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Threadbare Plot

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Stephen Reid edited this page Oct 4, 2026 · 59 revisions

Status: In development. This page sets out the first full plot for the main body of Threadbare: the LoreQuests of the StoryWeaver's journey. Details will change as the plot is refined. Where this page and another wiki page disagree, raise it with Creative Direction.

Summary

In the beginning, the FirstSpun, If, Once and Ever, wove the Great Weave on the First Loom. On it they wove Knot, the first Elder and the only one woven by all three of them, and sent Knot down to the Great Weave with the Loom, from then on called the Eternal Loom, to continue the creation of the world. The Loom was made with three elements, one gift from each of the FirstSpun: If's Spindle, Once's Warp Stones and Ever's Shuttle. Together they let it make things that had never existed before. The Loom is powered by stories, and it works almost on its own: every new story told anywhere in the world becomes new thread, and the Loom weaves it into new life.

Then Knot discovered the Song Sanctuaries, a whole land that sang, and could not bear it. In the first of their Three Denials, Knot refused to weave another new thing, abandoned the Loom, and renamed themselves Not. For thousands of years, Not wandered the Great Weave looking for ways to slow its growth, while the Loom went on weaving without them, and the world both grew and grew worn, until it was threadbare.

Seeing that Knot no longer kept the world, and in answer to the First Denial, the FirstSpun wove new Elders and sent them to the Great Weave. Three of them, the LoomWardens Whim, Echo and Vigil, were set apart to keep the Eternal Loom and carry on its work. Echo went looking for Not, and failed to convince them that remembering the world would help: in the second Denial, Not tore the pages from their book and scattered them across the world. Not went last to the KnitWitches and asked them to cast off the world. The KnitWitches told Not it could not be done, for creation will go on for ever. Betrayed and hopeless, Not made the third and final Denial, renamed themselves Null, and disappeared into the Interstice, the gaps in the Weave.

Thousands of years passed. Then came the LoomLight Festival at LoomLit, and the Legacy of Bobbin Blench: the Void was born, and began to creep across the world. It woke Null, who saw in it the chance of true perfection: a perfect world of nothing. Null returned to Frays End, where the Elders refused them ("Gone is not the same as nothing"), and stole the three elements from the Eternal Loom, leaving it able to mend, but never again to create. Null built each element into a dark loom of its own, the three Denial Looms, and hid them in fortresses scattered across the realms, where they give life to creatures made to help the Void along: InkDrinkers, MemoryMoths and Storyvores. Then Null marched the Obscurists North and took the Observatory of the Unseen, the academic heart of Threadbare and home of the lenses that can see the whole world.

Many years have passed since. The Void has grown, devouring whole regions and creeping ever closer to Frays End, while Null watches the world fall from the WeaveWatch Wale, in what is now the Observatory of the Obscure. The Eternal Loom still turns at the centre of Frays End, and it can still mend: when an old story is found and brought back to it, the world is healed and the Void held back. But it cannot renew. Nothing new is woven, and the world no longer grows.

The Weave has need of a StoryWeaver. And so, in WeaveWater, the Threadlings call for one, and the Sacred Sewing Machine sews them: to find and relive the world's stories, to recover the three elements, to make the Eternal Loom whole again, and to save Threadbare and the Great Weave.

Timeline

The Beginning

  1. The Great Weaving. The FirstSpun, If, Once and Ever, weave the Great Weave on the First Loom (see The Great Weaving).
  2. Knot is woven. The FirstSpun weave Knot, the first Elder, on the First Loom, and send them to the Great Weave with it, as the Eternal Loom, to continue the creation of the world.

The Fall

  1. The First Denial: Not. Knot discovers the Song Sanctuaries and cannot bear them. They refuse to weave anything new, abandon the Eternal Loom, and rename themselves Not.
  2. The long wandering. Thousands of years pass. Not wanders the Great Weave looking for ways to slow its growth, while the Loom weaves on without them. The world both grows and grows worn, until it is threadbare, and that is how it comes by its name.
  3. The Elders are sent. Seeing that Knot no longer keeps the world, and in answer to the First Denial, the FirstSpun weave new Elders and send them to the Great Weave. Three, the LoomWardens Whim, Echo and Vigil, are set apart to keep the Eternal Loom and continue its work.
  4. The Second Denial: None. Echo fails to convince Not that remembering the world will help. Not tears the pages from their book and scatters them across the world (see The Unbound Book).
  5. The Third Denial: Never. Not asks the KnitWitches to cast off the world. They tell Not it is not possible, and that creation will go on for ever. Betrayed and hopeless, Not makes the third and final Denial, renames themselves Null, and disappears into the Interstice.

