Skip to content

The Denial Looms

Jump to bottom
Stephen Reid edited this page Oct 4, 2026 · 13 revisions

Also known as: Null's Looms
Type: Looms
Built by: Null
Made from: The three elements stolen from The Eternal Loom: If's Spindle, Once's Warp Stones and Ever's Shuttle
Status: Active, hidden across Threadbare

"Not, for nothing new.
None, for nothing remains.
Never, for nothing lasts.
And so, Null."
-- The Tenets of Null

Overview

The Denial Looms are the three looms Null built from the elements they stole from the Eternal Loom. Each is a twisted copy of the Eternal Loom, built around a single stolen element, and each is named for one of Null's Three Denials: the Not Loom, the None Loom and the Never Loom. Each weaves one of the three great kinds of The Fray, and Null hid each one in a fortress in a different corner of Threadbare, so that together they would spread the Void faster than it could ever spread by neglect alone.

Denial Loom FirstSpun Stolen Element Creatures Region Hidden Fortress
The Not Loom If If's Spindle InkDrinkers and Smudgers The Ink Well The BlotWorks
The None Loom Once Once's Warp Stones MemoryMoths The Memoir Mines The Tacet Tower
The Never Loom Ever Ever's Shuttle Storyvores The Remnant Realms The Lost Library

How the Looms Were Made

When Knot made the first Denial and became Not, they abandoned the Eternal Loom, but left it whole. Thousands of years later, after the third Denial and the long exile in the Interstice, the birth of the Void at LoomLit woke Null, and Null found their purpose: not to stop the world growing, but to unmake it. Null returned to Frays End and stole the three elements from the Eternal Loom, so that it could never weave anything new again.

On the Eternal Loom, the three elements had worked together, spinning new thread, setting it in place and binding it to last. Null split them apart. Each Denial Loom has only one element, and each does only one thing, turned against the gift it came from. The Spindle that once spun every new idea now spins only hunger for ideas. The Warp Stones that once held every memory in place now hold only forgetting. The Shuttle that once carried every thread onward now carries only endings. Null weaves from the last loose fibres that drift at the edge of the Fraying, the threads the world has almost let go.

Each Loom is hidden where its Denial already feels at home. Not hides in the Ink Well, where every new word in Threadbare begins. None hides in the Forgotten Village, deep in the Memoir Mines, a place forgotten so completely that no one would think to look. Never hides in the Remnant Realms, the remains of a whole people who did not last.

The Not Loom: The BlotWorks

Main article: The BlotWorks

Element: If's Spindle. Creatures: InkDrinkers and Smudgers. Region: the Ink Well.

The BlotWorks is a vast ink extraction rig, built by Null deep in the swamp of the Ink Well, far beyond the punt routes and the InkKeepers' Keeps, where the mangroves close overhead and the black water goes perfectly still. Reaching it is a long and arduous journey that few ordinary Threadlings would ever attempt. The InkKeepers call it the Black Mill, and do not like to say even that too loudly.

The BlotWorks rises out of the ink on iron stilts blackened by ink, a grim echo of the InkKeepers' own stilt-houses. It is a place of catwalks, gantries and ladders; of pipes, thick and dented and sweating ink at every joint; of levers, valves, stopcocks and pressure gauges whose needles never rest. Pump jacks shaped like giant dip pens nod endlessly into the swamp, and pipelines snake out from the rig across the swamp to every spring they can reach. Waste pipes spew bright splashes of hollow ink across the reeds. Everything is blue, purple and blue-black, slick with an oily sheen. The rig is never quiet: it clanks, hisses and groans, ink bubbles in its pipes and drips from every rail, and over it all comes the whine of InkDrinkers.

Null built the BlotWorks to drain the Ink Well and pull out its Inklings, so that no new idea could ever reach a page. It is Not made into machinery. Pumps draw the ink up from the swamp. Separators spin the Inklings out of it. The Inklings are locked away in holding vats, where, with no ideas to feed them, they slowly grow dull and fall asleep. The drained ink is carried to the top of the Blotted Spire, the rig's great derrick, where it pours over the InkWheel, a great wheel built like a water wheel, which drives the Not Loom. The Not Loom spins If's Spindle into InkDrinkers, and the InkDrinkers fly out across Threadbare, drain pages, and carry the ink and its Inklings back to the BlotWorks. That is where the Inklings go.

