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LinenVille

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Heather edited this page Sep 26, 2026 · 1 revision
Known as The Pressed Town
Type Settlement
Region TBC
Residents Linenvillians: spinners, bleachers, and pressers
Trades in Crisp white linen, starch, lavender, and very strong tea
Core Thread Memory
Notable visitors Moss MothBane, Bree ButtonBoon
Themes Preservation, Privacy, Order, Care, Letting Go

LinenVille is a quiet, sun-bleached settlement of starched streets and pressed-flat fields, where every wall, fence, and washing-line seems to have been ironed by some careful, patient hand. The townsfolk are spinners and bleachers, makers of crisp white cloth and equally crisp opinions, and they greet outsiders with cautious courtesy and very strong tea.

Nowhere in Threadbare keeps its stories more carefully. Nowhere tells them less. In LinenVille, every history is folded neatly and stored on shelves, lavender-sweet and slightly stiff with age, and the Linenvillians would very much prefer that it stays that way.

"A story folded well will keep for a hundred years. A story told well will keep forever. We have always been better at the first."

  • Ida CreaseRight - Keeper of the Folding House

The Starched Streets

You smell LinenVille before you see it: hot cotton, clean water, and lavender, carried a long way on a dry wind. Then the white arrives all at once. White walls, white roofs, white lanes pressed so flat and so pale that visitors squint as if walking out onto fresh snow.

The town is laid out like a well-kept linen cupboard. Streets run straight, corners are square, and every house faces the same way, towards the sun. Washing-lines are strung between the rooftops in long, orderly rows, and on a bright day the whole town seems to breathe as the sheets lift and settle together.

Beyond the last houses lie the Bleaching Greens, wide pressed-flat fields where freshly woven linen is laid out on the grass to whiten in the sun. From a distance the Greens look like a patchwork with every patch the same colour. Further out still, the flax fields ripple blue in flower season, the only real colour for miles, and the Linenvillians rather wish they didn't.

The Linenvillians

The Threadlings of LinenVille are spinners, bleachers, and pressers, and they are very good at all three. LinenVille linen is prized across Threadbare for being crisp, true, and almost impossible to crease by accident. The Linenvillians themselves are much the same.

They are reserved, polite, and wary of outsiders, though never rude. A visitor is always offered tea, and the tea is always very strong. It is brewed in a tall white pot until, as the saying goes, the spoon stands up and salutes. Custom holds that no stranger asks a Linenvillian a personal question before the second cup. Those who try it before the first are thanked, warmly, for their visit, and shown the road.

The town's few firm rules are pressed as neatly as its streets:

  • A place for everything. Every object, story, and opinion has its shelf, and should be returned to it.
  • Mind the crease. A fold made in haste will never lie flat again. Think twice, speak once.
  • Keep it in the cupboard. Family business stays in the family, and so does most of the town's gossip, which is why outsiders so often find the town hard to read.
  • Air it on the day. What is folded must be aired, once a year, on Airing Day (see below). Nobody in living memory remembers why this rule matters. Everyone keeps it anyway.

Folded Histories

In most of Threadbare, stories are told. In LinenVille, they are laundered, pressed, and put away.

Every Linenvillian family keeps its history woven into squares of fine white linen: births, marriages, recipes, quarrels, and the occasional scandal, each one stitched in white thread on white cloth, so that it can only be read by holding it up to the light. The squares are folded with great care, tucked with sprigs of lavender, and stored in the Folding House, a long, cool building at the heart of the town lined floor to ceiling with shelves. Linenvillians call it simply the Press.

The Keeper of the Folding House, currently Ida CreaseRight, knows the exact place of every square on every shelf, and has read almost none of them. Reading another family's history, she points out, would be rude.

Airing Day

Once a year, on the brightest day of summer, the Press is opened and every folded history is carried out, shaken, and pegged on the washing-lines above the streets to air. For one day only, the whole town is hung with its own past, and anyone who stands beneath the lines and looks up can read it, stitch by stitch, against the sun. By evening everything is folded and shelved again, and nobody mentions what they read.

The Elders of the Eternal Loom are said to find Airing Day quietly moving. They also note that it is the only day of the year when anything in LinenVille is really told.

LinenVille and the Void

For a long time, LinenVille believed itself safe from the Void. Nothing here was forgotten, after all. Everything was kept.

But any weaver will tell you that linen always wears through first along its folds. A crease pressed in the same place for a hundred years grows thin, then pale, then weak, until one day it simply parts. The Linenvillians have begun to find exactly this on the oldest shelves of the Press: histories that have come apart along their fold lines, and faint grey filaments of Void Creep threading out from the gaps.

Worse, something has been getting into the Press. Small, neat holes have appeared in squares that nobody has aired in years. The lavender no longer seems to help. The Memory Moths of the Memoir Mines are drawn to memory that has gone quiet and thin, and a building full of stories kept but never told is, to a Memory Moth, a banquet laid out on white cloth.

The Observists of the University of the Unseen would recognise the pattern at once. The Void is not only born of forgetting. It also grows wherever memory stops being passed on. LinenVille remembers everything. It has simply stopped sharing it.

Visitors to LinenVille

Moss MothBane

Moss MothBane, Sister of the Order of the Humming Hem, is currently based in LinenVille, and the moths in the Press are very likely the reason. She arrived without announcement, drank her tea, waited politely for the second cup, and then asked to be shown the oldest shelf.

The Linenvillians are not sure what to make of her. She hums constantly, which they find a little much, and she has asked more than once whether the histories might be read aloud, which they find a great deal too much. Still, the holes in the Press have grown fewer since she came. Moss has said only that she is "listening for the right note", and that a town this quiet takes a long time to hear.

"They keep their stories beautifully. I just wish they'd let them sing."

  • Moss MothBane - Sister of the Order of the Humming Hem

Bree ButtonBoon

Bree ButtonBoon passes through LinenVille now and then, and is tolerated rather than welcomed, since her coat is by some distance the least tidy thing the town has ever seen. Among the buttons in her Archive is the Starched Button, a perfectly white button traded by a Linenvillian who asked her not to tell anyone where it came from. She has told everyone it came from LinenVille, which she maintains is not the same thing. In LinenVille, this is considered a very serious breach of manners, and also the most exciting thing to happen in years.

Narrative Function

LinenVille is a Memory settlement with a Spirit problem. Where LoomLit shows what happens when a community stops caring, LinenVille shows something quieter: a community that cares enormously, but keeps everything to itself. It is a gentle lesson in the idea at the heart of Ever: lasting is not holding still, lasting is passing on.

  • For the StoryWeaver, LinenVille is a place of trust to be earned rather than a place to be rescued. Its LoreQuests centre on persuading families to unfold and share a single history, repairing squares split along their creases, and helping Moss MothBane drive the Memory Moths from the Press.
  • Airing Day is a natural set piece: a once-a-year event where the whole town's history is briefly visible, and where a StoryWeaver who has earned enough trust might convince LinenVille to keep one story out on the line.
  • For contributors, a Folded History is an ideal first piece of lore, much like one of Bree's buttons: a single short family story, stitched white on white, small, low-stakes, and immediately canon on the shelves of the Press.

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