The Lucent Lakes - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

Name: The Lucent Lakes Type: Region (lost) Location: At the bottom of the world, among the Forgotten Forests Core Threads: Imagination, Memory, and Spirit, woven together as nowhere else Notable Places (as they were): Lake Lucid, the island village of LoomLit, the great LightLoom, ClothWall Inhabitants (as they were): The villagers of LoomLit, the Blench family, the WishWisps Status: Lost. Wholly consumed by the Void. The Lucent Lakes cannot be visited Themes: Light, Community, Gratitude, Neglect, Loss

"Fewer lanterns this year. We tell ourselves it is only lanterns." -- Hobb HemHollow, ferryman of Lake Lucid, in a water-stained ferry log, the EverLasting Library. The pages after this entry have been blanked by the Void

The Lucent Lakes were once the brightest jewel of Threadbare: a chain of mirror-still waters at the bottom of the world, whose surfaces shone with the gathered light of Wisps, festivals, paper lanterns, and the laughter of long, unbroken evenings. They were the ancient home of the Wisps, and the home of the LoomLight Festival, to which all of Threadbare came once a year.

They are gone now. The Lucent Lakes were the first place in Threadbare to be lost to the Void, for it was here that the Void was born. Nothing of them can be reached, and no one who has gone looking for them has found anything but the dark. What survives of the Lakes survives only in memory: in the records of the EverLasting Library, some of them blanked by the Void, in the few objects carried away before the end, and in the stories Threadlings still tell of them.

The Lakes as They Were

At the bottom of the world, the sun never rose and never set. The Lucent Lakes lay in a long, soft twilight, and the only light came from the Wisps: mysterious glowing creatures of Hope and Possibility, who were more numerous and brighter here than anywhere else in Threadbare.

Lake Lucid was the largest and most majestic of the Lakes. From its waters rose a gentle island, and on the island stood the village of LoomLit, its glow shimmering across the ripples of the lake and into the sky like an aurora. Around it lay smaller isles, reached by ferry and fishing boat, and the still, luminous shallows where the lake plants grew.

The shores and ponds of the Lakes were thick with luminescent flowers: LanternLace, StarWeave, and ShimmerStitch, whose petals were laid on the water in ever-shifting mosaics of light. PatchScale Perch swam in the shallows. The villagers built their homes, navigated the waters, and even farmed their food by the light of the Wisps.

History

Some say LoomLit was where the first threads of the world trailed from: threads of light, of connection, and of care. Whether or not that is so, the Lucent Lakes were, for more generations than any record can count, a place where the Core Threads were woven together as nowhere else.

The villagers of LoomLit and the Wisps lived together in harmony, one society caring for the other. The Wisps gave their light, and in return the villagers protected them from the Wisp Trade: a brutish practice of capturing and draining Wisps through twisted instruments, wasting their precious wishes on coin and power. The most famous of the Lakes' defenders was Benevola Blench, who single-handedly held off the Wisp Traders at ClothWall, and is revered by villagers and Wisps alike in songs still sung in the Song Sanctuaries.

Once a year, the people and creatures of every region crossed the Lakes by boat, lanterns swinging from their prows, for the The LoomLight Festival: three nights of light, story, and song, in which nothing was bought or sold that could not be traded for a song, a story, a joke, or a smile. The Blench family kept the festival for generations, and the great LightLoom of LoomLit wove its light through every street.

The Fall of the Lakes

The Lucent Lakes were not destroyed in a single night. They were let go.

When the keeping of the LoomLight Festival passed to Bobbin Blench, it passed to a young man who would rather have been fishing. He hurried through the Hand Binding, stuffed the ancient luminous string into his fishing sack, and left the work of the festival undone. On the night it began, he was fishing from a quiet pier on a neighbouring isle. And in the bleak depths of Lake Lucid, a single stitch caught on the hook of his rod, pulled, and parted.

No one noticed. The festival came and went, a little dimmer than before. But the carelessness spread, year on year, from one keeper to a whole village. Stairs went unswept, gardens untended, songs unsung, stories untold. The Song Circles dwindled to one. The storytelling campfires were banned. The festival was ticketed, its streets closed and guarded, and signs went up across the island: Private Property - Keep Out. No Ball Games. No Sparklers. No Children. No Wisps.

All the while, beneath the placid surface of Lake Lucid, a shadow stirred and grew from that first parted stitch. Within ten years, a collective forgetting had taken hold of LoomLit. Its people forgot the names of their storytellers, the words of their songs, and at last the names of their neighbours. The library closed. Everything was measured in coin. Even the Wisps came to be viewed with suspicion, and so they left.

The Lakes descended into an almost eternal darkness. The water turned black, the earth vanished, and the air could no longer be breathed. So was born the Void.

The fullest account of the fall is Noria NeedleNest's The Legacy of Bobbin Blench.

What Remains

Nothing of the Lucent Lakes can be reached. Where they once lay, there is only the Void, and the long, frayed edge from which it has crept outward across Threadbare ever since. The Lakes are the first entry in every record of what the Void has taken.

What remains are fragments, carried away before the end or recovered from its edges:

  • The records. Accounts of the Lakes and the festival are kept in the EverLasting Library, some on shelves the Void has left blanked and half-empty, among them a child's festival diary whose last pages are blank.
  • The recovered things. A lantern lining stitched with the words "It is not the lantern that floats, child. It is the name within it.", drawn from the shallows of Lake Lucid. Buttons from lamplighters' coats, a few of which have found their way to Bree ButtonBoon.
  • The Wisps. They left the Lakes before the end, and now drift wherever there is still hope to be drifted on, dimmer and fewer than they were.
  • The remembering. At Frays End, the Elder Yearn sets a lantern on the water each evening, facing the far south where the Lakes once shone, and teaches that a place is only truly lost when no one is left who misses it.

Some Threadlings say that on the clearest nights, those who stand at the far southern edge of the Fraying and listen very carefully can hear faint music drifting out of the dark: the memory of a festival that refuses to fully fade. No one has ever followed it, and the Elders ask that no one try.

Narrative Function

The Lucent Lakes are never visited. They are learned about, remembered, and mourned. They are the origin of the Void, and Threadbare's clearest lesson in how it spreads: not through a monster or a tyrant, but through the slow accumulation of not bothering. The story of their fall is the worked example beneath Frith FrayWalker's Letter.

For contributors, the Lucent Lakes must not be used as a present-day setting for quests, levels or scenes. They can appear only through the past: recovered records, memories, artifacts, songs, and the stories of those who remember them. The Lakes' fate is also the reason the finale of the StoryWeaver's journey recreates the LoomLight Festival at Frays End, rather than returning to the place it began.

Connections