The Remnant Realms - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

The Remnant Realms are the remains of a fallen city, older than any record in Threadbare. High in the air hang chunks of land, broken loose and floating, and on each stands a fragment of the city that was: a half-built hall still in its scaffolding, a lone bench beneath a streetlamp, a doorway with no house behind it, a scatter of belongings left exactly where their owners set them down. No one remembers who built the city, how, or why, only that it was long before the Loom Theft. The Realms are filled with the haunting memories of the people who lived there, and with something more: the city has ghosts.

At a Glance
Type Region
Known as The Unfinished Country, the Fallen City
Core Thread Memory
Residents Bygones, the Unnamed, BookWorms, and now MemoryMoths
Notable places The Ruined Road, the Schoolhouse Drift, the Last Bench, the Half-Built Citadels, the Deep Seams of The Memoir Mines, the Forgotten Village and The Keepsake
Themes Lost Civilisations, Memory, Forgetting, Unfinished Stories, Endings

The Fallen City

The Remnant Realms precede all written record. The histories of Threadbare say that written language was born at The Ink Well, and that Rune cut the first marks in stone, and the histories may well be right, for no one remembers the Realms at all. Whoever built the city, they were gone long before the Loom Theft, and long before anyone thought to write their story down.

What is left is a city in pieces. Its streets, squares, homes and halls have broken apart and drifted up into the sky, so that the Realms are now dozens upon dozens of floating chunks of land, some as large as a town square, some barely big enough to stand on. Each one holds a fragment of ordinary life, stopped mid-moment:

  • a half-built house, its scaffolding still lashed to its walls
  • a lone bench beneath a streetlamp that has never been lit
  • a market stall with its awning still up and its shelves still stocked
  • a table set for supper, a teacup set down mid-sip
  • a child's toy left on a doorstep that leads nowhere
  • a bridge that reaches out towards the next chunk and stops in the air

Nothing in the city was ever finished. It is not a ruin of things that fell, but the remains of things that were never completed, by a people who did not last long enough to complete them.

Of the three Core Threads, it is Memory that runs richest through the Realms. The city's people were miners of memory, the first Delvers, and the oldest shafts of The Memoir Mines run deep into the rock of the largest islands. Their memories outlasted them. They linger in every unfinished wall and every belonging left behind, even though no one remembers who left them. It is why Null hid the None Loom here, in the Forgotten Village deep in the Mines, where a whole people was forgotten twice over.

The Remnant Hand

Everything the city's people left behind is marked in the Remnant hand, a script no one living can read. Scholars of The University of the Unseen still argue over whether it is writing at all, or something older. So the Realms are read through what they left: their pictures, their belongings, and their old stories, scattered in pieces across the sky.

  • Torn letters. Halves and quarters of letters, caught in railings and tucked under stones. Matching the torn edges of two halves found on different chunks is often the first step to understanding what happened in a place.
  • Etchings. Pictures cut into walls, doorframes and paving: faces, homes, gatherings, and the shapes of buildings as they were meant to look when finished.
  • Symbols. The same small marks, over and over, on doors, signposts and keys. Learning which symbol belongs to which place is how locked doors are opened.
  • Fading diaries. Whole lives in the Remnant hand, unreadable, but full of little drawings in the margins that tell the story anyway.
  • Old sketchbooks. The truest record of the city. Someone, long ago, sketched it street by street, and their sketchbooks are now the StoryWeaver's best map.
  • The ruined schoolhouse. Broken across a cluster of turning chunks, its slates still chalked with picture lessons, its desks still in their rows.

The Ghosts of the Remnants

The fallen city is haunted. Its ghosts have been held in the Remnants for as long as anyone knows, and they cannot leave: they drift to the very edge of a chunk and no further, as if the city itself were holding on to them. No one knows why. Some say they are waiting for the city to be finished. Others say they are waiting for someone to finish its story.

The ghosts never speak. But they are not idle, and they are not hostile. They notice those who pass through the city, and they help them, in the only way they can: they point.

The Bygones

Most of the ghosts are Bygones: tattered, ethereal Threadlings, thin as worn cloth held up to the light, their edges fraying into the air. They are not the people who once lived in the city, but the memory of their lives, so strong it stayed behind. Threadlings call them Bygones, for they belong to days long gone by. Each one still keeps to the habits of a life: one sweeps a doorstep that has no house behind it; one sits forever writing a letter that never ends; one stands in the ruined schoolhouse with a hand raised to a slate.

When the StoryWeaver comes near, an Bygone stops what it is doing, turns, and points: at a torn half of a letter, at a symbol over a door, at the next chunk across the gap, at the place in a sketchbook where a missing street should be. Sometimes it leads the way, drifting ahead and waiting. When the StoryWeaver finds what it was pointing at, the Bygone nods, and fades a little, and goes back to its sweeping.