The Exile

  1. The long exile. Thousands of years pass, with Null hidden in the Interstice.

The Return

  1. The Void is born. The Legacy of Bobbin Blench unfolds at LoomLit, and the Void is born and begins to creep across the world (see The Legacy of Bobbin Blench). Null wakes, and sees in the Void an opportunity for true perfection.
  2. The Theft of the Elements. Null returns to Frays End and steals the three elements from the Eternal Loom, leaving it able to mend, but no longer to create.
  3. The Denial Looms. Null builds each element into a dark loom of its own, and hides the three looms in fortresses scattered across the realms. The looms give life to creatures made to help the Void: InkDrinkers, MemoryMoths and Storyvores (see The Denial Looms).
  4. The Fall of the Observatory. Null marches North and takes the Observatory of the Unseen, the academic heart of Threadbare and home of the lenses that can see everything in the world. It becomes the Observatory of the Obscure (see The Fall of the Observatory of the Unseen).
  5. The Void grows. Many years pass. The Void devours entire regions and creeps ever closer to Frays End. Null watches the world fall from the WeaveWatch Wale.

The StoryWeaver

  1. The Last Calling. The StoryWeaver is sewn on the Sacred Sewing Machine in WeaveWater (see WeaveWater).
  2. The StoryWeaver's journey. To find and relive stories, to recover the three elements and make the Eternal Loom whole, and to save Threadbare and the Great Weave (see The Story, below).
flowchart TD
  subgraph B["The Beginning"]
    B1["The Great Weaving<br/>The FirstSpun weave the Great Weave on the First Loom"] --> B2["Knot, the first Elder, is woven<br/>and sent to the Great Weave with the Eternal Loom"]
  end
  subgraph F["The Fall"]
    F1["The First Denial: NOT<br/>Knot discovers the Song Sanctuaries, abandons the Loom and becomes Not"] --> F2["Thousands of years pass<br/>Not wanders; the world grows, and grows threadbare"]
    F2 --> F3["The Elders are sent<br/>The LoomWardens keep the Eternal Loom"]
    F3 --> F4["The Second Denial: NONE<br/>Echo fails; Not tears the pages from their book"]
    F4 --> F5["The Third Denial: NEVER<br/>The KnitWitches cannot cast off the world; Not becomes Null"]
  end
  subgraph X["The Exile"]
    X1["Null disappears into the Interstice<br/>Thousands of years pass"]
  end
  subgraph R["The Return"]
    R1["The Legacy of Bobbin Blench<br/>The Void is born; Null wakes"] --> R2["The Theft of the Elements<br/>Null steals them from the Eternal Loom at Frays End"]
    R2 --> R3["The three Denial Looms<br/>hidden in fortresses; the Fray are woven"]
    R3 --> R4["The Fall of the Observatory<br/>Null marches North and takes the Observatory of the Unseen"]
    R4 --> R5["Many years pass<br/>The Void creeps towards Frays End; Null watches"]
  end
  subgraph S["The StoryWeaver"]
    S1["The Last Calling<br/>The StoryWeaver is sewn on the Sacred Sewing Machine"] --> S2["The journey<br/>Find the stories, recover the elements, make the Loom whole"]
  end
  B2 --> F1
  F5 --> X1
  X1 --> R1
  R5 --> S1
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The Denial Looms

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 Song Sanctuaries The Tacet Tower
The Never Loom Ever Ever's Shuttle Storyvores The Remnant Realms The Lost Library

See The Denial Looms for the full story of each Loom and its fortress.

The Story

Prologue: The Last Calling

The StoryWeaver is sewn on the Sacred Sewing Machine, in the Calling House of WeaveWater, a river town of weavers on the edge of the Fraying. Every StoryWeaver in history was sewn here. The Void has taken almost all of WeaveWater, but not the Calling House, which is held up by every stitch ever sewn there. The town's last Threadlings hung a Calling Cloth for their own town, each stitching in a scrap of something they could not finish, and Arun ArrasWeave stayed behind to sew the final stitch. The StoryWeaver is sewn from those last loose ends, and wakes unfinished, alone, and unsure that stories matter at all. With Arun, they set out for Frays End.

Act One: Frays End

At the centre of Frays End stands the Eternal Loom, still turning, with three empty sockets where its elements once sat. There the StoryWeaver meets the LoomWardens, Whim, Echo and Vigil, and learns what Null took: the Loom can mend the world, but it can no longer make anything new.

