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Yearn
Name: Yearn
Title / Role: Elder of the Eternal Loom, Keeper of What Is Missed, Mother of Wisps
Order: The Elders of the Eternal Loom
Parent: Once
Core Thread: Memory
Home: Frays End - Found near the water's edge in Frays End, facing south towards the lost Lucent Lakes
Status: Active
Themes: Longing, Loss, Love, Hope, Wishes
"You cannot long for nothing. If you miss it, it was something."
-- Yearn
Yearn is a child of Once, and the Elder of Longing - the ache for a place, a person, a thing, or a time that is no longer within reach. Where their siblings keep memories themselves, Yearn keeps the feeling of them. They don't just remember, they miss. Their gift is both emotional and sensory recall. It is the part of memory that hurts, and they have never once wished it away.
They are quiet, tender, and very still, with a gaze that always seems to rest a little past whoever they are talking to, as though they are looking somewhere far off and in the past. Threadlings who have lost something often find their way to Yearn without knowing why. They rarely offer advice. They simply sit with them, and listen to what they miss, for as long as that takes. Despite their often sad demeanor, they are also noted for their sense of humour among Elder and Threading alike.
"I miss everything. Places, people, songs, the second slice of cake I didn't have in the year of the long winter. Especially the cake."
-- Yearn
Hidden in the emotion of loss, Yearn also sews the threads of hope. All yearning is both an acknowledgment of what is lost, and a glimmer of hope that we will find it once more.
Yearn is bowed like all Elders, and is most often pictured standing at water's edge, a lantern in their hands. Portrait depictions show their head raised to the sky, tears on each cheek. They wear a black shawl adorned with stars that seem all too real, and even slowly move across the fabric as time passes, as though they really are shrouded in the night sky. Their book is more a ribbon-wrapped pile of letters, every one addressed to someone or somewhere lost, and none of them ever sent. They read them aloud to the lake.
"Halcyon HeyDay remembers everything as better than it was. I remember everything as further away than it is. Between us, we're impossible at parties."
-- Yearn
Yearn can often be found at the water's edge in Frays End, or any other region they may be travelling through, looking south, towards the place where the Lucent Lakes once shone. It was there, in the island village of LoomLit, that the Void drew its first breath, and there that it consumed the Lakes entirely. Nothing of them can be reached now. Yearn was there when it happened.
Every evening, they light a single lantern and set it on the water, facing the far south where LoomLit once stood. The other Elders once asked Yearn why, when the town could not be saved. Yearn told them that was not the point. A place is only truly lost, they said, when no one is left who misses it. As long as someone longs for LoomLit, its threads are not wholly pulled. They are only waiting.
Travellers who pass a shore at dusk and happen upon Yearn, sometimes see the lanterns. Not only theirs, but dozens, set out on the water by Threadlings who came to Yearn with a loss of their own.
Of all the Elders, Yearn is the one who answers Null's second denial most directly. Null teaches None: nothing remains, and so remembering is only grief that refuses to end. Yearn agrees that it is grief. They do not agree that it is only grief.
To yearn for something, they say, is proof that it mattered, and proof that it has not been wholly forgotten. Longing is memory that refuses to let go, and it is the first thing that moves a Threadling to go looking for what was lost. Every restoration the StoryWeaver achieves, they point out, began with someone missing what the Void had taken. The Elders hold that their answer to Null is the oldest line in scripture, lived rather than spoken - gone is not the same as nothing.
The WishWisps were born of the Lucent Lakes. For more generations than any record can count, the Lakes were their ancient home, where they were more numerous and brighter than anywhere else in Threadbare, and where the villagers of LoomLit cared for them as one society cares for another. When the Void came, the Wisps were among the first to leave. The Lakes are gone now, and the Wisps cannot go home.
They have never stopped wanting to. Wisps yearn too. They drift wherever there is still hope to be drifted on, but every Wisp carries, somewhere in its glow, a small and constant longing for the still, shining waters it came from. And so, one by one, the Wisps found their way to the Elder who understands and honours that longing - Yearn, at the water's edge, facing south towards where the Lakes once shone.
