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WeaveWater
"Half of Threadbare is wearing WeaveWater, and most of it doesn't know."
-- A WeaveWater saying
WeaveWater is a river town of weavers on the edge of The Fraying, the town that wove cloth for all of Threadbare. For as long as anyone can remember, its looms have clattered from dawn to dusk along the banks of the Long Warp, and its finished bolts have travelled downriver to Frays End and beyond. It is also home to the Calling House, where the Sacred Sewing Machine rests, and where every StoryWeaver in history has been made.
WeaveWater wove for everyone. In the end, it forgot to weave for itself.
| Known as | The Town That Wove for Everyone |
| Type | Settlement |
| Region | The Fraying, a few days' walk from Frays End, downriver of LinenVille |
| Residents | Weavers, dyers, bargefolk and their families |
| Notable residents | Arun ArrasWeave, Maddie MadderMoss, Mabel MillRace, Ossie OverShot, Tibb TwillTwist |
| Trades in | Woven and dyed cloth of every kind, sold in market towns across Threadbare |
| Core Thread | Spirit |
| Famous for | Its water mills and the finest weaves in Threadbare, the Calling House, and the Sacred Sewing Machine |
| Status | Abandoned, with the Void closing in |
| Themes | Community, Craft, Calling for Help, Giving, Neglect |
The river runs dead straight through the middle of WeaveWater, like a warp thread pulled taut across a loom, and the Threadlings call it the Long Warp. The town's looms are built along both banks and worked by waterwheels, so that the river itself does half the weaving.
Long ago, the weavers of WeaveWater noticed that the Long Warp never stopped moving, and wondered why their looms should. So they built waterwheels along its banks, and set the river to work.
Today a whole street of mills lines each bank, each with its great wheel turning in the current. The wheels drive long wooden shafts that run beneath the floors of the weaving sheds, and from the shafts run leather belts to every loom in the building, so that a single wheel can drive a hundred looms at once. A weaver need only guide the threads. The river does the rest.
The mills are the pride of the town, and every one of them has a name and a character. The oldest is the Great Wheel, which has turned without stopping since before anyone can remember and creaks in a low, steady voice that WeaveWater children say is the river talking. Upstream, where the water falls fastest, stand the Overshot Mills, whose wheels are fed from above by wooden channels and spin so quickly that their looms must be watched every moment. Downstream, the broad Undershot Mills turn slowly and patiently in the deep water, and weave the heaviest cloth. Between them all runs the Mill Race, a stone channel that carries the river from wheel to wheel, so that the same water turns every mill in town before it leaves.
Because the river does the heavy work, WeaveWater's weavers have time for care, and care is what made their cloth famous. A WeaveWater weave is tighter, truer and more even than any woven by hand alone, and it holds its pattern for generations.
Each season the Long Warp runs at a different pace, and each pace makes a different cloth. The weavers of WeaveWater learned long ago to weave with the river, not against it, and the most famous weaves in all of Threadbare were born of this.
- RiverTwill - The everyday cloth of WeaveWater, woven all year round on the Undershot Mills. Hard-wearing, diagonal-ribbed and nearly impossible to tear, it is the cloth of every travelling coat, sailor's jacket and wagon cover in Threadbare. They say a RiverTwill coat will outlast three owners and remember all of them.
- WheelCheck - A bright check pattern whose squares are counted out by the turns of the waterwheel, so every mill weaves its own check. A Threadling who knows their mills can tell from a tablecloth which wheel in WeaveWater turned it.
- RippleWeave - A light, shimmering cloth woven only on the Overshot Mills, where the water runs fastest. Held up to the light it seems to move like water, and on a breezy day a RippleWeave scarf looks as though it is still flowing downriver.
- SlackWater Lawn - The finest, sheerest cloth in Threadbare, woven only in high summer, when the river runs low and slow and the wheels turn gently enough for the most delicate thread. It is so light that a whole bolt can be folded into a walnut shell. LinenVille has been trying to match it for three hundred years.
- HighWater Brocade - The rarest and most treasured of all. It can only be woven during the spring floods, for a few days each year, when the Long Warp roars and the Great Wheel turns faster than at any other time. Its patterns are rich, raised and full of colour, and it is woven only for celebrations: wedding cloths, festival banners and the canopies of the Performance Playa. To own a scrap of HighWater Brocade is to own a little of WeaveWater's spring.
"Weave with the river, never against it. The river was here first."
-- The first rule of the WeaveWater mills
No WeaveWater cloth leaves the town undyed. Before it reaches the world's market towns, every bolt passes through the hands of the Dyers, and the Dyers work on the walls.
The old town walls of WeaveWater are lined, inside and out, with great dye vats of copper, stone and seasoned oak, set into the stonework in long rows like the pots on a giant's stove. Each vat holds a single colour, and each colour has its place on the wall, so that walking the full circuit of the walls takes you through every colour in Threadbare, in order. Visitors are told to start at Madder Gate, where the reds begin, and to finish at the Indigo Steps, where the blues grow so deep they are nearly night.
