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Muse
Name: Muse
Threadling-given name: To come
Title / Role: Elder of the Eternal Loom, Keeper of the StoryQuests, Walker Among Makers
Order: The Elders of the Eternal Loom
Parent: If
Core Thread: Imagination
Home: Nowhere for long. Often found waiting on the Selvedge Strand of the Imagine Isles, or at the Performance Playa
Status: Active
Themes: Inspiration, Creativity, Craft, Courage, New Voices
"I have never once given anyone an idea. I only ask them what they were about to think of, before they talked themselves out of it."
-- Muse
Muse is a child of If, and the Elder who keeps the StoryQuests: the stories brought into Threadbare from every life, culture and imagination, which live alongside the main tale of the StoryWeaver's journey. Where Page keeps the canon of the world, Muse keeps its endless new arrivals, and welcomes every one of them.
He has spent most of a very long life among the people who make things: painters, builders, songwriters, tailors, tinkers, playwrights and cooks. He does not teach them their crafts, and has no great skill in most of them. What he offers is smaller and harder to find. He sits with a maker at the moment they are about to give up on an idea, and asks them, quietly, what it might have been.
Muse is gentle, patient, and very hard to hurry. He listens far more than he speaks, and when he does speak, it is usually a question.
The Elders say that in the earliest days of the world, the first Threadlings made almost nothing, and finished even less. They had If's gift, the ability to picture a world slightly different from the one in front of them, but not yet the courage to carry a picture all the way into their hands. Idea after idea was begun and abandoned.
Muse found the first potter of Threadbare sitting beside the pieces of a bowl she had smashed in frustration. He did not tell her how to make a better one. He picked up a piece, turned it over, and asked her what the bowl would have held. She thought for a long time. Then she told him: water, for someone who was thirsty. And she sat down at the wheel again.
That bowl, the story goes, was the first thing in Threadbare ever finished. And when the potter later told the tale of how she made it, it became the first story a Threadling ever made from their own life. Muse kept it, and has kept every story like it since. That is what a StoryQuest is, he says: something a maker almost didn't finish, carried all the way home.
Muse wears the colours of the order, though they are usually hidden under a borrowed apron, a painter's smock, or a tailor's measuring tape draped round his neck. His hands are stained with a little of every craft he has watched. His book is a sketchbook, thick with the first drafts of stories other people finished, and on its first page is a single sketch of a bowl.
Muse is the StoryQuest Elder. In the StoryQuest Kit, he waits on the Selvedge Strand of the Imagine Isles for StoryWeavers returning from quests of their own making, and congratulates each one. In the wider world, he is a wandering Elder, and a natural encounter anywhere the StoryWeaver meets people who make things.
For contributors, Muse is the face of every StoryQuest submission, and a patron figure for everyone who creates for Threadbare: artists, writers, composers and developers alike.
- If - his parent, and patron of every StoryQuest
- The Elders - his order
- StoryQuests - which he keeps
- The Imagine Isles - where he waits on the Selvedge Strand
- Page ProseStitch - his counterpart, keeper of the LoreQuests
- Figment - his brother of If, who keeps the ideas that were never finished