The Denial Looms - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

Also known as: Null's Looms Type: Looms Built by: Null Made from: The three elements stolen from The Eternal Loom: If's Spindle, Once's Warp Stones and Ever's Shuttle Status: Active, hidden across Threadbare

"Not, for nothing new. None, for nothing remains. Never, for nothing lasts. And so, Null." -- The Tenets of Null

Overview

The Denial Looms are the three looms Null built from the elements they stole from the Eternal Loom. Each is a twisted copy of the Eternal Loom, built around a single stolen element, and each is named for one of Null's Three Denials: the Not Loom, the None Loom and the Never Loom. Each weaves one of the three great kinds of The Fray, and Null hid each one in a fortress of its own, one in the Ink Well and two in the Remnant Realms, so that together they would spread the Void faster than it could ever spread by neglect alone.

Denial Loom FirstSpun Stolen Element Creatures Region Hidden Fortress
The Not Loom [If]] ](/endlessm/threadbare/wiki/If's-Spindle- -[InkDrinkers) and [Smudgers]] The BlotWorks
The None Loom [Once]] ](/endlessm/threadbare/wiki/Once's-Warp-Stones- -[[MemoryMoths) [The Remnant Realms]] (the Memoir Mines) ](/endlessm/threadbare/wiki/[[The-Keepsake)
The Never Loom [Ever]] ](/endlessm/threadbare/wiki/Ever's-Shuttle- -[[Storyvores) [The SunSpun Sands]] ](/endlessm/threadbare/wiki/[[The-Lost-Library)

How the Looms Were Made

When Knot made the first Denial and became Not, they abandoned the Eternal Loom, but left it whole. Thousands of years later, after the third Denial and the long exile in the Interstice, the birth of the Void at LoomLit woke Null, and Null found their purpose: not to stop the world growing, but to unmake it. Null returned to Frays End and stole the three elements from the Eternal Loom, so that it could never weave anything new again.

On the Eternal Loom, the three elements had worked together, spinning new thread, setting it in place and binding it to last. Null split them apart. Each Denial Loom has only one element, and each does only one thing, turned against the gift it came from. The Spindle that once spun every new idea now spins only hunger for ideas. The Warp Stones that once held every memory in place now hold only forgetting. The Shuttle that once carried every thread onward now carries only endings. Null weaves from the last loose fibres that drift at the edge of the Fraying, the threads the world has almost let go.

Each Loom is hidden where its Denial already feels at home. Not hides in the Ink Well, where every new word in Threadbare begins. None hides in the Remnant Realms, the remains of a whole people, beneath the fallen city in the Forgotten Village deep in the Memoir Mines, among a people forgotten so completely that no one would think to look. Never hides in the deep desert of the SunSpun Sands, in the Lost Library, a library of endings that the shifting dunes bury and uncover, where nothing is allowed to last.

The Not Loom: The BlotWorks

Main article: The BlotWorks

Element: If's Spindle. Creatures: InkDrinkers and Smudgers. Region: the Ink Well.

The BlotWorks is a vast ink extraction rig, built by Null deep in the swamp of the Ink Well, far beyond the punt routes and the InkKeepers' Keeps, where the mangroves close overhead and the black water goes perfectly still. Reaching it is a long and arduous journey that few ordinary Threadlings would ever attempt. The InkKeepers call it the Black Mill, and do not like to say even that too loudly.

The BlotWorks rises out of the ink on iron stilts blackened by ink, a grim echo of the InkKeepers' own stilt-houses. It is a place of catwalks, gantries and ladders; of pipes, thick and dented and sweating ink at every joint; of levers, valves, stopcocks and pressure gauges whose needles never rest. Pump jacks shaped like giant dip pens nod endlessly into the swamp, and pipelines snake out from the rig across the swamp to every spring they can reach. Waste pipes spew bright splashes of hollow ink across the reeds. Everything is blue, purple and blue-black, slick with an oily sheen. The rig is never quiet: it clanks, hisses and groans, ink bubbles in its pipes and drips from every rail, and over it all comes the whine of InkDrinkers.