The Dyers are a family trade as old as the mills. They mix their colours from plants, roots, berries, barks and minerals gathered from across Threadbare, and from the inks of the InkKeepers, set fast with MordantMaples bark, so that a WeaveWater colour never fades or runs. Their greatest skill is pattern. By binding, folding, waxing and stitching the cloth before it goes into the vat, and by dipping it again and again in different colours, the Dyers can draw patterns into the cloth itself: river ripples, falling leaves, starbursts, and house patterns that seem to shimmer from one colour into the next. Some of their patterns take a whole season and a hundred dips to finish, and are passed from Dyer to apprentice by word of mouth alone, never written down.
The rinse water runs off the walls in little stone channels and down into the Long Warp, so that for a stretch below the town the river runs in ribbons of colour. Threadlings call it the Rainbow Reach, and say you can tell what the Dyers are working on that week just by looking at the water.
Only once a bolt has been dyed, rinsed and dried on the Drying Lines is it ready for Bolt Day, and for the market towns beyond.
"The weavers give it strength. The river gives it patience. We give it something to say."
-- Maddie MadderMoss - Master Dyer of the Walls
WeaveWater's bridges are not ordinary bridges. Each one is an enormous loom, and cloth is woven across the river as you walk over it. No bridge looks the same two days running, and children race to be the first across in the morning to see what pattern the night has left behind.
Endless lengths of freshly dyed cloth hang on lines strung between the rooftops to dry, in every colour that came off the walls that morning. From the hills above, WeaveWater looks like a town dressed in bunting for a party that never ends.
You hear WeaveWater long before you see it. From dawn to dusk the looms clatter, and the Threadlings say the town has a heartbeat. When one loom falls quiet, the neighbours knock on the weaver's door to check that all is well.
Every WeaveWater family weaves its own pattern, a signature in cloth passed down from one generation to the next. Patchlings learn to weave their own name into their family pattern before they can write it. A WeaveWater blanket in any home in Threadbare will tell you exactly which family made it, if you know how to read it.
Once a season, the finished, dyed cloth of WeaveWater is rolled into bolts, loaded onto barges and sent down the Long Warp to Frays End and beyond. The whole town turns out on the banks to wave it off, and there is singing, and there are far too many pies. Most of the cloth in Threadbare began its life as a WeaveWater bolt.
WeaveWater weaves, and LinenVille spins and bleaches, and the two towns have bickered fondly for centuries over whose work matters more. Flax comes upriver from LinenVille's FoldFlax fields, and wool from the BobbleBleats grazing the hills above the town. Dyes come from the InkKeepers of The Ink Well, whose MordantMaples bark makes WeaveWater's colours hold fast. SpindleHops nest in the soft heaps of offcuts behind the weaving sheds, and nobody has the heart to move them.
At the heart of WeaveWater stands a round hall with a low, patched roof: the Calling House. Its walls are hung with every Calling Cloth ever sewn, the oldest so faded that their stitches can barely be seen. In the middle of the floor, beneath a quilt pieced from offcuts of every house pattern in town, rests the Sacred Sewing Machine.
The Sacred Sewing Machine was made by Threadlings. Not by the FirstSpun (If, Once and Ever), and not by The Elders, but by ordinary Threadlings, in the frightened early days of the world, after Knot abandoned the Eternal Loom and the Elders were still few. Tired of waiting to be saved, a gathering of Threadlings from every early community came together in WeaveWater and built it themselves. Each brought one part: spinners brought the spool, weavers brought the treadle, smiths brought the needle, and storytellers brought the first thread. Nobody's name is on it, and WeaveWater is quietly proud of that.
The Elders call it sacred because it was the first thing in Threadbare to surprise them. Nothing the FirstSpun had made had ever made something of its own.
A loom makes new cloth from thread. A sewing machine joins together pieces that already exist. Every other being in Threadbare was woven. A StoryWeaver is sewn, pieced together from the world as it already is.
"The FirstSpun made the world. The Elders keep it. Threadlings made the StoryWeaver."
-- Saying of the Calling House
A StoryWeaver cannot be called by one Threadling alone, however great their need. Not a king, not a sorcerer, not an Elder. The Sacred Sewing Machine wakes only when a whole community calls together.
- In a time of great need, a community hangs a Calling Cloth in its square, or wherever its people gather.
- Every Threadling sews a single stitch into it, and pins on a scrap of something they could not finish: half a sock, an unsent letter, a song with no last verse.
- Every Calling Cloth finds its way to WeaveWater, by barge, by caravan, or in a Patchling's satchel, and is hung in the Calling House.
- When enough stitches have been sewn, by enough different hands, the Sacred Sewing Machine hums awake and sews a StoryWeaver from the scraps on the cloth.
A StoryWeaver wakes carrying a little of everyone who called for them. This is why no two StoryWeavers are ever alike, and why every one of them feels, without quite knowing why, that they owe something to people they have never met.