The Blotted Spire is the final climb. It is built like a giant fountain pen, nib-up, its barrel the tower and its split nib the summit, in layers of wet and dry ink set like dripping wax, in bands of indigo, violet and blue-black. Its walls are covered in writing: sigils, scribbles and symbols that no one can read, many of them redacted under heavy black bars.

The route.

  1. The Wellhead. The stilt approach, beneath the nodding pump jacks, where InkDrinker swarms first rise to meet the StoryWeaver.
  2. The Pump Deck. Timing puzzles across moving pump arms and pistons.
  3. The Separators. Halls of great spinning drums that pull the Inklings out of the ink.
  4. The Holding Vats. A vast tank farm glowing faintly with captured Inklings, and the greatest rescue in the BlotWorks.
  5. The Pressure Hall. The pipework heart of the rig. Smudgers breed in the sludge sumps below.
  6. The Blotted Spire. The final climb, through the Barrel, the Feed, the Drip Gallery and the Crossed-Out Hall, to the InkWheel, the Not Loom and the guardian.

The StoryWeaver's tools. The InkKeepers give the StoryWeaver two tools for the journey: ink, to write and draw things into existence, and clean water in stoppered bottles, to wash away redactions and drive off Smudgers.

Rescuing the Inklings. The StoryWeaver must rescue the captured Inklings from the holding vats, guiding them through a piping puzzle of pipes, valves, separators and filters to BookWorm Portals that carry them home. Every Inkling freed makes the StoryWeaver's ink stronger. See The BlotWorks for the gameplay notes.

The guardian is the BlotQueen, a huge, bloated InkDrinker coiled around the InkWheel, with many ink-spitting trunks. She fires single drops of ink or holds whole lines of ink across her chamber, and her ink stays in sticky puddles that slow the StoryWeaver down, so the grapple is the best way to keep moving. She cannot be beaten by force, only diluted. As she thins, she moves from the pool to the feed channels to the nib slit, changing her tactics each time. When she runs clear, all the stolen ink pours out of her and back into the swamp, the coloured springs at the swamp's edge run again, and she shrinks to an ordinary InkDrinker and whines away into the mist. The InkWheel slows and stops.

The None Loom: The Tacet Tower

Main article: The Tacet Tower

Element: Once's Warp Stones. Creatures: MemoryMoths. Region: the Memoir Mines.

In music, tacet is the instruction for a part to fall silent. The Tacet Tower is a ruined bell tower at the heart of the Forgotten Village, deep in the Memoir Mines. Its bells once rang through every tunnel, signalling the start and end of each shift, until the village was forgotten twice over and the bells fell silent. The village's gates stayed sealed for as long as its name was lost, and so Null hid the None Loom in the one place no one would ever think to look. Its stairs have fallen away, its floors are cracked open, its bell ropes hang broken, and the LanternLichen on the village walls has gone dark.

The None Loom stands in the belfry, its Warp Stones fixing every fibre into a forgetting, and the MemoryMoths that come from it swarm the village. Many kinds of moth are woven here, each with its own colour and habits (see MemoryMoths). All of them are disturbed by vibration, and cannot settle where a true note is ringing.

Finding the Tower. The StoryWeaver restores the village's name by retelling the stories of its people, matching names to deeds and places, and its gates open. Finding the None Loom guarded by swarms of moths, they retreat, and return prepared to climb the Tower floor by floor, through sound-based challenges and battles.

The StoryWeaver's sound kit. In the temples of the Humming Hem, in the Song Sanctuaries, the StoryWeaver learns the notes and pitches MemoryMoths cannot bear, and seals them into ChimeStones, small stones each tuned to one note and coloured to match it, which ring out a pocket of vibration when thrown. Thrown in sequence, they play a tune. Some moths can only be beaten with WardWords, word magic of the theatrical arts, which the Tattered Troupe teaches the StoryWeaver at the Performance Playa, for a price. The StoryWeaver can also place set pieces: planted HummingBells for a steady hum, Tuning Forks staked in the ground, and Wind Chimes to reveal hidden moths.