Null built the BlotWorks to drain the Ink Well and pull out its Inklings, so that no new idea could ever reach a page. It is Not made into machinery. Pumps draw the ink up from the swamp. Separators spin the Inklings out of it. The Inklings are locked away in holding vats, where, with no ideas to feed them, they slowly grow dull and fall asleep. The drained ink is carried to the top of the Blotted Spire, the rig's great derrick, where it pours over the InkWheel, a great wheel built like a water wheel, which drives the Not Loom. The Not Loom spins If's Spindle into InkDrinkers, and the InkDrinkers fly out across Threadbare, drain pages, and carry the ink and its Inklings back to the BlotWorks. That is where the Inklings go.

The Blotted Spire is the final climb. It is built like a giant fountain pen, nib-up, its barrel the tower and its split nib the summit, in layers of wet and dry ink set like dripping wax, in bands of indigo, violet and blue-black. Its walls are covered in writing: sigils, scribbles and symbols that no one can read, many of them redacted under heavy black bars.

The route.

  1. The Wellhead. The stilt approach, beneath the nodding pump jacks, where InkDrinker swarms first rise to meet the StoryWeaver.
  2. The Pump Deck. Timing puzzles across moving pump arms and pistons.
  3. The Separators. Halls of great spinning drums that pull the Inklings out of the ink.
  4. The Holding Vats. A vast tank farm glowing faintly with captured Inklings, and the greatest rescue in the BlotWorks.
  5. The Pressure Hall. The pipework heart of the rig. Smudgers breed in the sludge sumps below.
  6. The Blotted Spire. The final climb, through the Barrel, the Feed, the Drip Gallery and the Crossed-Out Hall, to the InkWheel, the Not Loom and the guardian.

The StoryWeaver's tools. The InkKeepers give the StoryWeaver two tools for the journey: ink, to write and draw things into existence, and clean water in stoppered bottles, to wash away redactions and drive off Smudgers.

Rescuing the Inklings. The StoryWeaver must rescue the captured Inklings from the holding vats, guiding them through a piping puzzle of pipes, valves, separators and filters to BookWorm Portals that carry them home. Every Inkling freed makes the StoryWeaver's ink stronger. See The BlotWorks for the gameplay notes.

The guardian is the BlotQueen, a huge, bloated InkDrinker coiled around the InkWheel, with many ink-spitting trunks. She fires single drops of ink or holds whole lines of ink across her chamber, and her ink stays in sticky puddles that slow the StoryWeaver down, so the grapple is the best way to keep moving. She cannot be beaten by force, only diluted. As she thins, she moves from the pool to the feed channels to the nib slit, changing her tactics each time. When she runs clear, all the stolen ink pours out of her and back into the swamp, the coloured springs at the swamp's edge run again, and she shrinks to an ordinary InkDrinker and whines away into the mist. The InkWheel slows and stops.

The None Loom: The Keepsake

Main article: The Keepsake

Element: Once's Warp Stones. Creatures: MemoryMoths. Region: the Remnant Realms (the Memoir Mines).

The Keepsake is a ruined watchtower at the heart of the Forgotten Village, deep in the Memoir Mines beneath the Remnant Realms. Its great lantern once lit the village and sent its beam down every tunnel to guide the Delvers home, and its bell called the start and end of each shift. The Delvers called it the Keepsake because it kept them. When the village was forgotten twice over, the lantern went out and the bell fell silent. The village's gates stayed sealed for as long as its name was lost, and so Null hid the None Loom in the one place no one would ever think to look. Its stairs have fallen away, its floors are cracked open, and the LanternLichen on the village walls has gone dark.

The None Loom stands in the watch room, its Warp Stones fixing every fibre into a forgetting, and the MemoryMoths that come from it swarm the village. Many kinds of moth are woven here, each with its own colour and habits (see MemoryMoths). All of them are drawn to light, and all of them are scattered by the ring of a bell.

Finding the Keepsake. The StoryWeaver restores the village's name by retelling the stories of its people, matching names to deeds and places, and its gates open. They climb the Keepsake floor by floor, relighting its Glims to sneak past or fight the moths on each landing.

Light and bell. Glims are the small lanterns of the Delvers. A moth circling a lit Glim is dazzled and weakened, so the StoryWeaver can slip past in the dark, or strike while the moths are weak. Glims burn out quickly and must be relit, so every route is a choice of which to light, and when. The Keepsake's bell scatters moths and weakens them for a time.

