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Halcyon HeyDay
Name: Halcyon HeyDay
Title / Role: Professor of History, the University of the Unseen
Species: Threadling, or so she says
Affiliation: The University of the Unseen and the Observists. Formerly of the Observatory of the Unseen
Core Thread: Memory
Home: The University of the Unseen
Status: Active
Themes: History, Nostalgia, Joy, Hope, Rose-Tinted Memory
"Of course it was wonderful. It was the best day there ever was. Well, until the next one."
-- Professor Halcyon HeyDay
Professor Halcyon HeyDay is the University of the Unseen's Professor of History, and its most popular lecturer by a very long way. She is a historian of brighter times: the golden ages, the great festivals, the long summers and the good old days of every people in Threadbare. She studies the past as it was at its best. Her critics say she studies the past as it was a little better than its best, and they are not entirely wrong.
She is bright, bubbly and endlessly sentimental, prone to happy tears at graduations, namings, homecomings and, on one memorable occasion, the reopening of a university bakery. In her histories, every summer was sunnier than it really was, every feast was bigger, every song was sung in perfect tune, and nobody ever argued over who got the last slice of ButtonBerry pie. Her colleagues roll their eyes. Halcyon simply smiles, and tells it again, a little brighter than before.
The halcyon is a small, bright-winged bird of the old songs, that nested on the open water in the depths of winter. For as long as it sat on its nest, the winds dropped and the waves lay still, and there were seven days of calm in the middle of the stormiest season. Threadlings came to call any golden, peaceful time halcyon days, and Halcyon was named for the bird.
A heyday is a time at its very best, and it is the only kind of time she has ever wanted to study. Her students say the name suits her twice over, because every one of her lectures begins with a cheerful "Hey!", and they end, as often as not, in applause.
Before the arrival of Null and the Obscurists, Halcyon kept her study high in the Observatory of the Unseen, the University's crowning campus in the WeaveWatch Wale. While the Observists around her aimed their telescopes at the soft blank places where stories used to be, Halcyon built one that looked the other way: backwards. Named the
The Looking-Back Glass was her life's great work, and the most famous instrument ever made at the Observatory. Through its eyepiece, a patient historian could watch the past as it happened: a coronation, a harvest dance, the first lantern of a festival long gone. Scholars travelled from every corner of Threadbare to take a turn at it, and came away with tears in their eyes.
Famously, the lenses of the Glass were ground from glass tinted with an ethereal glitter, a very subtle pink that most never noticed at all. Halcyon has never said where the glitter came from. Very few of those who have looked through the Glass have stopped to wonder whether it might be the reason the past always seemed so much brighter through it than it ever was in truth. Halcyon, if she knows, has never said that either.
When Null and the Obscurists came to the Observatory of the Unseen, and it became the Observatory of the Obscure, the Looking-Back Glass was left behind, lenses removed. Halcyon came down from the mountain carrying them. She had them set into a new telescope on the roof of the EverLasting Library, and she has looked at the world through rose-tinted glasses ever since. Nobody knows what has become of the Glass itself. Halcyon likes to think it is still up there, pointing at a brighter day, and that no Obscurist has ever dared to look through it.
Halcyon is close to the KnitWitches, closer than any historian has a reason to be. Maud MendWell's cottage finds her more often than it finds anyone else, and she takes tea with the High KnitWitch, Noria NeedleNest, on the first day of every season. She knits through her own lectures and never once drops a stitch.
Rumour has it that she may in fact be a KnitWitch herself. The KnitWitches' deepest discipline is Seam Sight, the reading of the joins where past meets present, and some point out that this is exactly what the Looking-Back Glass does. Others point to the glitter in its lenses, which looks, they say, remarkably like Mend Magic. Asked directly, Halcyon laughs and changes the subject. Asked, the KnitWitches only smile.
The Void takes the past first. Where it spreads, histories are forgotten, anniversaries pass unnoticed, and no one can quite remember the last time things were good. Halcyon has watched it happen, through the Glass and without it. She went to the LoomLight Festival at LoomLit every year of her youth, and she watched it dwindle, year by year, into ticketed squares and closed streets, until there was no festival left at all.
The Obscurists have a denial for every one of her gifts. Null's None teaches that nothing remains, so the past is only something else to lose. Null's Never teaches that nothing lasts, so why remember the good days at all? Halcyon's answer is to remember them anyway, as brightly as she can. When a Threadling touched by the Void can no longer recall a single happy day, she sits beside them and tells them one of theirs, glowing, golden and very slightly exaggerated, until they begin to smile and remember it for themselves. A Threadling who remembers joy, she insists, goes looking for it again, and very often finds it.
"Nothing lasts, they say. Well, nor does a cake, and I have never once let that stop me."
-- Professor Halcyon HeyDay
Halcyon is almost always pictured in her rose-tinted spectacles, or looking through a telescope with a bulbous punk lens. She wears a white academic gown trimmed with pink ribbons and bunting, adorned with a pattern of pink clocks. She carries a scrapbook of history's good days, crammed with pressed flowers, ribbons, invitations and ticket stubs, and every entry is written in the present tense, as though it were still happening.
Halcyon is a warm, hopeful presence, and a natural source of history for the StoryWeaver: of what the world was like at its best, and of what it is fighting to become again. The Looking-Back Glass, still somewhere in the Observatory of the Obscure, is an open hook for the StoryWeaver's journey North. She is also a natural ally for the finale, when the LoomLight Festival is recreated at Frays End, since no one remembers the LoomLight at its brightest as she does.
For contributors, Halcyon is the right voice for histories, golden ages, anniversaries and celebrations of every kind, drawn from cultures around the world, and for any story that asks whether we remember the past as it was, or as we wish it had been.
- The University of the Unseen - where she is Professor of History
- The Observatory of the Unseen - where she built the Looking-Back Glass
- The Observatory of the Obscure - where the Glass was left behind
- KnitWitches - who may, or may not, count her as one of their own
- Maud MendWell - whose cottage finds her more often than it should
- Noria NeedleNest - High KnitWitch, and her seasonal tea companion
- The LoomLight Festival - the brightest celebration she remembers
- Hearth WickWeaver - with whom she will light the LoomLight again
- Yearn - who remembers everything as further away than it is
- Null - and the denials None and Never