Once

FirstSpun - The Weaver - Memory.
Lord of the Warp, Identity, Education, Patience.
Most often depicted facing backward, or sat at a loom, head turned, looking behind.

Once
Title: The Warp-Setter of What Was
Order: The FirstSpun
Core Thread: Memory
Weaving Act: The setting of the warp
Resting Place: The WeaveWatch Wale, by most accounts
Themes: Memory, Identity, Survival, Education, Patience

Every story begins with Once.

Once is the second of the FirstSpun, the three ultimate beings from whom the Great Weave began, and the one who feels the oldest, though Once came after If. When If spun the first thread out of nothing, it would have drifted away as easily as it came. Once caught it. Once measured it, and laid it long and taut across the frame of the world, and then laid another beside it, and another, until there was a warp: the long, strong, patient threads that everything else in creation hangs from.

"The world did not begin when it was made. It began the moment someone remembered making it."

Mitten MythMender - Elder and Timekeeper of the Observatory of the Unseen - The Book of Ages, Volume Yesterday The Warp

Any weaver in Frays End will tell you that the warp is the unglamorous part, and the most important. It must be laid first, before a single thread of weft can cross it. It must be strong. It must be held under even tension, neither slack nor strained. And a weaver who skimps on the warp will lose the cloth, however beautiful the pattern.

This is Once's work, and Once's nature. Memory is not the pattern of the world. It is what the pattern hangs on. Every place, creature, culture, and story in Threadbare runs along one of Once's warp threads, which is why the Elders, when a settlement is lost to the Void, never say that it fell. They say its threads were pulled.

Nature

Where If is never still in the tellings, Once is never hurried. Once is pictured as a vast, bowed figure, eyes closed as though recalling something from very far off, with long threads running from both hands down into the world below. Once speaks slowly, in the tellings that give Once a voice at all, and never says anything twice, because once is enough.

The bowed back is no accident. The Elders of the Eternal Loom are bowed too, from the weight of the books they carry, and they are said to be Once's closest heirs: the keepers who forget nothing they have promised to remember.

Once Upon a Time

The oldest words in any story in Threadbare are once upon a time, and the University of the Unseen's linguists have traced them further back than any other phrase in the Weave. The Elders say the words are not an opening at all. They are a request. To begin a story with once is to ask Once to lend it a warp thread, so that it will be remembered after it is told.

The Atrium of First Words, at the threshold of the Everlasting Library, is said to be built around the very first once ever spoken aloud. Librarians of the Threadbare still tread softly there.

What Once Gave

When the first Threadlings were woven into the world, each of the FirstSpun gave them a thread of their own. Once's gift was memory: the oldest and most essential technology a Threadling has ever possessed.

Memory is survival: which plants hurt and which heal, where a river floods in spring, how to read the sky before a storm. Memory is identity: the story of a Threadling's journey through the world, and of every generation before them. And memory is education: the wisdom that lets each generation stand on the last, rather than paying the same price for the same lessons. A Threadling who forgets everything has not been hurt. They have been unmade.

Where Once is Felt

Once is felt in the quiet moment before a story begins, when a room of listeners settles and leans in. Once is felt in the Memoir Mines, where each shaft was once a life and each chamber a year, and where the Memory Moths, in their gentler nature, tend the line between what can be remembered and what cannot.

Most of all, Once is felt in the far North. The peaks of the WeaveWatch Wale are called the oldest threads ever spun, and most tellings agree they are Once's warp, laid at the very top of the world and left there when the FirstSpun wove themselves into the Weave. The threads have grown so old they are brittle. Travellers who climb them lose small memories on the way up, a name, a tune, the reason they set out, and find them again, changed, on the way down. Threadlings call the wind there the Weave's own shiver. Those who know the old stories call it Once, remembering.

Once and Null

Of all the FirstSpun, it is Once whom Null wounded most deeply, because Null was an Elder, one of Once's own heirs.

Where the other Elders hold that forgetting is a wound to be mended, Null teaches that forgetting is simply the truth of things, and that holding on to what is gone is its own kind of cruelty. Once is only a word for what is over, the Obscurists say. The Elders answer with the oldest line attributed to Once in scripture:

"Gone is not the same as nothing."

It is no accident that the Absurdity Abyss is torn into the highest reach of the WeaveWatch Wale. The Void has come to rest in Once's oldest threads, and Null has chosen to watch the world unravel from the very place where memory is most brittle.

Narrative Function

Once is not encountered as a character. Once is learned about, and read about, and remembered. Contributors should treat Once as the quiet foundation beneath every LoreQuest: the reason recovering a lost story matters at all.

In the main narrative, Once's presence runs through every region rich in Memory, and the StoryWeaver's allies of Memory echo Once's role. The journey north to the WeaveWatch Wale is, in a sense, a climb up Once's own threads. In the closing LoomLight Festival, the re-enactment of the Great Weaving casts one ally as the Warp-Setter.

For contributors, Once is the patron of every LoreQuest. Each lost history, tradition, or name recovered and woven back into Threadbare is a warp thread restored.