The Four Profound Weaves is R. B. Lemberg’s first printed novella set Birdverse, a setting they describe as “an LGBTQIA+-focused secondary world with a Bird deity.” Since I rarely read isolated short stories, I was excited for this novella to serve as my introduction to their writing, and this world. The story brims with strange magics, the most central being the eponymous four profound weaves, magical tapestries created from wind, sand, hope, and death. We follow two elderly trans protagonists who together journey to find a master weaver, one in order to finish learning the skills of the weaves, and the other in search of a new name post-transition.⁣
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My expectation from the description of the world as “LGBTQIA+-focused” was that this would be a world where queer and trans characters were completely accepted and commonplace, however that wasn’t exactly the case. Instead, the Birdverse is a complex world with multiple different cultures with their own norms regarding gender, sexuality, and family composition. Although it was heartbreaking that the characters in this world deal with transphobia (I’m not sure about homophobia, which was not on the page in this story), Lemberg’s decision to feature this diversity within their world was ultimately a better choice in my opinion, and it gives them space to explore stories of characters who face challenges both mirroring those in our world and completely different. One of the central arcs of this novella was one of the characters grappling with his recent transition after a life spent coercively remaining his birth gender, and my favorite parts of the story included how he explored his complex feelings about his change, how to now relate to his family, and how to forgive his late partner who for years discouraged him from transitioning.⁣
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For me, this novella served as a great introduction to Lemberg’s setting, with intriguing worldbuilding and a pair of great characters. The story was a little plodding at times, one relevant issue being that I have a personal quirk where I dislike stories with a lot of traveling for some reason. Also I’m not sure how much I felt that the two protagonists were truly in their sixties, a fact which I kept forgetting and grating against whenever I was reminded by the text. It felt like they had a lot of backstory about when they were young people and then didn’t do much for many intervening years, which lessened the weight of their supposed age. I was glad though that I didn’t feel lost at all for having read no previous stories in their Birdverse repertoire, but I’m probably not intrigued enough to start digging into their short fiction at this time, mostly because short stories aren’t my favorite unless they’re already collected into a larger volume, but I’d definitely buy a Birdverse short story collection whenever such a thing exists. The book itself is super beautiful, and I especially loved the illustrations within its pages.