The StoryWeaver makes a home in the EverLasting Library, where Page SpineStitch gives them Frith FrayWalker's Letter, the last words of the Elder who walked into the Void, found floating beside the Tangled Temple in the Ink Well. It is their first deep encounter with what the Void really costs. At the water's edge, the Elder Yearn sets a lantern on the water each evening for the lost Lucent Lakes. In Gather the Scattered Wisps, the StoryWeaver crosses the Void-touched waters beyond Frays End to find the WishWisps the Void has scattered and guide each one home. One stays as their companion, and because Yearn vouches for them, it gifts them its wishes freely.

Act One ends with the LoomWardens' charge: find Null's three Denial Looms, destroy them, and bring the elements home.

Act Two: The Three Denial Looms

The three arcs can be played in any order. Each is a reversal of one of Null's Denials, guided by the LoomWarden of that gift. No arc goes straight to its Loom. Each Loom is hidden, and the StoryWeaver must find it through a journey across Threadbare: following clues, solving puzzles, trading for help, winning over allies, and fighting off the Fray. Each arc ends in the Loom's fortress with a boss battle, after which the StoryWeaver destroys the Denial Loom, takes back its element, and returns it to the Eternal Loom.

  • The Not Loom, with Whim. Not is reversed by imagining something new. Aboard the Ferries of Fable, the only boats to the Isles, the StoryWeaver sails to The Imagine Isles, where Venture shows them the Blank Bolts lying empty: nothing new has drifted in for a year. The trail leads to The Ink Well, where the springs of ink are running dry and InkDrinkers swarm the punt routes. With the help of the InkKeepers, and the clue in Frith's Letter, the StoryWeaver makes the long, hard journey deep into the swamp to The BlotWorks, a vast ink extraction rig of pipes, pumps and levers that Null built to drain the Ink Well and pull out its Inklings, so that no new idea could ever be had. The InkKeepers give the StoryWeaver two tools: ink, to write and draw things into existence, and water, to wash away redactions and drive off the Smudgers. Across the rig, the StoryWeaver rescues captured Inklings in puzzle after puzzle, and every Inkling freed makes their ink stronger. The final climb is the Blotted Spire, the rig's great derrick, shaped like a giant fountain pen, where the drained ink turns the InkWheel that drives the Not Loom. At the summit, the guardian, a vast InkDrinker queen, can only be beaten by diluting her.
  • The None Loom, with Echo. None is reversed by remembering what was lost. In LinenVille, the Press has stayed shut and the town has stopped airing its histories. Beneath it, in The Memoir Mines, the StoryWeaver relights the tunnels by telling stories aloud and restores the name of the Village Unmade, and learns from Moss MothBane that the pitches MemoryMoths cannot bear are kept in the Song Sanctuaries. At the Performance Playa, the Rag King, Rook RagRavel, knows the way, and for a price his Tattered Troupe teaches the StoryWeaver their songs and leads them across the SunSpun Sands to The Song Sanctuaries. There, with the help of Refrain RoundSong and the Order of the Humming Hem, they climb The Tacet Tower, a ruined bell tower wrapped in grey felt, where every sound is swallowed. Armed with ChimeStones and the Troupe's songs, they face a series of sound-based challenges floor by floor, and at the top they must ring the silenced bells in the right order and at the right time to drive off the Tower's guardian, a giant moth.
  • The Never Loom, with Vigil. Never is reversed by passing things on. In HemsHollow, Peg PomPocket teaches the StoryWeaver the PomPuff lure she used at the Battle of HemsHollow, because Storyvores can never resist a PomPuff. From there the StoryWeaver follows the Ruined Road into The Remnant Realms, the floating remains of a people no one remembers. The journey is one of precision grappling from island to island, while the Void eats the ground away and packs of Storyvores of many kinds try to stop them. The Realms' silent Bygones and Unnamed point the way through directional puzzles and locked doors, to the last and highest island of all, and the ruin of The Lost Library. There the Never Loom weaves Storyvores, and its guardian, BookBelly, a giant three-headed Storyvore swollen with every ending in the Library, waits beside it.

As each element returns, the Eternal Loom begins to recover a little of what it lost. When all three are home, it is whole again, and for the first time since Null stole its elements it weaves something new.

Act Three: The Battle for Frays End

The final battle comes in two parts.

The Observatory of the Obscure. With the Eternal Loom whole, the StoryWeaver travels North through the WeaveWatch Wale and across the floating peaks of the Absurdity Abyss to the Observatory of the Obscure, to drive out the Obscurists and Null with them. They sneak, battle, grapple and puzzle their way up through the Observatory, helped by an Observist of the University of the Unseen who has been trapped there since Null took it. But when they reach Null's chamber at the top, it is empty. Through the Observatory's great lenses, which can see the whole world, the StoryWeaver sees where Null has gone: Null is leading the Obscurists and the Fray in an attack on Frays End, to take the restored Eternal Loom.

