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Yearning
Name: Yearning
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."
-- Yearning
Yearning 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 her siblings keep memories themselves, Yearning keeps the feeling of them. She doesn't just remember, she misses. Her gift is both emotional and sensory recall. It is the part of memory that hurts, and she has never once wished it away.
She is quiet, tender, and very still, with a gaze that always seems to rest a little past whoever she is talking to, as though she is looking somewhere far off and in the past. Threadlings who have lost something often find their way to her without knowing why. She rarely offers advice. She simply sits with them, and listens to what they miss, for as long as that takes. Despite her often sad demeanor, she is also noted for her 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."
-- Yearning
Hidden in the emotion of loss, Yearning 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.
Yearning is bowed like all Elders, and is most often pictured standing at water's edge, a lantern in her hands. Portrait depictions show her head raised to the sky, tears on each cheek. She wears a black shawl adorned with stars that seem all too real, and even slowly move across the fabric as time passes, as though she really is shrouded in the night sky. Her book is more a ribbon-wrapped pile of letters, every one addressed to someone or somewhere lost, and none of them ever sent. She reads them aloud to the lake.
"Halcyon remembers everything as better than it was. I remember everything as further away than it is. Between us, we're impossible at parties."
-- Yearning
Yearning can often be found at the water's edge in Frays End, or any other region she 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. Yearning was there when it happened.
Every evening, she lights a single lantern and sets it on the water, facing the far south where LoomLit once stood. The other Elders once asked her why, when the town could not be saved. She told them that was not the point. A place is only truly lost, she 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 Yearning, sometimes see the lanterns. Not only hers, but dozens, set out on the water by Threadlings who came to Yearning with a loss of their own.
Of all the Elders, Yearning 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. Yearning agrees that it is grief. She does not agree that it is only grief.
To yearn for something, she says, 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, she points out, began with someone missing what the Void had taken. The Elders hold that her 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 - Yearning, at the water's edge, facing south towards where the Lakes once shone.
They gather around her in the evenings, drifting above the lanterns she 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 her company, their longing for home becomes something gentler, a shared remembering rather than a loss borne alone. And in her 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." -- Yearning to a WishWisp
It is this bond that allows Yearning 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.
Yearning is the exception. The Wisps trust her as they trust no one else, because she longs for their lost home as deeply as they do, and they gift her their wishes freely, whenever she asks, which she does rarely to be fair. No other Elder in Threadbare holds such a power. Yearning uses it for one thing only - When a Threadling comes to her longing for a story from their past, a day, a song, a person, a place, and that yearning is so deep she can see the hurt in their eyes, she holds that longing in her 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 her shoulder, dim and tired, and she 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."
-- Yearning
Yearning 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. She is a natural ally against Null's second denial, None, and a way into the story of LoomLit.
For contributors, Yearning is the right voice for stories of homesickness, absence and hope, handled with the gentleness Threadbare requires. Her 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, Yearning must first be found, and the StoryWeaver must help her with a task of great importance to her and to the Wisps. 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 Yearning'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 Yearning has vouched for them, it offers the StoryWeaver the same gift it offers her: 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 - Keeper of the Halcyon Days, child of Once
- Null - the Dark Elder and enduring antagonist