother.

I cried and screamed and wailed, obviously, and she held me and tried to comfort me as best she could. I don't think she meant to hurt me. I think she was trying to help me the only way she knew how – by keeping her daughter's hands perfect.

She wrapped up the stump as tightly as she could, and we went to a hospital, leaving my hand to burn in the huge hearth fire. My mother was obviously arrested as soon as we got to the hospital, and the nurses realized what must have happened.

I wasn't there when she was arrested – I was getting my stump fixed up in an operating room by some very confused doctors. They hadn't seen a mother cut off her own daughter's hand before.

My grandmother came to see me after I woke up, and explained that my mother had gone away to get better. The wizened old woman examined my hand carefully. She examined the stump in the middle of my left forearm. She stared into my eyes.

She nodded.

"Now you will be a Weaver."

And so I went to live with my grandmother after I got out of the hospital. I'm not sure that's where I was supposed to go, but that's where I went.

My grandmother lived in a very small house, and there were weaving supplies everywhere – I'm not joking, the stuff occupied every drawer and surface in that little mountain cottage. I could only assume at the time that she sold the tapestries and rugs and placemats she made for income, but they never seemed to go anywhere. They just took up more and more space. To give you an idea of how many there were, I had to sit on a pile of them to watch my grandmother weave in the one remaining chair that sat in front of her huge standing loom. There was a couch somewhere under the stack of tapestries, but I had to sit on the stack because the couch wasn't visible anymore.

I never got what would be considered expensive prosthetics. My grandmother always made sure the plastic hand was appropriately scaled to my growing size, but my repeated requests for a functioning replacement were turned down every time.

"It will make you lazy," she would chide, "and blind you to the Weaver's trade." I would try to argue that I needed two hands to be a weaver, but she just shook her head. My grandmother made that excuse about everything I wanted to do – go play games with friends, wear fun colors, do anything besides eat, sleep, go to school, and work with the lap-loom.

Oh, how I hated that thing.

"This is how all women in our family have learned to weave and so will you," my grandmother always said, right after I complained. You see, it's very difficult to operate a loom with only one hand. My stumpy arm could brace it ok, but operating the pieces was difficult. I won't go into it right now, but just assume that a dexterous activity like weaving usually involves the full use of both hands.

But, at eight years old, I wove the first placemat that met my grandmother's approval. I remember it had a blue warp, and a purple weft, so it kind of looked like a different color if you held it at an angle. My grandmother held it up to the light, her eyes glittered a little, and she smiled.

It was the first smile I remember seeing.

"Good," she had said, "now make me seven more. The table needs to match."

A/N: Hi everyone! I imagine the only people who will read this are already reading Parts 1 and 2 of the Chronicles of Conversion. This is short, yes, but I wanted it to just get the story started, and as a placeholder for the last part of the trilogy. This will be updated not too frequently, I imagine, until Part 2 is done, otherwise it will give too much away.

Thanks for reading!