Frays End. The StoryWeaver races home through a WormHole opened by the Grand BookWorm beneath the EverLasting Library, and finds Frays End under siege. The last battle is fought at the Eternal Loom, against Null. Null fights with the Three Denials themselves, unravelling everything they touch, and the StoryWeaver answers each with the restored gifts of the FirstSpun: there is always something new to imagine, gone is not the same as nothing, and lasting is passing on. Null is defeated, but not destroyed, and not redeemed. They step back into a gap between the threads, into the Interstice, and are gone. Null endures, as absence always does. But the Unweaving fails, the world begins to knit back together, and the Void draws back to the edges of the world.

Finale: The LoomLight at Frays End

For the first time since LoomLit was lost to the Void, the LoomLight Festival is held, recreated at Frays End as a celebration of the Void's defeat. The Hand Binding string is passed not to a single keeper but hand to hand through every community, in remembrance of Ever. The StoryWeaver ends the journey as a confident creator and keeper of stories, and an inspiration to others. The Weave is not finished. It never is. But it holds.

Key Characters

  • The StoryWeaver - the player; sewn on the Sacred Sewing Machine in WeaveWater, at the Last Calling
  • The LoomWardens - Echo (Once), Whim (If), and Vigil (Ever), the Keepers of the Eternal Loom, from whom Null stole its elements, and who guide the three arcs
  • Null - the first Elder, woven as Knot, maker of the three Denial Looms, and the enduring antagonist
  • The Obscurists - Null's followers
  • Frith FrayWalker - Elder lost to the Void, met through her letter
  • Venture - Elder of the Imagine Isles, who sets the StoryWeaver on the trail of the Not Loom
  • Rook RagRavel - the Rag King, whose Tattered Troupe teaches the StoryWeaver their songs, and who leads them to the Song Sanctuaries, for a price
  • Moss MothBane - Sister of the Humming Hem, who knows the pitches MemoryMoths cannot bear
  • Peg PomPocket - the PomPuff Collector of HemsHollow, who teaches the StoryWeaver how to lure Storyvores
  • Pell PealKeeper and Tamber ToneForge - the Tacet Tower's last bellringer, and the SongSmith who forges ChimeStones
  • The Bygones and the Unnamed - the silent ghosts of the Remnant Realms, who point the StoryWeaver to clues
  • Refrain RoundSong - Cantor of the Order of the Humming Hem, ally in the Song Sanctuaries
  • The Observist - a scientist of the University of the Unseen, trapped in the Observatory of the Obscure (name in development)
  • Bree ButtonBoon - the Button Collector, met throughout the journey
  • Rune and Muse - keepers of the LoreQuests and StoryQuests
  • Page SpineStitch - Chief Librarian of the EverLasting Library, the StoryWeaver's home in Frays End
  • Woal WickWeaver - Lamplighter of Frays End and keeper of the Book of Keepers, who leads the LoomLight's return
  • Yearn - Keeper of What Is Missed, whose trust brings the Wisps to the StoryWeaver
  • WishWisps - scattered by the Void and gathered home; one becomes the StoryWeaver's companion, and gifts them its wishes

Key Places

Still in Development

  • Names for the guardians of the BlotWorks and the Tacet Tower (the Lost Library's is BookBelly). Candidates for the BlotWorks: Queen Quench, Mother Murk, the Gall, the Brimming, Sepia. For the Tacet Tower: the Diminuendo, Pianissima, Old Muffle, the Grand Rest
  • The kinds of MemoryMoth in the Tacet Tower and of Storyvore in the Remnant Realms (working names on their pages)
  • The Observist's name, and the other Elders' roles in the story
  • A new name for the WeaveWatch Wale, which is easily confused with WeaveWater

Connections

  • StoryWeaver - the player, sewn in WeaveWater when a community calls for help
  • The Denial Looms - Null's three looms, the Not Loom, the None Loom and the Never Loom
  • The Eternal Loom - the loom of the FirstSpun, at the heart of Frays End
  • The Elders - the Elders of the Eternal Loom
  • Null - the Dark Elder and enduring antagonist
  • The Obscurists - Null's followers
  • The Fray - the creatures woven on the Denial Looms
  • Frays End - the last bastion of hope against the Void
  • The EverLasting Library - the eternal repository of story at Frays End
  • Yearn - Keeper of What Is Missed, child of Once
  • WishWisps - lights of hope, born of the Lucent Lakes
  • The Observatory of the Obscure - Null's lair, formerly the Observatory of the Unseen
  • If - the FirstSpun of Imagination, the Spinner
  • Once - the FirstSpun of Memory, the Weaver
  • Ever - the FirstSpun of Spirit, the Binder

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