-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 531
The Sea of Sagas
Name: The Sea of Sagas
Type: Sea
Also Known As: The Saga Sea, the Great Telling, the Long Blue Book (sailors' slang)
Location: West of Frays End, stretching to the Tattered Hem, where the sea frays into the deep currents of the Void
Core Thread: Imagination, with Memory in its depths
Patron: If, the Spinner of What Might Be, though Once is said to keep the seabed
Notable Inhabitants: The Tidetellers, the Tomewhales, ThimbleCrabs, Blurbfish
Notable Places: The Last Lighthouse, the Hem Harbour, the Port of Possibility, the Riddle Reef, the Cliffhangers, the Undercloth, the Tattered Hem, the Imagine Isles
Themes: Adventure, Epic, Voyage, Retelling, Wonder
Every wave is a story. No two ever break the same way.
West of Frays End, past the rooftops that lean inward and the last cobbled street that runs down to the water, the world opens into the Sea of Sagas. It is a vast, seemingly endless expanse of rippling blue, woven from Imagination so loosely that it moves. From the harbour wall it looks like any sea. Look closer and you will see that every wave carries a story of its own. Some are tiny tales that lap at the shingle and are gone. Some are sagas so long that a boat can ride one for a week and still not reach the end.
The sea carries boats, bottles, driftwood, and the occasional swimmer. It is home to the mysterious Imagine Isles, and the Dev Archipelago within them, which drift on its far western edge. Most of all, it carries stories, rolling them from one shore to another, so that a tale told in one corner of Threadbare may wash up, a little changed, in another.
"Everyone thinks the sea is made of water. It is made of and then."
-- Captain Maren CableKnit, Tideteller
The Tidetellers, the sailors who know this sea best, can read a wave the way a librarian reads a spine. They sort the waves by shape, and their names have passed into everyday speech in Frays End.
- Epics - Great, slow swells that take days to pass beneath a boat. A ship caught on an Epic rises for a very long time, and sailors who have ridden one talk about nothing else for years afterwards.
- Ballads - Long, rolling waves that lilt and sway. They are best heard at dusk, when the whole sea seems to hum along.
- Fables - Small, tidy waves that break neatly on the sand. Each leaves a little moral written in the foam, which is gone before most people finish reading it.
- Limericks - Short, choppy waves that come in fives and always finish with a splash in someone's face.
- Tall Tales - Rogue waves that grow bigger every time someone describes them. No one has ever measured one, because they refuse to stay the same size long enough.
- Cliffhangers - Waves that rise, and rise, and never quite break, leaving everyone on board desperate to know what happens next. They usually break the following week.
- Riddles - Whirlpools that spin a boat round and round until someone on deck answers them. Tidetellers keep a crew member who is good at riddles for exactly this reason.
- Lullabies - The soft, slow swell of the sea at night, which rocks every hammock in the harbour into sweet, restful dreams. Many a sailor from the Drowsy Downs says the Lullabies are the only thing that makes them homesick.
Foam, in the language of the sea, is called footnotes: the little extra details a wave leaves behind. Beachcombers say the best stories are always in the footnotes.
The Sea of Sagas tells its stories twice a day. The incoming tide tells a tale one way. The outgoing tide tells it back again, never quite the same. The Observists of the University of the Unseen call this tidal retelling. Fishermen just call it the sea changing its mind.
This is why the sea is so precious to Frays End. A story that is told, and told again, and told once more on the next tide, is a story that is very hard to forget. The KnitWitches say that as long as the tide keeps turning, the Sea of Sagas is one of the last great places in Threadbare where stories are retold without anyone needing to remember to do it.
Sailors also steer by two great forces that run through the weave of the sea:
- The Warp Currents - Long, steady currents that run straight and true, like warp threads on a loom. A ship that rides a Warp Current will always reach somewhere, though not always where it meant to go.
- The Weft Winds - Winds that blow across the currents, to and fro, like a shuttle carrying the weft. A good captain uses both, tacking across the grain of the sea the way a weaver works a cloth.
