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Rune
Name: Rune
Title / Role: Elder of the Eternal Loom, Keeper of the LoreQuests, Carver of Memory
Order: The Elders of the Eternal Loom
Parent: Once
Core Thread: Memory
Home: The EverLasting Library, Frays End, and the ridges of the WeaveWatch Wale
Status: Active
Themes: The Written Word, Stone, Permanence, Record, Canon, Wayfinding
"Paper forgets in a hundred years. Stone forgets in ten thousand. I prefer to give the world time to catch up."
-- Rune
Rune 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, Rune keeps it in the mark. He cut the first marks ever made in stone, and he wrote the first story ever set down in ink, and he has spent every age since making sure that what matters is kept in both.
He is slow, deliberate, and practically immovable once he has decided on something, which is rarely. He speaks in short sentences, as though each word costs him a chisel stroke. He is also careful, precise, and deeply kind, and he checks every recovered story twice before he will let it be stitched back into the Weave.
Rune divides his long life between two places. At the EverLasting Library in Frays End he keeps a desk of solid stone, where the LoreQuests are kept and every recovered story comes to be read. On the ridges of the WeaveWatch Wale, where the first threads ever spun rise into the sky, he keeps his waymarks. He never comes back from the Wale without a stone, and he never goes out to it without a pen.
The peaks of the WeaveWatch Wale are said to be Once's own warp: the oldest threads in the world, 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, if they are lucky, find them again on the way down.
Rune decided long ago that luck was not good enough. He began to carve. Along every ridge and pass of the Wale he cut small, deep marks into the rock: a sign for water here, a sign for the path turns, a sign for you came this way to find someone. Each one was a memory that would not slip, left for those whose own memories might. The oldest are worn almost smooth now. Travellers still trace them with their fingers on the way down, and find, in the shape of a mark, the thing they had forgotten.
These marks are the first runes in Threadbare, and the Elder who carved them has carried their name ever since. Among those who have followed his marks North is the Elder Venture, who says she would have been lost a dozen times without them. She was young then, and very far from home, when she first found a mark cut low on a ridge of the Wale: you came this way to find someone. She sat beside it until the fear passed, and then she followed it down. She has never told Rune which mark it was. Rune has never needed her to.
Rune's waymarks are older than any writing in Threadbare. The ReedKin, the reed people who once settled from swamp to swamp, came after him, and the InkKeepers have always said they carved in his tradition. Where Rune's marks pointed the way, the ReedKin's notches told what had happened there. On some of the old stones scattered across Threadbare, the two still stand side by side: Rune's deep waymark, and the ReedKin's stitch-script running up the edge beside it.
Rune taught the ReedKin to carve, and in the end they taught him to write. In the earliest days, every story in Threadbare lived only in the voice, or in the slow cut of a chisel. Each time a teller forgot a line, the line was gone. Each time a village scattered, its stories scattered with it. And stone, for all that it lasts, cannot travel.
When Rune came to The Ink Well, he found writing already waiting for him on the ReedKin's stones and walls. He learned it. Then he pressed a broad leaf flat beneath a stone, cut a reed of his own, dipped it 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.
It was a small thing, and it changed everything. A stone could not leave the swamp. A leaf could. Rune encouraged the ReedKin's children to carry their writing, and the ink that made it, out into the world, and in doing so helped turn the ReedKin's discovery into something every Threadling could share. He has never put down the chisel for the pen, or the pen for the chisel. Ink is quick, and it travels. Stone lasts. He holds that Threadbare needs both.
"A story told is a gift. A story written down is a promise that it will still be here tomorrow."
-- Rune
Every story recovered by a StoryWeaver comes, in the end, across Rune's stone desk in the EverLasting Library. He reads it, checks it twice, and copies it, and copies it again, and sends the copies out, so that no story in Threadbare ever lives on a single page. The stories that belong to the canon of the world, he carves as well: a single line for each, cut into the stone tablets he carries, so that even if every page were lost, the shape of the story would remain.
