The Memoir Mines - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

The Memoir Mines burrow deep beneath the bones of Threadbare - a labyrinth of tunnels gouged in pursuit of memory itself. Each shaft was once a person's life, dug out story by story, each chamber a year, each glittering vein a remembered face. Now the lanterns are dim, and the mines echo only in fragments: a lullaby with no singer, the smell of a meal no one cooked, the name of a friend lost to the dark. The MemoryMoths, Children of Null, flit between the tunnels on book-page wings, feeding on the brightest shards before any StoryWeaver can carry them back up to the surface.

At a Glance


Type	Region (underground)
Location	Deep beneath the world, its main entrance below LinenVille, its oldest shafts in the rock of The Remnant Realms
Core Thread	Memory
Patron	Once
Residents	The Delvers, miners of memory; MemoryMoths
Fortress	The Keepsake, in the Forgotten Village beneath the Remnant Realms, home of the None Loom
Notable places	The Upper Galleries, the Lantern Rows, the Forgotten Village, the Deep Seams
Themes	Memory, Loss, Remembrance, Neglect, Recovery

The Shape of the Mines

The Mines run down in three great layers, and every layer is older than the one above it.

The Upper Galleries

The youngest tunnels, closest to the light, where each chamber holds a single year of someone's life. Here the veins are bright and the memories are recent: a first day at school, a wedding dance, a pie that went wrong. The Upper Galleries were busy once, full of Delvers coming and going with lanterns and baskets, and LinenVille's own folded histories began as memories brought up from here.

The Lantern Rows

Long, straight tunnels where the old Delvers hung a lantern for every life they found. These small lanterns are called Glims. Most of them are out now. MemoryMoths are drawn to a lit Glim and circle it, dazzled and weakened, until it goes out, and Glims never burn for long. Where LanternLichen still grows along the walls, it glows warm gold, and only where a memory is still whole. Where it has gone dark, the memory has begun to fray, and that is where the MemoryMoths keep.

The Deep Seams

The oldest shafts in the Mines, which no Delver has entered in living memory. They were dug by the people of The Remnant Realms, the first Delvers, and run deep into the rock of the Realms' largest floating islands. The veins down here hold the memories of the very first Threadlings, so old that they hum faintly in the rock. Few have seen them. Fewer still have come back up with anything to say about them, except that it is very quiet, and that something down there remembers them.

The Delvers

The Delvers were the miners of the Memoir Mines, a patient, lantern-carrying people who dug memories out of the dark so that they could be carried up into the light and kept. A Delver never takes a memory for themselves. They bring it up, hand it on, and go back down for the next. Their old rule is carved over every shaft head: Dig gently. Someone is still in there.

There are few Delvers left. As the world forgot to visit the Mines, the Mines grew dark, and as the Mines grew dark, the Delvers stopped going down. The question they ask each other now is the one that keeps them up top: why dig up what's gone?

Light and Telling

The Mines answer to the same law as the rest of Threadbare: what the Void unravels, story, song and shared memory can reweave. Telling a story aloud in a tunnel makes the LanternLichen around the teller brighten, a small, local reversal of the kind the Observists have recorded wherever stories are shared. A tunnel full of voices is a tunnel full of light, and a lit tunnel is one the MemoryMoths will not enter.

Moss MothBane, monk of the Order of the Humming Hem, is said to have walked the Lantern Rows humming the Whole Hum, and to have left every lantern she passed burning behind her.

The MemoryMoths

Main article: MemoryMoths

In the Mines, the MemoryMoths are something close to custodians, thinning out memories already frayed past saving. Above ground, where memory is neglected, they swarm. As the Mines have grown darker, more of them have come down to feed, and the Lantern Rows have become their nesting grounds.

The Forgotten Village

Deep in the Deep Seams, beneath the fallen city of The Remnant Realms, lies a village that has been forgotten twice over: by the people who lived there, and by everyone who might have remembered them. It was the village of the first Delvers, the Remnant people, and its watchtower, The Keepsake, once lit the village and sent its beam down every tunnel to guide the Delvers home, while its bell called the start and end of each shift. Its name has vanished from every road sign and every account, and its gates have stayed sealed for as long as its name has been lost. The Delvers say its stories are still down there, scattered through the tunnels, and that if anyone ever told them all again, matching every name to its deeds and places, the village's name could be spoken aloud, and its gates would open.

Null has hidden the None Loom in the Keepsake, in the one place no one would think to look (see The Denial Looms).

In the Threadbare Plot

The Memoir Mines lie on the road to the None Loom in the Threadbare Plot. Guided by the LoomWarden Echo, the StoryWeaver follows the Ruined Road into The Remnant Realms and descends into the Deep Seams, relighting the tunnels by discovering and retelling the stories of the Remnant people, matching names to deeds and places, and using the Glims to lure the MemoryMoths away or weaken them. This restores the name of the Forgotten Village and opens its long-sealed gates. Inside, the StoryWeaver climbs the Keepsake to the None Loom. A page of The Unbound Book also lies somewhere in the Mines.

For Contributors

Every shaft is a life. A quest in the Mines can follow a single life, one chamber, one year, at a time.
Light is hope. Lit tunnels are safe; dark tunnels belong to the MemoryMoths. Telling a story is always the way to bring the light back.
Dig gently. Memories are never taken or destroyed by the StoryWeaver, only carried up and handed on.
No one is lost for good. Even the Forgotten Village can be remembered again. See Content Guidelines.

Connections

MemoryMoths - Null's creatures that feed on memory
LanternLichen - the glowing lichen that lights the tunnels
LinenVille - the town above the Mines' main entrance, whose folded histories began down here
The Remnant Realms - the fallen city whose people dug the Deep Seams
Echo - LoomWarden of Memory, who guides the StoryWeaver through the Mines
Rune - Keeper of the LoreQuests and Carver of Memory, child of Once
Once - the FirstSpun of Memory, the Weaver
Moss MothBane - whose Whole Hum keeps the Moths at bay
The Unbound Book - one of whose pages lies in the Mines
Threadbare Plot - the Warp Stones arc
The Void - the existential threat to Threadbare
The World of Threadbare - the lore, landscape and denizens of Threadbare