When a Weft Wind suddenly turns about without warning, sailors call it a Plot Twist, and reach for their hats.
The Hem Harbour - The western waterfront of Frays End, where the city's streets run down to the sea. Its quays are lined with sail-menders, rope-knitters, story-sellers, and a small, very busy shop that sells nothing but bottles for messages. Most voyages on the Sea of Sagas begin and end here, and it is the home port of the Ferries of Fable.
The Last Lighthouse - A tall, stitched tower on the headland above the Hem Harbour, and the last light a ship sees as it leaves Frays End behind. Its keepers shine a single line of story out across the water every night, a different one each time, so that sailors far out at sea can always find their way home by following the thread of it. Travellers bound for the Mythical Meadows say that everything beyond the Last Lighthouse is a different kind of story altogether.
The Riddle Reef - A shallow, glittering reef not far from shore, full of whirlpools, questions, and shortcuts that are only shortcuts if you know the answer. Young Tidetellers learn their craft here.
The Cliffhangers - A line of towering sea cliffs, their edges hanging impossibly far out over the water. Waves reaching the Cliffhangers rise to the very top and pause there, sometimes for days. Nobody has ever been able to wait long enough to see how they end.
The Undercloth - The seabed. The sea's oldest sagas sink here when they grow too heavy to carry, and settle layer upon layer, like pages pressed together. The Elders say that where the surface of the sea belongs to If, the Undercloth belongs to Once, for nothing that settles there is ever truly lost. Only the Tomewhales dive deep enough to read it.
The Tattered Hem - The far western edge of the Sea of Sagas, where the sea's weave grows looser and looser until the waves themselves begin to fray. Past the Hem, the water thins into the deep currents of the Void. It is here, adrift on the border between the story-sea and the silence beyond it, that the Imagine Isles turn slowly around one another.
The Imagine Isles are the Sea of Sagas' most famous and most mysterious passengers. Sailors call them If's Scraps, the offcuts of a world If is still deciding on, and say they must have been washed out to the Tattered Hem on some great tide at the very beginning of the Great Weaving.
The Isles can only be reached by sea, and the only passage there is aboard the Ferries of Fable (see below), whose Tideteller captains will take a StoryWeaver out and back, though most will warn them to hold on tight when crossing a Cliffhanger, and never, ever to wish for anything out loud on the way. The ferries dock at The Port of Possibility, the great harbour of the Isles. The Dev Archipelago, a small, separate group of islands within the Isles dedicated to game development education, is no exception to the rule of the sea, but its ferries land at the Selvedge Strand, the one shore of the Isles that never drifts.
The Dev Archipelago is the reason many young Threadlings first set eyes on the Isles. Venture herself, the Elder of the Isles, crosses the Sea of Sagas more often than any other Elder, and it is said she has ridden every kind of wave there is, including one Tall Tale that she swears was taller than the WeaveWatch Wale.
The only way to the Imagine Isles is aboard the Ferries of Fable, the small fleet of Tideteller ferries that sail from the Hem Harbour of Frays End. And no one aboard a Ferry of Fable simply crosses the sea. On the way, they live through an entire story.
A Ferry of Fable does not steer around the waves. It sails straight into them. As soon as the Last Lighthouse drops below the horizon, the ferry rides out onto a wave, and its passengers find themselves inside that wave's story, from the first line to the last. One crossing might be a voyage to the edge of every map in search of a fallen star. The next might be a race against a storm with a hold full of runaway wishes, or a long, slow drift through a Ballad that rhymes all the way to shore. No two crossings are ever the same story, and no passenger is ever told in advance which story they will get.
A crossing is never short of them. The Kraken of Chapter Nine reaches its great knitted arms over the rail, looking for a story it has not heard yet. The Sulking Serpent coils around the hull and will not let go until somebody makes it laugh. More than one island has turned out to be a sleeping turtle that would very much rather not be woken. Every sea monster on the Ferries of Fable can be outwitted, befriended, sung to sleep or told a better tale, and none is ever harmed. Most of them, the Tidetellers say, only wanted company.