Allies. Pell PealKeeper, the last keeper of the Keepsake, has forgotten almost everything, but she remembers the order in which its lights were lit, and hums the old shift peal. The mysterious Musician turns up where least expected, with a hint.

The guardian is Murmur, a swarm of thousands of small MemoryMoths moving as one, gathering into a whirlwind that throws the StoryWeaver, a hammer that squashes them, or a giant moth that slashes at them. In Moth to a Flame, each time the StoryWeaver relights the great lantern, Murmur is dazzled and weakened, and they can strike. The bell breaks her apart, and the Glims around the watch room draw parts of the swarm away, making her smaller and weaker. When every light burns at once and the old shift peal rings out, Murmur can no longer hold together, and scatters into ordinary MemoryMoths that drift away into the tunnels. One by one, the LanternLichen on the village walls glows gold again.

The Never Loom: The Lost Library

Main article: The Lost Library

Element: Ever's Shuttle. Creatures: Storyvores. Region: the SunSpun Sands.

The Lost Library lies half-buried in the deep desert of the SunSpun Sands, far beyond the Performance Playa, where no road runs. The dunes shift around it, burying one wing and uncovering another, so that almost no one who goes looking for it ever finds it. Only the Obscurists know the way, and their caravans, loaded with stolen endings, cross the desert and vanish into it. The StoryWeaver finds it with a map from Rook RagRavel, and fights their way through it, room by room and level by level.

It is a ruin: its great dome half fallen in, its halls filled with drifted sand. Many of its shelves hold only empty covers, spines with nothing inside, eaten hollow by Storyvores. The books that remain are written in a script no one can read. Inside, the Obscurists have piled the last pages they tear from books across Threadbare: a library of endings no one is allowed to read.

The Never Loom stands in the great reading room. With every pass, Ever's Shuttle carries another ending across its warp, so that every story near it stops short. Storyvores of every kind, Gnashers, Nippers, Gulpers, Bloaters and Gobblers, spill from the Library's broken windows and out across the Sands, and defend the Library against all comers. Beneath it, coiled in the bedrock under the sand, lies a BookWorm, still waiting for an ending.

The guardian is BookBelly, a giant, three-headed Storyvore, swollen with every ending in the Library. Its three heads, Mash, Gnash and Lash, each hunger for a different kind of story: spoken, written and pictured. As the fight goes on it chews through the shelves, and the Library breaks apart around the StoryWeaver. Grappling between what still stands, the StoryWeaver gathers last pages from the Obscurists' piles and turns each ending against the head that hungers for it, because a Storyvore cannot bear a tale told all the way to its end. Last of all, they piece together the Library's own story, and finish it. BookBelly unravels, and every book it swallowed spills out in a great pile on the floor of the reading room, to be returned to their rightful place in the HemsHollow Lending Library. The finished story wakes the BookWorm, which opens a WormHole straight home to the EverLasting Library in Frays End.

The Denial Looms and the StoryWeaver

In the Threadbare Plot, each Denial Loom is the goal of one of the three arcs of Act Two. Guided by a LoomWarden, the StoryWeaver must find each Loom's hidden fortress through a journey across Threadbare, defeat the guardian waiting there, destroy the Loom, and carry its element home to the Eternal Loom. When all three are destroyed and all three elements are home, the Eternal Loom is whole again, and can weave something new for the first time since Null stole its elements.

For Contributors

  • Each Loom is a Denial made into a place. The BlotWorks is thirsty and mechanical, the Keepsake is dark and forgetting, and the Lost Library is all endings. Scenes set in or near a fortress should feel like the Denial it serves.
  • Each Loom weaves one kind of Fray. InkDrinkers and Smudgers come from the Not Loom, MemoryMoths from the None Loom and Storyvores from the Never Loom.
  • Each fortress has its own tools. Ink, water and Inkling rescue in the BlotWorks, light and the bell in the Keepsake, and precision grappling in the Lost Library.
  • A Loom can be destroyed. Null cannot. Destroying a Denial Loom unravels it back to loose fibre and frees its element. The Fray it wove, guardians included, can be driven off and outwitted, but never cruelly harmed. See Content Guidelines.

Connections

Resources

Images

TBC

Audio and source files

TBC