-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 501
Echo
Name: Echo
Title / Role: LoomWarden of Memory, Keeper of the Eternal Loom
Order: The Elders of the Eternal Loom
Parent: Once
Core Thread: Memory
Home: The Eternal Loom, Frays End
Status: Active
Themes: Memory, Listening, Oral Tradition, Faithfulness, Voice
"Tell it to me once. I will tell it back to you for as long as there is anyone left to listen."
-- Echo
"The Void does not destroy a story. It waits for the last person to stop repeating it. So I never stop."
Echo is a child of Once, and one of the three LoomWardens - the Elders committed to the care of the Eternal Loom in Frays End. She keeps the Loom's memory.
Echo's gift is the oldest form of memory there is. She can hear any story once and repeat it perfectly, word for word, for ever after. She is quiet, attentive, and utterly still when she listens, and Threadlings say there is no greater compliment in Frays End than to have told Echo a story and watched her close her eyes to keep it.
Echo is bowed like all Elders, most often depicted with her head tilted, listening. She had large ears, by Threadling standards and imagery of Echo can often have such exaggerated ears that she might fly away on them. She wears a black robe, and a long, black scarf knitted from threads gifted to her by returning StoryWeavers through the ages. Her book is almost empty, for she has never needed to write anything down, and carries it only so that others can see where the stories are kept. That said, she has spent many a long night with Page, retelling the stories of the world for archival in the Everlasting Library.
"People think an echo is just a sound repeated. It isn't though, it's so much more. The true nature of an echo is the world saying 'I heard you'."
-- Echo
"A voice is spun from nothing, like the first thread. The listener holds it, long and taut, like the warp. And when it comes back to you, carried across the silence, that is the weft. An echo is the whole Great Weaving, in a single breath."
-- Echo
An echo is not only a memory. It is a copy. Every time Echo repeats a story, it exists multiple times in the world where before there was only one - the teller's and her own. In Threadbare, where everything is made of thread, two or three is always stronger than one.
Any spinner in Frays End will explain it. A single strand of freshly spun yarn is fragile. Tug it hard and it snaps, and leave it alone long enough and it untwists back into fluff. So spinners ply their yarn - they take two strands and twist them together, each against the other's grain. The plied yarn is not merely twice as strong, it is stronger because each strand holds the other's twist in place, and neither can come loose without the other letting go. Ply another and it becomes a string. Ply enough strands together and you have rope, and rope can hold a ship at anchor through a storm. This is the power of Imagination, Memory, and Spirit, and Echo knows this only too well.
A story told once is a single strand, and it is only as strong as the memory of whoever heard it. But a story told and retold is plied. Every retelling twists another strand around it, and each strand holds the others in place. This is why the oldest stories in Threadbare are also the strongest. They have been echoed so many times, by so many voices, that they have become rope. And so Echo makes rope of old stories, strong enough to anchor their origin, their meaning, and their impact for eternity. When she repeats a story back to its teller, or to a different audience altogether, she isn't showing off her memory, she is plying it. And she never tells a story only once, because a story only she remembers is still a single strand, and the Void has always found single strands the easiest to pull.
"I have called into the Void, and it did not call back."
-- Echo
An echo needs something to return from. A voice must strike a surface before it can come back: a cliff face, a valley wall, the far side of a still lake, or simply someone who is listening. Everywhere in Threadbare, Echo has found that surface. It is the first thing she ever learned about the world, and the thing she has relied on ever since: speak, and something, somewhere, will answer.
The Void is the only place where that isn't true.
The Void has no walls and no far side. It has no mass, density, or volume. No one exists in it to listen. It is not hostile and it does not refuse; it simply isn't there to be struck. A voice sent into it does not fade or fall silent. It goes out and never meets anything at all. The first time Echo stood at the edge of the Fraying and called into the dark, she waited a very long time. Nothing came back. The other Elders say it was the only time in her long life that Echo was ever truly afraid.
She understood then what the Void is, better than almost anyone. The Void does not destroy stories. It waits for a story to be spoken into a place where no one is left to hear it, and for the story to find nothing to return from. A story that is never echoed is a single strand, and the Void has always found single strands the easiest to pull. So Echo made the Void her life's opposition, in the only way she knows how. She repeats. Every story she has ever been told, she tells again, and again, and again, to a new audience each time.
There is one exception to the Void's silence, and Echo holds it dearer than anything. When Frith FrayWalker walked into the Void, she sent back a letter, and it was found floating in the still water beside the Tangled Temple. It is the only thing that has ever come back out of the Void - the only echo it has ever given. Echo has read it aloud every day since, to anyone who will listen, and she means to go on until every Threadling in Threadbare has heard it at least once.
For ages unnumbered the LoomWardens kept the three tools of the First Loom. Echo's charge was Once's Warp Stones, the loom weights that held Once's warp long and taut at the Great Weaving. She remembers the moment they were taken more clearly than anyone, and can never forget a single detail about it. The betrayal burns and her desire to retrieve the stones is her single focus.
Echo is one of the StoryWeaver's three guides from Frays End, and the ally of Memory. She is the LoomWarden most associated with listening, oral tradition, and the faithful retelling of stories. Her arc in the main story is the recovery of Once's Warp Stones.
In the StoryWeaver's journey, Echo guides the recovery of the Warp Stones, and the confrontation with Null's second denial: None.
For contributors, Echo is the right voice for oral histories, songs, spoken traditions, and any quest where remembering exactly is what matters.
- Once - the FirstSpun of Memory, the Weaver
- The Elders - the Elders of the Eternal Loom
- The Eternal Loom - the heart of Frays End, which mends the Weave
- Whim - LoomWarden of Imagination, child of If
- Vigil - LoomWarden of Spirit, child of Ever
- Frith FrayWalker - Elder lost to the Void
- Threadbare Plot - the main story of the game
- Null - the Dark Elder and enduring antagonist