The most famous pirates on the Sea of Sagas are the Plot Pirates, who sail a patchwork galleon called the Twist Ending under a black flag stitched with a question mark. They board ferries not for gold, but for endings. Unless a passenger can beat them at a riddle, a sea shanty or a duel of tall tales, the Plot Pirates will make off with the end of the story, and everyone aboard will have to make up a new one. Their captain, Bess BlackBinding, has never lost a duel of tall tales, though she has been known to cheat. Nobody aboard is ever hurt. A Plot Pirate's cutlass is a quill, and their cannon fire confetti.
Between the monsters and the pirates there is always an adventure: a treasure map that redraws itself whenever someone looks away, a mutiny settled by a vote and a pie, a night becalmed on top of a Cliffhanger, an island that is not on any chart, a rescue by a passing pod of Tomewhales. The story always ends, and the ferry always arrives.
However long the story feels, and some passengers swear they were at sea for a year and a day, a Ferry of Fable always arrives at the Port of Possibility (or, for learners bound for the Dev Archipelago, the Selvedge Strand) on the evening tide of the day it set sail. Its passengers step ashore with salt in their hair and a story they have lived, and the Tidetellers write it into the ferry's logbook. The journey home is a different story again. No one is ever lost overboard, and no ferry ever sinks. The story always brings its passengers home.
"You don't take a Ferry of Fable to get somewhere. You take it to have been somewhere."
-- Captain Maren CableKnit, Harbourmaster of the Hem Harbour
Swimming in the Sea of Sagas is not like swimming anywhere else. To swim in a wave is to swim through its story, and a swimmer who comes back to shore always comes back knowing it. Children of the Hem Harbour hop from wave to wave on summer afternoons, collecting stories the way other children collect shells, and arrive home a little wiser and very, very wet.
Swimmers learn three rules as soon as they can paddle:
- Swim with the story, never against it.
- Never swim in a Cliffhanger. You will be up there for days.
- If a wave begins to rhyme, it is a Ballad. Relax and let it carry you home.
The Tidetellers are the sailors, pilots, and ferry captains of the Sea of Sagas, and the only Threadlings who can read a wave at a glance. They keep their logbooks not as records of wind and weather, but as collections of the stories they have sailed through, and a Tideteller's logbook is worth more in Frays End than their ship.
Every Tideteller boat is sewn, not built. Hulls are quilted from layered canvas and patched with old book covers, sails are stitched from the flags of forgotten kingdoms, and every rope is cable-knitted by hand. By tradition, a boat is named after the first wave it ever rode, which is why the Hem Harbour is full of boats called things like The Wolf Who Wasn't, Three Wishes and a Spoon, and That Time With the Goat.
The most famous of them is Captain Maren CableKnit, harbourmaster of the Hem Harbour, who claims to have sailed through more stories than the EverLasting Library holds, and who has never once been known to tell the same one twice.
The Sea of Sagas is full of life, and much of it is full of stories. Its creatures are cared for fiercely by the Tidetellers, and nothing in the sea is ever hunted, netted, or harmed. Sailors say you do not catch anything in the Sea of Sagas. You only meet it.
The Tomewhales - Vast, slow, ancient whales whose hides are covered in barnacles shaped like letters. A Tomewhale's song is a single saga that takes a whole year to sing, and pods sing to one another across the sea, passing the oldest stories in Threadbare from one end of the water to the other. They are the only creatures who dive all the way to the Undercloth, and when they surface, they bring the old stories up with them.
ThimbleCrabs - Tiny hermit crabs who make their homes in lost thimbles, washed-up buttons, and the occasional abandoned inkwell. They are fussy about their houses and will trade up whenever something better washes ashore. Bree ButtonBoon is known to visit the beaches of the Hem Harbour, and is thought to be the only trader in Threadbare who has ever done business with a ThimbleCrab and come out even.
Blurbfish - Small, round fish that puff themselves up when startled and, while puffed, recite the most exciting parts of whatever story they swam through last, with none of the boring bits. Fishermen say you should never trust a Blurbfish's review.