So every StoryWeaver in history was made in WeaveWater, and not one of them has ever stayed. They are sewn in the Calling House and sent out to wherever they were called from, and the town waves them off from the banks of the Long Warp, as it waves off the cloth on Bolt Day. WeaveWater makes heroes for everyone else, and says goodbye at the door.
The Void did not take WeaveWater all at once. It came the way it always comes, by neglect.
As the Fraying crept closer, the towns downriver fell quiet one by one, and the orders stopped coming. With no one to weave for, the looms stopped too, one at a time. The wheels were lifted from the water, mill by mill, until only the Great Wheel still turned, and the Clack grew thinner, until one morning there was none at all. WeaveWater had spent so long weaving for everyone else that it had woven very little for itself, and when the silence came, there were too few of its own stories left to hold it back. Void Creep crept across the Loom Bridges, the dye vats on the walls dried to grey crusts, the Rainbow Reach ran clear, and the colour drained out of the Drying Lines. Most of the town packed what it could carry and left.
Before they left, the last Threadlings of WeaveWater remembered the oldest custom they had. For the first time in its history, WeaveWater hung a Calling Cloth for itself.
Each of them stitched in a scrap of something they could not finish: a half-woven house pattern, a Patchling's name only half learned, a Bolt Day song with no last verse. Tibb TwillTwist carried the cloth through the empty square to the Calling House. Arun ArrasWeave stayed behind to sew the final stitch.
The Sacred Sewing Machine hummed awake, and the StoryWeaver of this story was sewn from WeaveWater's last loose ends. They woke unfinished, because the call came late, from a town already leaving. See Threadbare Plot.
"StoryWeaver, I'm so glad you've come."
-- Arun ArrasWeave - Weaver of WeaveWater
- Arun ArrasWeave - A young weaver, and the last Threadling left in WeaveWater. He never finished weaving his own house pattern. He sewed the final stitch of the Last Calling, and walks with the StoryWeaver to Frays End.
- Mabel MillRace - Keeper of the Calling House, who knew the story behind every Calling Cloth on its walls. Her family kept the Mill Race clear for generations before her.
- Ossie OverShot - Bargemaster of Bolt Day, who has steered more cloth down the Long Warp than anyone alive, and says so. Born in the Overshot Mills, and named for them.
- Maddie MadderMoss - Master Dyer of the Walls, whose hands have been stained a different colour every day of her life. She knows every pattern the Dyers have ever made, and has never written one down.
- Tibb TwillTwist - The Patchling who carried the last Calling Cloth through the square.
WeaveWater is where the StoryWeaver's story begins, and the place that shows most plainly what the Void costs: not a single great catastrophe, but a busy, generous town that slowly fell silent. It establishes from the very first scene that a StoryWeaver is made by a community calling for help, and that every StoryWeaver carries a debt of love to people they have never met. As WeaveWater stands on the Fraying, rather than inside the Void, it is not beyond saving.
- Listen for the Clack. A WeaveWater scene is full of sound: looms, waterwheels, shuttles and singing. When it is quiet, something is wrong.
- Every colour has its place. The dye vats run around the walls in order, from the reds of Madder Gate to the blues of the Indigo Steps. Dyers' patterns are drawn into the cloth by binding, folding, waxing and stitching before dyeing.
- Weave with the river. Every famous WeaveWater weave depends on the river's pace and the season. New weaves should follow the same rule, and be named in the joined style of RiverTwill and WheelCheck.
- Everything is woven. Bridges, blankets, banners and bunting. Every family has its own house pattern.
- Many hands. WeaveWater's stories are about people doing things together. The Sacred Sewing Machine was built by many hands, and a Calling can only be made by many voices.
- No one is lost for good. The townsfolk who left WeaveWater are scattered across Threadbare, not gone. See Content Guidelines.
Open threads to settle as the entry firms up:
- The society of the Calling. The Threadlings who keep the custom of the Calling need a name. Candidates: the Sewing Circle, the Common Thread, the Calling Circle.
- The Sacred Sewing Machine may need a page of its own.
- After the Last Calling. The Sacred Sewing Machine leaves WeaveWater with the StoryWeaver and rests in The EverLasting Library until their story is finished. Whether WeaveWater can be rewoven, and its first loom turned again, is still to be decided.
- StoryWeaver - sewn in the Calling House, every one of them
- Threadbare Plot - which begins in WeaveWater
- LinenVille - upriver neighbours and fond rivals, who spin what WeaveWater weaves
- Frays End - where WeaveWater's bolts were carried on Bolt Day
- The EverLasting Library - where the Sacred Sewing Machine rests after the Last Calling
- The Fraying - the frayed edge of the world where WeaveWater stands
- The Void - which came to WeaveWater by neglect
- BobbleBleats - whose wool fills WeaveWater's looms
- FoldFlax - spun in LinenVille, woven in WeaveWater
- MordantMaples - whose bark makes WeaveWater's colours hold fast
- The World of Threadbare - the lore, landscape and denizens of Threadbare
TBC
TBC