Not every Bygone remembers truly. Some point to where a road used to run, or a bridge used to stand, long before the city broke apart. Learning to tell a true memory from a stale one is part of crossing the Realms.

The Unnamed

Among the Bygones walk the Unnamed: taller and stranger, of a shape that matches nothing else in Threadbare. No one knows what they are, or were. Some believe they were the city's builders; others, its guardians; others, something that came after. They are rare, and found only at the city's great thresholds: at the foot of the Half-Built Citadels, on the Last Bench, at the gates of the Forgotten Village. Where an Bygone points to the next step, an Unnamed points to the next mystery, and its clues open the biggest doors in the Realms.

Places of the Realms

The Ruined Road

The great road that once wound through the whole city, now broken into pieces that drift apart in the sky. The StoryWeaver enters the Realms along it, grappling from one broken stretch to the next. Its milestones still stand, each carved with a first line in the Remnant hand and nothing beneath it.

The Schoolhouse Drift

The ruined schoolhouse, spread across a cluster of slowly turning chunks. Its slates still hold picture lessons in the Remnant hand, and an Bygone still stands at the front of the class.

The Last Bench

A single chunk holding a lone bench beneath an unlit streetlamp. One of the Unnamed sits here, as though waiting for someone to light it.

The Half-Built Citadels

The great fortresses of the city, each the beginning of a tale of kings, queens, sieges and long-lost heirs that no one ever told to the end. Their scaffold towers lean against one another like old friends keeping each other upright, and their courtyards are full of statues halfway out of the stone.

The Memoir Mines and the Forgotten Village

Main articles: The Memoir Mines, The Keepsake

Beneath the largest islands, the Remnant people dug for memory, and their shafts are the oldest of The Memoir Mines, the Deep Seams. Somewhere in them, behind gates that stay sealed for as long as its name is lost, lies the Forgotten Village, the Remnant people's own village. At its heart stands the Keepsake, the watchtower whose lantern once lit the village and guided the miners home, and whose bell called them down to work and home again. Null has hidden the None Loom in its watch room.

Crossing the Realms

The Realms are crossed by precision grappling, from chunk to chunk, across gaps with nothing beneath them but the Void.

  • The Void creeps up from beneath the Realms and eats at the edges of the chunks. Some crumble soon after anyone lands on them, turning whole stretches into timed runs.
  • Directional puzzles. At forks in the Ruined Road and across scattered clusters of chunks, the ghosts point the way, and the StoryWeaver must follow, and learn which ghosts remember truly.
  • Locked-door puzzles. Doors, gates and chests are sealed with symbols in the Remnant hand. The ghosts point to the clues that open them: the other half of a torn letter, an etching that matches the seal, a page of a sketchbook showing what lies behind.

The BookWorms of the Realms

Main article: BookWorms

A BookWorm cannot make a door from a story without an ending. So in the Remnant Realms, BookWorms sit patiently, glasses on, beside stories that were never finished, waiting, sometimes for centuries, for someone to come along and finish them. When someone does, the BookWorm reads the ending with enormous satisfaction, and leaves behind a WormHole that leads somewhere new.

The Realms and the Denial Looms

The Realms are the perfect hiding place for a loom of forgetting: the remains of a whole people no one remembers. Deep in the Memoir Mines beneath the city, in the Keepsake of the Forgotten Village, Null keeps the None Loom, one of the three Denial Looms, which fixes every fibre into a forgetting and weaves MemoryMoths. A people forgotten so completely is the one place no one would think to look.

In the Threadbare Plot

The arc for the None Loom in Act Two of the Threadbare Plot takes place here.

The None Loom. Guided by the LoomWarden Echo, the StoryWeaver enters the Realms along the Ruined Road and descends into the Memoir Mines beneath the city. In What's in a Name?, they relight the tunnels by retelling the stories of the Remnant people, learning to use the Glims against the MemoryMoths, until the name of the Forgotten Village returns and its gates open. They climb The Keepsake, and in Moth to a Flame drive off its guardian, Murmur.

For Contributors

  • Every chunk is a fragment of a life. A place in the Realms should feel like one moment of an ordinary day, stopped: a room, a street corner, a belonging left behind.
  • Read the Realms through pictures. The Remnant hand cannot be read, so clues come from sketches, etchings, symbols, torn letters and the pointing of ghosts.
  • The ghosts help, silently. Bygones and the Unnamed never speak and never harm. They point, lead and wait. They are the lingering memory of the city's people, never described as the dead. See Content Guidelines.
  • Endings open doors. Finishing a story always gives a BookWorm somewhere new to go, so a finished quest in the Realms should open a new way through the world.
  • A natural home for learners' work. Unfinished stories are an ideal invitation for contributors to write endings of their own.

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