He works beside the Chief Librarian of the EverLasting Library, Page SpineStitch, and beside the long line of SpineStitch librarians who came before her. The SpineStitches like to say that their family's habit of naming its children for the parts of a book began with the first page Rune ever wrote. Rune has never confirmed it. He has never denied it either, and he keeps a small, careful record of every SpineStitch who has ever held the post.
Rune and Venture could hardly be less alike. She is restless, loud, and forever halfway to somewhere else. He is slow, quiet, and rarely moves at all. Rune keeps knowledge in stone. Venture stitches lessons into the world. Each has always trusted the other to do the half they cannot.
Rune has carved and written for longer than anyone, but he has always known what he could not make: a reader. A mark no one can read is a mark made for no one. Across Threadbare, his oldest waymarks and the stitch-script of the ReedKin still stand, but fewer Threadlings each year can read what they say. The stories are not going anywhere. It is the readers who are disappearing. For a long time, that was a quiet sorrow he carried alone.
Venture was the one who saw it. Where Rune saw stones going unread, she saw lessons waiting to be taught. Together, they have begun the slow work of bringing stitch-script back: Rune keeping and recarving the old stones, and Venture bringing learners to them, one traveller at a time, until the marks mean something again.
Rune does not say much about it. But those who have seen him watch a Stitchling trace a line of stitch-script for the first time, and read it aloud, say it is the only time they have ever seen him smile.
"He'd carve for ten thousand years if no one ever came. I just think someone should come."
-- Venture
Rune is bowed like all Elders, and more than most, for his book is not a book at all, but a set of carved stone tablets bound together with thick cord and slung across his back. Pressed between the first two tablets is the very first leaf, brittle and brown, and he never lets anyone else turn it. He wears the colours of the order beneath a mason's leather apron, grey with stone dust and stained with ink at the cuffs. There is always a chisel in his hand, and a reed pen tucked behind his ear.
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. Even stone forgets where the Void has been: ridges where Rune's waymarks once guided travellers home now lead only into the dark.
This is Null's second denial, None: nothing remains. Nothing written is ever truly kept, the Obscurists say. Ink fades, paper tears, fabric deteriorates, and even stone wears. The cruellest wound is in the WeaveWatch Wale itself, where Null has made a lair in the Observatory of the Obscure, above the Absurdity Abyss. The Void has come to rest in the most brittle memory in the world.
Rune does not argue with Null. He writes it again, and he carves it again. He walks his old routes, recarving what he can and marking, for the first time, the places no one should go. And his marks along the Wale, old and new, are the path the StoryWeaver follows North on the final journey to the Observatory: memory, cut into stone, leading straight to the one who denies it.
Rune knows the Void does not only swallow stone and ink. It swallows the knowing of what they say, and that often goes first. This is why he has never carved alone, and why, whenever Venture comes back from her travels with a new pack of learners, he puts down his chisel to meet them.
Rune 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, and a natural presence in the WeaveWatch Wale, the Memoir Mines, and the StoryWeaver's journey North to the Observatory of the Obscure. His waymarks can serve as environmental storytelling, and as gentle guidance for the player, across the map.
For contributors, Rune 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 Rune's desk. He is also a patron for ancient history, monuments, ancestral stories, and any lore meant to feel old and permanent.
- Once - the FirstSpun of Memory, the Weaver, and his parent
- The Elders - the Elders of the Eternal Loom
- LoreQuests - the main narrative, dominion of Once
- The EverLasting Library - where he keeps his stone desk
- Page SpineStitch - Chief Librarian of the EverLasting Library
- The Ink Well - where he wrote the first page
- ReedKin - who carved in his tradition, and taught him to write
- The WeaveWatch Wale - where his oldest waymarks are found
- The Memoir Mines - where he still carves
- Venture - who followed his marks on her earliest journeys, and now helps him teach others to read them
- Echo - his sister, LoomWarden of Memory
- Muse - Keeper of the StoryQuests, child of If
- Null - the Dark Elder, and the denial None