Maud MendWell - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

The Threadlings of Frays End will tell you that you don't visit Maud MendWell's cottage...it visits you, usually on the coldest evening of the year, when the wind gets into your seams and you need the mending most. A corner you've taken a thousand times before, a cottage that was never there before. A farm lane that ends with a field...just not this evening.

Where Maud herself came from, nobody can say. That's the way with KnitWitches - they arrive already wrinkled, wise, and knitting, as though they were spun into the world mid-stitch. Ask her and she'll only smile and count her rows.

On the outside, her unkempt yard is filled with boxes of fabric, fizzing with MendMagic. Maud will tell you it’s all ‘messessary’. Flower boxes and hanging ivy adorn her walls and garden. A washing line runs from the corner of the house to a little birdhouse on a crooked pole - home to a wren named Weft who considers herself the keeper of the line. She calls the wind, chases off the RagPies who covet a bright thread for their nests, and acts as Maud's doorbell, greeting every visitor with a burst of song far too large for so small a bird.

Inside, Maud works by the glow of lantern-light, needles clicking a rhythm older than even the Elders can recall. She knits Memory into mittens so children never forget the way home, purls Spirit into socks so fisherman stay warm and dry, even if they fall in to dark waters, and interweaves Imagination into everything in between.

Knock twice on the door and leave a single, shiny button of indigo or azure. By morning something soft will be folded on your step. Something you didn't even realise you needed...but Maud did - a scarf, a cap, a cloak - smelling of wind and wonder.

Maud is counted among the solitary KnitWitches - those bound to no circle. The Clothborn Coven neither claims nor disowns its wanderers; the High KnitWitch, Noria NeedleNest, is said only to believe that "some threads are meant to run loose."

Weft may chase the RagPies off the washing line, but she has never managed to keep them off the roof. Wherever Maud's cottage is about to appear, a mischief of RagPies gets there first, gathering on the rooftops the evening before, drawn by the shiny buttons that callers leave on her step. By morning there is usually a single RagPie sitting on her chimney pot, as if it had been there all along. Maud has never minded. She says a RagPie on the chimney is the cottage's way of telling the neighbours it has arrived, and the Threadlings who know her have learned that when a mischief settles on the rooftops of a quiet lane, it is worth putting the kettle on.

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