The Void reaches even here. Far out, towards the Tattered Hem, sailors have begun to find patches of water they call the Slack: flat, grey stretches of sea where the waves have stopped telling anything at all. In the Slack, the water lies still and colourless, like a thread with no tension in it. A boat that drifts into the Slack loses its wind, and its crew begin to forget why they set sail in the first place.
The Tidetellers have learned the only cure there is. When a boat drifts into the Slack, the whole crew gathers on deck and tells a story out loud, together, as loudly as they can. More often than not, the water begins to ripple again, a small wave rises beneath the hull, and carries them home. Professor Alfeus AllPatch has noted that the Slack spreads fastest where the fewest ships now sail, which is why Captain CableKnit insists that the Hem Harbour must never, ever stop sending boats out to sea.
"A calm sea never made a good saga. But a silent one never made anything at all."
-- Old Tideteller saying
The Sea of Sagas is the great western sea of Threadbare, and the water that lies between Frays End and the Imagine Isles. It gives the world a sense of scale and adventure: the feeling that beyond the harbour wall there is always another story waiting to break.
In the main narrative, the Sea of Sagas is the route to the Imagine Isles and the Dev Archipelago, and a natural setting for voyages, crossings aboard the Ferries of Fable, set pieces on the water, and encounters with the creatures of the deep. The Slack offers a gentle, sea-going form of Void threat, in which the answer is always to tell a story together.
The Sea of Sagas is a playful, open setting for StoryQuests and LoreQuests alike, and every wave is an invitation. A few guidelines:
- Every wave is a story. A quest set at sea can drop the StoryWeaver into the story of a single wave, and each wave type (Epic, Ballad, Fable, Limerick, Tall Tale, Cliffhanger, Riddle, Lullaby) suggests its own style of quest.
- Every crossing is a story. A voyage aboard the Ferries of Fable is a ready-made StoryQuest: a self-contained adventure that begins at the Hem Harbour and ends at the Port of Possibility or the Selvedge Strand. Sea monsters are outwitted or befriended, never harmed. Pirates steal endings, not treasure. Everyone arrives on the evening tide.
- Stories from every shore. Because the sea carries stories from one land to another, it is a natural home for sea stories and seafaring folklore from every culture of Earth, retold in Threadbare's own voice.
- Creatures of the deep are gentle. The sea's creatures may be enormous, mysterious, mischievous, or a little bit spooky in the fog, but they are never cruel, and they are never hurt. Nothing is hunted, netted, or harmed. See the Content Guidelines.
- No one is ever lost at sea. Boats may be becalmed in the Slack, spun round by a Riddle, or stranded at the top of a Cliffhanger, but the sea always brings its travellers home. Boats may be taken by the Void, gently and in the world's own language, but never wrecked, sunk, or drowned.
- New creatures and new waves are welcome. New creatures should follow the Naming Conventions, pairing a story or craft word with a familiar sea creature (Blurbfish, Tomewhale, ThimbleCrab).
- If - the FirstSpun of Imagination, the Spinner, whose Imagination the sea is woven from
- Once - the FirstSpun of Memory, said to keep the Undercloth
- Frays End - whose Hem Harbour and Last Lighthouse look out over the sea
- The Port of Possibility - the harbour of the Imagine Isles, where the Ferries of Fable dock
- The Imagine Isles - the drifting archipelago on the sea's far western edge, including the Dev Archipelago
- Venture - Elder of the Imagine Isles, and the sea's most frequent Elder traveller
- The Fraying - whose tattered hem runs out to sea as the Tattered Hem
- The Void - whose deep currents lie beyond the Tattered Hem, and which brings the Slack
- The Mythical Meadows - which lie far beyond the Last Lighthouse
- Bree ButtonBoon - the only trader known to deal fairly with ThimbleCrabs
- The University of the Unseen - whose Observists study tidal retelling
- The Sea of Stolen Dreams - the small, quiet sea of the Drowsy Downs
- The Odyssey Ocean - the vast ocean to the East, beyond the SunSpun Sands
- Content Guidelines - including the rules on animals, loss, and the Void