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Whim
Name: Whim
Title / Role: LoomWarden of Imagination, Keeper of the Eternal Loom
Order: The Elders of the Eternal Loom
Parent: If
Core Thread: Imagination
Home: The Eternal Loom, Frays End
Status: Active
Themes: Spontaneity, Wonder, Play, Surprise, Responsibility
"The trouble with plans is they only ever go where you tell them"
-- Whim
Whim is a child of If, and one of the three LoomWardens: the Elders committed to the care of the Eternal Loom at Frays End. Where his fellow LoomWardens keep the Loom's memory and its will to endure, Whim keeps its imagination - the possibility in every thread for something no one expected.
He laughs easily and often, asks more questions than he answers, and hums half-finished tunes while he works. Younger Threadlings are sometimes surprised to find a LoomWarden so light of heart. The other Elders are not quite so easy going. Weavelings know Whim's lightness is a discipline, practiced through long ages of watching the Void take more than any Elder can mend.
Whim is bowed like all Elders, but less than most; he is said to stand up straighter whenever something delights him. His eyes filled with light. He wears purples and lilacs, patched with small, bright, mismatched scraps gathered from every corner of Threadbare. His book is the lightest of the LoomWardens' - a slim, much-folded volume of possibilities, full of pages that some say you can jump into and visit, entirely new worlds held within. There is a certain story of a book thief who is still lost in there somewhere.
The Elders tell this story of how Whim came to be.
When the FirstSpun wove the first Elders on the Eternal Loom, every thread was measured and meant. Each had its place in the warp before it was spun. But partway through the weaving, If stopped, laughed at something none of the others could see, and spun one more thread that no one had asked for.
Once manifested, there was no place set for it in the warp, and a thread with no place, Once said, would only drift. Ever said nothing at all, took the shuttle, and wove the thread in anyway, right where it had fallen. When the cloth was cut free, there stood an Elder no one had planned for, blinking in delighted at everything around it.
If named him Whim, for he had been woven on one. Once, frowned and then laughed, and Ever was the first to embrace him.
"I've decided the sky is going to be purple on Tuesday. It hasn't agreed yet, but it's thinking about it." -- Whim
As the ages wheeled and passed, the LoomWardens kept the three tools of the First Loom - Gifts of the FirstSpun. Whim's charge was If's Spindle, the spindle with which If spun the first thread from nothing, all things thereafter, and the very thread from where Whim himself had came from. When Null stole the tools, it was the Spindle's loss that Whim felt most.
The Void has always found the unplanned the easiest thing to take. Where it spreads, days begin to look alike. Threadlings take the same road, tell the same story, eat the same supper, and stop wondering what else there might be. Nothing is surprising any more, because nothing new is let in. It is, the Elders say, the quietest way a place can stop imagining.
This is Null's first denial, Not, made into a way of life: nothing could be otherwise. And it strikes at the very heart of Whim, who was never planned at all. In places the Void has touched, his gift grows faint. His small surprises in the weft go unnoticed, his questions go unanswered, and the flowers he slips into the cloth fade before anyone sees them.
Whim does not answer the Void with grand gestures. He answers it with small, stubborn, delightful ones: a door painted a colour no one expected, a tune no one has heard before, a question asked at exactly the wrong moment. Every one of them is proof that things can be otherwise.
"Null says nothing could ever be otherwise. I say: watch this."
-- Whim
Whim is one of the StoryWeaver's three guides from Frays End, and the ally of Imagination. He is the most approachable of the LoomWardens, and the one most likely to encourage the StoryWeaver to try something no one has tried before. His arc in the main story is the recovery of If's Spindle. In the StoryWeaver's journey, Whim guides the recovery of If's Spindle, and the confrontation with Null's first denial: Not. Null holds that nothing could ever be otherwise. Whim is living proof that it can.
For contributors, Whim is a voice for play, spontaneity and experiment, and a natural presence wherever the StoryWeaver is asked to imagine a way forward.
"Don't go that way, never go that way! Whichever way you had planned to go, always go the other way."
-- Whim, to the StoryWeaver
- If - the FirstSpun of Imagination, the Spinner
- The Elders - the Elders of the Eternal Loom
- The Eternal Loom - the heart of Frays End, which mends the Weave
- Echo - LoomWarden of Memory, child of Once
- Vigil - LoomWarden of Spirit, child of Ever
- Threadbare Plot - the main story of the game
- Null - the Dark Elder and enduring antagonist