They gather around Yearn in the evenings, drifting above the lanterns Yearn sets on the water, and the Threadlings of Frays End say that there, the shore glows almost as brightly as the Lakes once did. In Yearn's company, their longing for home becomes something gentler, a shared remembering rather than a loss borne alone. And in Yearn's company they find hope, that one day they will see their home once again.
"There, there. Have a lie down. You'll be back to your usual dazzling self in a season or two." -- Yearn to a WishWisp
It is this bond that allows Yearn to lean into the Wisps' oldest power - Wishes.
Every Wisp carries a wish, and it can give it. But a wish is made of the Wisp's own light, and granting one costs it dearly. The moment a wish is given, the Wisp's glow dims almost to nothing, and then, slowly, over days or even seasons, it rekindles - a faint spark, a flicker, then a steady shine, until at last it is bright enough that the wish is ready once more. Because of this, Wisps almost never give their wishes away. They remember the Wisp Trade, when their kind were captured and drained for coin and power, and they guard their light carefully. Most Threadlings will live their whole lives without ever being granted a single wish.
Yearn is the exception. The Wisps trust Yearn as they trust no one else, because Yearn longs for their lost home as deeply as they do, and they gift Yearn their wishes freely, whenever Yearn asks, which Yearn does rarely to be fair. No other Elder in Threadbare holds such a power. Yearn uses it for one thing only - When a Threadling comes to Yearn longing for a story from their past, a day, a song, a person, a place, and that yearning is so deep Yearn can see the hurt in the Threadling's eyes, Yearn holds that longing in their hands and asks a Wisp for its wish. The wish lights the memory so brightly that, for a little while, the Threadling can step back into it and live that story once more. Then the Wisp drifts to Yearn's shoulder, dim and tired, and Yearn keeps it close while its light slowly rekindles.
It is not a way of changing what happened, and it cannot bring back what the Void has taken. But it lets a Threadling feel, fully and truly, what it was like, and carry that feeling home again. The Elders say it is one of the gentlest gifts in Threadbare, and one of the most powerful. A memory relived is a memory the Void finds very much harder to take.
"They miss home, just as I do. We keep each other company while we wait for the world to remember where it was."
-- Yearn
Yearn is the Elder of longing, loss and hope, and a gentle, grounding presence for any part of the StoryWeaver's journey that touches what the Void has taken. They are a natural ally against Null's second denial, None, and a way into the story of LoomLit.
For contributors, Yearn is the right voice for stories of homesickness, absence and hope, handled with the gentleness Threadbare requires. Their longing is always for something that might yet be found, never for someone who has died.
The Wisps do not follow just anyone, and they give their wishes to even fewer. In the StoryWeaver's journey, Yearn must first be found, and the StoryWeaver must help Yearn with a task of great importance to Yearn and the Wisps alike. Since the Void began its spread, many Wisps have been scattered, lost and dimming in Void-touched places beyond Frays End. In Gather the Scattered Wisps, the StoryWeaver seeks them out and guides each one home to Yearn's shore (see Threadbare Plot).
When the last Wisp is home, one of them chooses to travel with the StoryWeaver as a companion. And because Yearn has vouched for them, it offers the StoryWeaver the same gift it offers Yearn: its wishes, freely given, whenever they are needed, each one followed by the slow rekindling of its light. More Wisps can be deployed with more passive or active powers per wish.
- Once - the FirstSpun of Memory, the Weaver
- The Elders - the Elders of the Eternal Loom
- Frays End - the last bastion of hope against the Void
- The Lucent Lakes - the lost lakes where the Void was born
- LoomLit - the lost island village of Lake Lucid
- Wish Wisps - lights of hope, born of the Lucent Lakes
- Halcyon HeyDay - Professor of History at the University of the Unseen
- Null - the Dark Elder and enduring antagonist