Allies. Moss MothBane of the Order of the Humming Hem tells the StoryWeaver of the pitches MemoryMoths cannot bear. Refrain RoundSong welcomes them to the temples of the Humming Hem, where the SongSmith Tamber ToneForge helps them forge their ChimeStones. Rook RagRavel and the Tattered Troupe teach them WardWords. In the belfry, Pell PealKeeper, the village's last bellringer, has forgotten almost everything, but she remembers the order of the bells, and hums it. The mysterious Musician turns up where least expected, with a hint.

The guardian is Murmur, a swarm of thousands of small MemoryMoths moving as one, gathering into a whirlwind that throws the StoryWeaver, a hammer that squashes them, or a giant moth that slashes at them. The StoryWeaver must clear and mend the bells, then ring them in the right order and at the right time, playing the old peal that once called the Delvers home. Every phrase that rings true disperses and weakens the swarm, and when the last phrase rings out, Murmur can no longer hold together, and scatters into ordinary MemoryMoths that drift away into the tunnels. One by one, the LanternLichen on the village walls glows gold again.

The Never Loom: The Lost Library

Main article: The Lost Library

Element: Ever's Shuttle. Creatures: Storyvores. Region: the Remnant Realms.

The Lost Library stands on the last and highest island of the Remnant Realms. It is anchored to nothing, and drifts slowly around the edge of the Realms, so that it can be reached only by the hardest chain of grapples in the region, timed for the moment the islands line up. Shelves and reading rooms broken from it drift across the sky nearby, and the StoryWeaver follows them inward, as you might follow pages blown from a book.

It is a ruin: its roof half fallen, its walls cracked open to the sky. Many of its shelves hold only empty covers, spines with nothing inside, eaten hollow by Storyvores. The books that remain are written in the Remnant hand, which no one can read. Bygones drift between the stacks, and one of the Unnamed stands at the door. Inside, the Obscurists have piled the last pages they tear from books across Threadbare: a library of endings no one is allowed to read.

The Never Loom stands in the great reading room. With every pass, Ever's Shuttle carries another ending across its warp, so that every story near it stops short. Storyvores of every kind, Gnashers, Nippers, Gulpers, Bloaters and Gobblers, spill from the Library's broken windows and out across the Realms, and defend the Library against all comers. Beneath it, coiled in the rock of the island, lies a Grand BookWorm, still waiting for an ending.

The guardian is BookBelly, a giant, three-headed Storyvore, swollen with every ending in the Library. Its three heads, Mash, Gnash and Lash, each hunger for a different kind of story: spoken, written and pictured. As the fight goes on it chews through the shelves, and the Library breaks apart around the StoryWeaver. Grappling between what still stands, the StoryWeaver gathers last pages from the Obscurists' piles and turns each ending against the head that hungers for it, because a Storyvore cannot bear a tale told all the way to its end. Last of all, they piece together the Remnant people's own story, and finish it. BookBelly flees into the drifting Realms. The finished story wakes the Grand BookWorm, which opens a WormHole straight home to Frays End.

The Denial Looms and the StoryWeaver

In the Threadbare Plot, each Denial Loom is the goal of one of the three arcs of Act Two. Guided by a LoomWarden, the StoryWeaver must find each Loom's hidden fortress through a journey across Threadbare, defeat the guardian waiting there, destroy the Loom, and carry its element home to the Eternal Loom. When all three are destroyed and all three elements are home, the Eternal Loom is whole again, and can weave something new for the first time since Null stole its elements.

For Contributors

  • Each Loom is a Denial made into a place. The BlotWorks is thirsty and mechanical, the Tacet Tower is silent and forgetting, and the Lost Library is all endings. Scenes set in or near a fortress should feel like the Denial it serves.
  • Each Loom weaves one kind of Fray. InkDrinkers and Smudgers come from the Not Loom, MemoryMoths from the None Loom and Storyvores from the Never Loom. Other Fray, such as the Woeverns, are said to be woven on them too.
  • Each fortress has its own tools. Ink, water and Inkling rescue in the BlotWorks, sound in the Tacet Tower, and precision grappling in the Lost Library.
  • A Loom can be destroyed. Null cannot. Destroying a Denial Loom unravels it back to loose fibre and frees its element. The Fray it wove, guardians included, can be driven off and outwitted, but never cruelly harmed. See Content Guidelines.

Connections

Resources

Images

TBC

Audio and source files

TBC

Clone this wiki locally