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Figment LooseEnd
Name: Figment LooseEnd
Title / Role: Curator of the Archive of the Unfinished
Species: Threadling
Affiliation: The EverLasting Library
Core Thread: Imagination
Home: The EverLasting Library, Frays End
Status: Active
Themes: Ideas, Possibility, Patience, Second Chances, Hope
"No idea is ever wasted. Some of them are simply early."
-- Figment LooseEnd
Figment LooseEnd is the Curator of the Archive of the Unfinished, the smallest, dustiest and most crowded wing of the EverLasting Library. Where the Elder Rune keeps the stories that were told, and the Elder Muse keeps the stories that were made, Figment keeps everything that came before them: the notions, sketches, half-thoughts and what-ifs that were imagined once and never carried any further. The crumpled paper in the wastepaper basket is his domain.
Figment is stooped from years spent peering at small scraps on floors and in bins. He wears the browns and greys of dust, mixed with vibrant glitter, and an old hooded patchwork robe, with a pair of dusty spectacles pushed up onto his forehead and forgotten there. He carries a catalogue thousands of entries long, and every entry begins with the same two words: what if...?
He is quiet, fussy, and deeply sentimental, with a magpie's eye for anything unfinished. He has been known to follow a Threadling for an entire afternoon because they muttered "I have an idea...", waiting for the idea to trail off, as it very likely will.
Threadlings call him LooseEnd because he has never been able to leave one alone. A loose end is the last trailing thread of an unfinished piece of work, and every weaver knows the temptation to snip it off and be done with it. Figment ties it off instead, carefully, and keeps it, in case someone wants to pick the work up again.
A figment is something that exists only in the imagination. Most of them fade. A Threadling pictures a better roof, a happier song, a different ending, and then gets distracted, and the picture drifts away.
Figment was a junior clerk at the EverLasting Library, charged with emptying its wastepaper baskets, when he first noticed what was being thrown away. He could not bring himself to burn it. He began to keep the scraps instead, gently, the way one might catch fireflies on a summer evening, or a dandelion seed on a spring breeze. The Chief Archivist, Perrin PageSpun, eventually gave him a spare room, mostly to stop him filling the corridors. That room is now a wing of its own: shelf upon shelf of ideas no one finished, each labelled in his tiny, careful hand, some held in books, others in jars, and some flittering freely around the room.
Figment does not keep them to hoard them. He keeps them to give away. When a Threadling comes to the Library stuck, uninspired, or certain they have nothing new to offer, Figment takes down an old, unfinished idea, blows the dust off, and asks if they would like to try it. Muse sends more makers to his door than anyone, and he is quietly, enormously proud of it.
Since the Void came, Figment's work has become urgent. Forgotten things are what the Void feeds on, and an idea no one remembers is the easiest thing in the world to lose. His archive is one of the last places in Threadbare where the unfinished is still safe.
"The Void takes what no one remembers. So I remember. All of it. Every tiny, lovely, unfinished thing. That's my fight."
-- Figment LooseEnd
Where the Void spreads, the ideas themselves begin to fade. Labels on Figment's shelves have started to blur, jars have been found empty, and some of the oldest books in his archive hold nothing but the words what if...? with nothing after them. It is Null's first denial, Not, working quietly on the unfinished: if nothing could ever be otherwise, then no idea is worth keeping. Figment disagrees, fussily and absolutely. He has begun giving his ideas away faster than ever, because an idea in someone's hands is far harder for the Void to reach than an idea on a shelf.
Figment is the keeper of ideas and possibilities within the EverLasting Library. He is a natural source of hints, lost designs, and forgotten plans, and a quiet ally against Null's first denial, Not: every idea he keeps is proof that the world could still be otherwise.
For contributors, Figment belongs to anyone who has ever abandoned an idea. He is the patron of drafts, concepts, prototypes and second attempts.
- The EverLasting Library - the eternal repository of story at Frays End, and home of his archive
- Perrin PageSpun - Chief Archivist of the EverLasting Library, who gave him his first room
- Muse - Keeper of the StoryQuests, who sends makers to his door
- Rune - Keeper of the LoreQuests
- Page SpineStitch - Chief Librarian of the EverLasting Library, whose mother's unfinished novel he would dearly love to keep
- If - the FirstSpun of Imagination, the Spinner of What Might Be
- Threadlings - the people of Threadbare
- Null - the Dark Elder, and the denial Not