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Page
Name: Page
Title / Role: Elder of the Eternal Loom, Keeper of the LoreQuests
Order: The Elders of the Eternal Loom
Parent: Once
Core Thread: Memory
Home: The Everlasting Library, Frays End
Status: Active
Themes: The Written Word, History, Record, Care, Canon
"A story told is a gift. A story written down is a promise that it will still be here tomorrow."
-- Page
Page is a child of Once, and the Elder who keeps the LoreQuests: the canonical story of Threadbare, and of the StoryWeaver's journey through the unravelling world. Where his sister Echo keeps memory in the voice, Page keeps it in writing. He is careful, precise, and deeply kind, and he checks every recovered story twice before he will let it be stitched back into the Weave.
He is also the Elder most weighed down by his book, which is the thickest in Frays End. He refuses every offer to carry it for him.
In the earliest days of the world, every story in Threadbare lived only in the voice. Stories were told, and retold, and remembered by those who heard them, and that was enough for a long time. But Page noticed what the others did not. Each time a teller forgot a line, the line was gone. Each time a village scattered, its stories scattered with it. Memory, he realised, was only as long as the life of whoever held it.
So Page went looking for a way to make a memory outlast its teller. He found it at the Ink Well, the dark, glistening swampland where written language is said to have been born. There he pressed a broad leaf flat beneath a stone, dipped a reed into the ink, and wrote down the first story he could remember: how a small river came to be called by its name. It took him a whole day. When he held it up, the ink still wet, it was the first page in Threadbare, and the leaf had given him his name.
He has been writing ever since. Every page he writes is a promise that the story on it will still be there when its teller is not.
Page is bowed like all Elders, more than most, from the weight of the book he carries. He wears the colours of the order, with ink stained into his cuffs and a reed pen tucked behind his ear. His book is enormous, bound in layers of patched cloth and pressed leaves, and held shut with a length of red thread that he unties, with great ceremony, every time a new LoreQuest is written. The very first leaf is still inside, brittle and brown, and he never lets anyone else turn it.
The Void has always been hungriest for the written word. Where it spreads, ink fades from the page, whole books go blank, and the shelves of the Lost Library stand half-empty, paged through by the Void. The InkDrinkers that swarm out of the dark drain whatever writing they can find. For the Elder who wrote the first page, every blank one is a small grief.
This is Null's second denial, None - nothing remains. Nothing written is ever truly kept, the Obscurists say, and so every page is only a promise that will one day be broken. Ink fades, paper tears, fabric deteriorates, and even stone wears. Page answers the only way he knows how. He writes it again. Every story recovered by a StoryWeaver comes across his desk, and he copies it, and copies it again, and sends the copies out, so that no story in Threadbare ever lives on a single page.
Page is the LoreQuest Elder, and the keeper of Threadbare's canon. He is the natural source of the main narrative's history and lore within the Everlasting Library.
For contributors, Page is the face of the LoreQuests: the stories crafted by the core team that form the canonical heart of the world. Any contribution offered for the main lore passes, in the language of the world, across Page's desk.
- Once - the FirstSpun of Memory, the Weaver
- The Elders - the Elders of the Eternal Loom
- LoreQuests - the main narrative, dominion of Once
- The Everlasting Library - the eternal repository of story at Frays End
- The Ink Well - where written language was born
- Muse - Keeper of the StoryQuests, child of If
- Echo - LoomWarden of Memory, child of Once