The Eternal Loom - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

The Eternal Loom is the slow, breathing heart of all creation - an ancient mechanism of beams, shuttles, and threads beyond counting, housed at the centre of Frays End. It is older than any record and stranger than any blueprint; some Elders insist it was not built so much as discovered. Upon its frame, Memory, Imagination, and Spirit are still being woven, and any story rediscovered in Threadbare returns here to be stitched back into the world. The Elders tend it day and night, their hands moving from habit and love. But the Loom requires more than hands. It requires stories. And stories require StoryWeavers.

The Loom of the FirstSpun

The Eternal Loom is the loom of the FirstSpun, once called the First Loom. On it, If, Once and Ever wove the Great Weave itself (see [The Great Weaving]]), and then life upon it: first [Knot, the only Elder woven by all three of them, and in time the nine Elders who came after. It was made with three elements, one gift from each of the FirstSpun: If's Spindle, which spins new thread out of nothing; Once's Warp Stones, which set new threads in place; and Ever's Shuttle, which carries each thread across and binds it to last.

The FirstSpun sent the Loom down to Threadbare with Knot, to continue the creation of the world, and from then on it was called the Eternal Loom. The Loom is powered by stories, and it works almost on its own. Every new story told anywhere in the world became new thread, and the Loom wove it into new life: new creatures, new peoples, new customs and whole new lands. The Song Sanctuaries were woven on it from a single new story.

Abandoned

When Knot discovered the Song Sanctuaries, they could not bear it. In the first of the Three Denials, Knot refused to weave another new thing, became Not, and abandoned the Loom (see The Undoing of Knot). But the Loom, powered by stories, went on weaving without them. For thousands of years the world grew, and grew worn, until it was threadbare.

In time, seeing that Knot no longer kept the world, the FirstSpun sent the nine Elders into the world, and three of them were set apart to keep the Loom and carry on its work: the LoomWardens, Keepers of the Eternal Loom - Whim for Imagination, Echo for Memory, and Vigil for Spirit.

The Theft of the Elements

Thousands of years later, the birth of the Void at LoomLit woke Null in the Interstice. Null returned to Frays End and stole the Loom's three elements, and from them built the three Denial Looms. How Null took them from under the LoomWardens' hands is a wound the LoomWardens do not speak of.

Mending, Not Making

Without its elements, the Loom can still mend. When an old story is found and brought back to it, the Loom stitches it back into the world, the world is healed, and the Void is held back. But it cannot renew. Nothing new is woven, nothing is reinvented, and the world no longer grows. The Loom is tended by all the Elders, and three makeshift sockets in its frame, patched by the LoomWardens, show where its elements once sat.

In the Threadbare Plot, the StoryWeaver destroys Null's three Denial Looms and brings the elements home. When all three are back in the Eternal Loom, it is whole again, and for the first time since Null's theft it weaves something new.

Connections

  • The Elders - the Elders of the Eternal Loom
  • Whim - LoomWarden of Imagination, child of If
  • Echo - LoomWarden of Memory, child of Once
  • Vigil - LoomWarden of Spirit, child of Ever
  • Frays End - the last bastion of hope against the Void
  • The EverLasting Library - the eternal repository of story at Frays End
  • Threadbare Plot - the main story of the game
  • Null - the Dark Elder, who abandoned the Loom and later stole its elements
  • The Denial Looms - the three looms Null built from the stolen elements

Resources

Images

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Audio and source files