Moss MothBane

Moss MothBane belongs to the Order of the Humming Hem, a monastic line devoted to the belief that the world is not broken, even as the Void creeps and blooms its way closer to Frays End, but simply out of tune, and that healing is a matter of finding the right note, then holding it long enough for the world to remember. Woven to life in the Song Sanctuaries, she now walks the fraying edges of existence, most recently through LinenVille, humming the world slowly back to health.

"A hem doesn't stop a thing from fraying. It just strengthens the garment where it counts, at the end. That's all I've ever tried to be for this world, the one you can count on to be there at the end."
— Moss MothBane - Sister of the Order of the Humming Hem

A Late and Quiet Calling

Moss came to the Order later than most of her brothers and sisters, having spent her early years as a Threadling of few words and fewer songs. Threadlings born in the Sanctuaries are expected to hum before they can properly speak, so a silent Threadling was, by Sanctuary standards, something of a small scandal. The other novices of the Hem still bring it up with fondness, mostly because Moss has since travelled so completely in the opposite direction - the quiet child became a monk who is rarely found not humming, and has created some of the most powerful hymns of healing known across Threadbare. She herself talks only of listening, and that a hum has to be earned by first knowing exactly what needs mending.

The Discipline

The humming is a time-served art from. The Order teaches that certain old songs, sung correctly, can coax a fraying place back toward wholeness the way a familiar tune can coax a forgotten memory back to the surface. Sung correctly is the key however, and Moss has become known even among her peers for the particular tenderness of her humming at the fraying edges of the world, places where the Weave grows thin and the boundary between what is and what has been unravelled starts to blur. It is unglamorous, patient work, more focused darning by candlelight than wild heroics under a blinding sun, and she seems to prefer it that way.

The Name She Was Given

Moss MothBane was not always Moss MothBane. Within the Order, a Hem-name is not chosen, it is given, earned through a deed the Order judges worthy of carrying forward. Hers came after she stood between a swarm of Memory Moths and a small Sanctuary village, holding the moths back from feeding on the villagers' memories through humming alone. What she used that day was not a spell so much as a set of pitches, rare and exact, that the moths are said to find unbearable, though Moss has never fully explained how she found them, or whether "found" is even the right word for it. Moss, when asked, tends to deftly change the subject to something else entirely.

Hymns of Healing

Within the Order, a Hymn of Healing is a humming composed for the purposes of healing - a bump on the head, a broken finger, a broken heart, the effects of the Void. Many of these hymns are part of the work of the Order, though some are private and sung only by the monk who composed them. Most monks compose no more that one or two in a lifetime, if they compose one at all. Moss has composed several that have become known, and two of her hymns are now counted among the most powerful known anywhere in Threadbare when working to reverse the effects of the Void.

"A hymn isn't mine because I wrote it. It's mine because I was the one paying attention when the world hummed it to me." — Moss MothBane - Sister of the Order of the Humming Hem

The Long Work

In recent years Moss has taken a quiet, consuming interest in the history of the Void, poring over any and all writings she can find at the Everlasting Library or the University of the Unseen. It's said she is composing a song meant to do something no single monk has managed before - restore the whole world at once, rather than one fraying edge at a time. She calls this unfinished piece, Hurry Home.

Whether such a song is possible is a subject of much disagreement within the Order. Moss doesn't seem troubled by the debate. She has learned more than any of her brothers and sisters that Hymns of Healing can repel the void even as it creeps along your robes, it's tendrils reaching for your heart, and those hymns come from knowing that waiting for certainty is to welcome your own unravelling.

"I was quiet for such a long time because to me, silence was the first and most important step. To hear the world hum in the beating of a bees wings, the flapping of a sheet in the wind, the cry of a newly woven Patchling, or the breathy whisper of the Void, that is the key to learning how to hum back at it with any meaning or impact."
— Moss MothBane - Sister of the Order of the Humming Hem