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Muse
Name: Muse
Threadling-given name: TBC
Title / Role: Elder of the Eternal Loom, Keeper of the StoryQuests, Patron of Makers
Order: The Elders of the Eternal Loom
Parent: If
Core Thread: Imagination
Home: The Everlasting Library, though often found wandering the crowded craft markets of Threadbare, or among the audience at the Performance Playa
Status: Active
Themes: Inspiration, Creativity, Craft, Courage, New Voices
"Look again, child. There is something here you haven't seen yet."
-- Muse
Muse is a child of If, and the Elder who keeps the StoryQuests: stories brought into the world of Threadbare from all the other worlds, 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.
Muse wears the colours of earthy reds, like the clay of the first bowl, though they are usually hidden under the borrowed apron of a potter, baker, or glass blower, a painter's smock, or a lab coat, with a tailor's measuring tape draped round her neck. She is also carrying a sketchbook, thick with the first sketches of the creations she sees manifest, on its first page a sketch of a bowl.
She has spent most of a very long life among the people who make things: painters, builders, songwriters, tailors, tinkers, playwrights and cooks. She does not teach them their crafts, and has no great skill in most of them. What she offers is smaller and harder to find. She 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. She listens far more than she speaks, and when she does speak, it is usually in the form of 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. They lived with the world exactly as they found it.
One hot afternoon, a young Threadling knelt at a riverbank to drink. She cupped the water in her hands, and it ran through her fingers before she could lift it to her mouth. She tried again, and again, and each time the water slipped away.
Muse had been sitting on the bank beside her, quite still, for longer than she had noticed. She did not tell the girl what to do, she only looked at her cupped hands, and then at the soft red clay of the riverbank, and asked: "What if your hands could hold it for longer?"
The girl looked at her hands. She looked at the clay. And for the first time, she saw something that wasn't there yet.
She pressed the clay into the shape of her cupped palms, left it to dry in the sun, and that evening carried water home in it without spilling a drop. This was the first bowl in Threadbare, and she became its first potter. She made water bowls for the rest of her village, and created many new things like pots and plates, and went on to teach generations of Potters.
When the girl had grown very old, she told the tale of that afternoon to a small crowd enjoying the sunshine on the very same river bank. That story became the very first a Threadling had ever made from their own life. Little did she know that Muse was also once again on that bank and among the crowd. Muse listened quietly, smiling. She kept that story, and has kept every story like it since. And so began the great library of StoryQuests, a collection of stories told by anyone and everyone across every world.
Muse is humble, and never takes credit for the gift she gives, or the results.
"Oh I have never made anything significant in my life. I have only ever happen to be there at the moment someone else does." -- Muse
The Void does not smash what makers create. It does something quieter. Where it spreads, Threadlings stop finishing things. A song is begun and left. A bowl is shaped and never fired. A story is started and set aside for another day that never comes. The courage to carry an idea all the way into the world, which Muse has spent her whole long life inspiring, is the first thing the Void wears away.
This is Null's first denial, Not, at work in the hands: nothing could be otherwise, so why make anything at all? In the places the Void has touched, Muse finds more half-finished work than ever, and fewer and fewer makers willing to pick it up again. Fewer stories reach her, and the StoryQuests of those places grow thin.
So Muse walks further and sits longer than she ever has. She knows the Void cannot take a story that has already been made and shared. And she knows that every maker who finishes one thing, however small, has proven Null wrong.
Muse is the StoryQuest Elder. In the StoryQuest Kit, she waits in the Everlasting Library for StoryWeavers to return from quests of their own making, and congratulates each one. In the wider world, she 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 - the FirstSpun of Imagination, the Spinner
- The Elders - the Elders of the Eternal Loom
- StoryQuests - stories from every world, dominion of If
- The Everlasting Library - the eternal repository of story at Frays End
- Page - Keeper of the LoreQuests, child of Once
- Figment - Archivist of Ideas, child of If
- The Imagine Isles - the learning and practice ground, including the Dev Archipelago