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Rune
Name: Rune
Threadling-given name: TBC
Title / Role: Elder of the Eternal Loom, Carver of Memory
Order: The Elders of the Eternal Loom
Parent: Once
Core Thread: Memory
Home: The ridges and foothills of the WeaveWatch Wale, and the deep shafts of the Memoir Mines
Status: Active
Themes: Permanence, Stone, Wayfinding, Patience, Endurance
"Paper forgets in a hundred years. Stone forgets in ten thousand. I prefer to give the world time to catch up."
-- Rune
Rune is a child of Once, and the Elder of carved memory. Long before most of Threadbare learned to write, Rune was cutting marks into stone, so that what mattered would outlast every fire, flood and forgetting. He is slow, deliberate, and practically immovable once he has decided on something, which is rarely. He speaks in short sentences, as though each word costs him a chisel stroke.
Rune lives among the oldest places of memory: the ridges of the WeaveWatch Wale, where the first threads ever spun rise into the sky, and the deep shafts of the Memoir Mines. He rarely visits Frays End, but when he does, he always brings a stone.
The peaks of the WeaveWatch Wale are said to be Once's own warp: the oldest threads in the world, grown so old they are brittle. Travellers who climb them lose small memories on the way up, a name, a tune, the reason they set out, and, if they are lucky, find them again on the way down.
Rune decided long ago that luck was not good enough. He began to carve. Along every ridge and pass of the Wale he cut small, deep marks into the rock: a sign for water here, a sign for the path turns, a sign for you came this way to find someone. Each one was a memory that would not slip, left for those whose own memories might. The oldest are worn almost smooth now. Travellers still trace them with their fingers on the way down, and find, in the shape of a mark, the thing they had forgotten.
These marks are the first runes in Threadbare, and the Elder who carved them has carried their name ever since. Among those who have followed his marks North is the Elder Venture, who says she would have been lost a dozen times without them.
Rune is bowed like all Elders, and his book is not a book at all, but a set of carved stone tablets bound together with thick cord and slung across his back. He wears the colours of the order beneath a mason's leather apron, grey with stone dust, and his hands are never without a chisel.
Rune is the Elder of the deepest, oldest memory, and a natural presence in the WeaveWatch Wale, the Memoir Mines, and any journey North, including the StoryWeaver's journey to the Observatory of the Obscure. His waymarks can serve as environmental storytelling, and as gentle guidance for the player, across the map.
For contributors, Rune is a patron for ancient history, monuments, ancestral stories, and any lore meant to feel old and permanent.
- Once - his parent, whose warp the Wale is said to be
- The Elders - his order
- The WeaveWatch Wale - where his oldest waymarks are found
- The Memoir Mines - one of his homes
- Venture - who followed his marks on her earliest journeys