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Tally
Name: Tally
Threadling-given name: TBC
Title / Role: Elder of the Eternal Loom, Keeper of the Record of Loss
Order: The Elders of the Eternal Loom
Parent: Once
Core Thread: Memory
Home: Frays End
Status: Active
Themes: Remembrance, Loss, Witness, Responsibility, Hope
"The Void can pull a thread. It cannot make me forget that it was there."
-- Tally
Tally is a child of Once, and the Elder who keeps the record of what the Void has taken. When a Threadling, a village, or a whole tradition is lost to the Void, the Elders never say that it fell or ended. They say its threads were pulled. It is Tally who marks each one, so that nothing the Void takes is ever wholly forgotten.
It is solemn work, and Tally carries it gently. He is soft-spoken, steady, and quietly stubborn, and he believes absolutely that every pulled thread can one day be woven back.
Long before there was writing, Threadlings kept count with tally sticks: a length of wood with a notch cut for every sheep in a flock, every day of a journey, every coin owed. A tally stick could not be argued with. The notches were simply there.
When the Void first came to LoomLit, and the threads of the world began to be pulled, no one knew how to keep track of what was lost. The losses were too many, and too strange: a name here, a song there, a street no one could quite picture any more. Tally took up a stick of pale wood from the lakeside and began to cut a notch for every thread he knew had gone. He has never stopped.
His tally stick has grown into a staff, and the staff into a great bundle of them, carried on his back and stacked in his rooms at Frays End, every notch a thread that was pulled. It is the heaviest burden any Elder carries. But Tally does not carry it only out of grief. Each time a StoryWeaver recovers something the Void has taken, Tally finds its notch and carefully sands it smooth again. There are more smooth places on his oldest sticks than anyone would believe, and Tally smiles every time he runs his thumb over one.
Tally is bowed like all Elders, beneath his bundle of tally sticks. He wears the colours of the order, and carries a small whittling knife and a scrap of sanding cloth in his apron pocket, always within reach. His book is a ledger of names to go with the notches, and its oldest pages are full of names he has been able to cross out.
Tally is the Elder of remembrance, and a way for Threadbare to speak about loss without speaking about death. His tally sticks make the Void's toll visible, and every restoration the StoryWeaver achieves can be felt in them: a notch sanded smooth.
For contributors, Tally is the right voice for stories of loss, memorial and restoration, handled with the gentleness Threadbare requires. Losses are always threads pulled, never deaths, and always something that might yet be woven back.
- Once - his parent
- The Elders - his order
- The Void - whose toll he records
- LoomLit - where he cut his first notch
- Threadlings - and the saying that their threads were pulled