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Venture
Name: Venture
Title / Role: Elder of the Eternal Loom, Elder of the Imagine Isles, Overseer of the Dev Archipelago
Order: The Elders of the Eternal Loom
Parent: If
Core Thread: Imagination
Home: The Imagine Isles, when she is home at all
Status: Active
Themes: Adventure, Courage, Discovery, Teaching
"I've been lost in more places than you'll ever see. That's how I know every way home."
-- Venture
Venture is a child of If, and the Elder of the Imagine Isles. She is two things at once, and has never been able to choose between them - an adventurer who cannot stay still, and a teacher who cannot bear to be away from her learners too long. Every journey she makes, she takes for the learners waiting at home. Every lesson she teaches, she learned out in the wide and fraying world.
She is bold, warm, and tirelessly generous, with scuffed boots, a sunburnt face, and a laugh that some say can be heard regions away. She is impatient with caution but endlessly patient with beginners. And though she is gone more often than she is home, not one learner on the Isles is forgotten by her.
Venture believes that the art of learning is the greatest adventure, opening the world of Threadbare to those who might otherwise have stayed right where they were woven. While Venture is a child of If, this love of learning draws her close to the work of Once. Once's gift to the world was Memory, and among its oldest truths is that memory is education - the wisdom that lets each generation stand on the last, rather than paying the same price for the same lessons. Every lesson Venture brings back from her adventures is an act of that gift. She turns what she has lived through into something others can remember and build on, so that no learner has to be lost where she was once lost. The Elders say this makes Venture the rare child of If who looks both ways. With If's restlessness she runs towards what might be, and with a quiet devotion to Once she makes sure what she finds is never forgotten.
Venture is bowed like all Elders, though less by the weight of her book than by the pack on her back, which is always full. She wears mixed purples, though these are faded by the sun and the dust of the open road. Her book is half journal and half lesson plan: every adventure on the left-hand page, and on the right, what was learned and how to teach it to others.
"I go first, so you don't have to go alone."
-- Venture
In the earliest days, when the Elders were first woven, most of them took their station at the Eternal Loom, and there they remained. Venture turned immediately towards the horizon. She was the first Elder to walk to the edges of the known world and come back with more than she left with - not treasure, but understanding. And the first thing she did with each discovery was to find someone and teach it to.
Her closest kin among the Elders is Rune, a child of Once and the carver of memory into stone. Rune's ancient carvings along the ridges of the WeaveWatch Wale were the waymarks Venture followed on her earliest journeys North, long before the two ever met. When they finally did, they found they were doing the same work in different materials. Rune carves what must never be forgotten into stone so that it lasts. Venture stitches what must be learned into the Isles so that it too is not lost. Rune still leaves a mark on every ridge he knows she will one day cross.
In recent years, the two have taken on a shared cause. Across Threadbare, the oldest stones still stand, Rune's waymarks and the stitch-script of the ReedKin, but fewer Threadlings each year can read them. Rune can keep a stone for ten thousand years. What he cannot do is make someone read it. That, Venture decided, was her half of the work. She has begun bringing learners to the old stones, turning stitch-script from a lost art into a lesson worth learning, and some say the first charted isle for it is already taking shape. She does it for the learners, as she does everything. But those who know her best say she also does it for Rune, so that he never has to carve for no one.
Long ago, Venture successfully navigated the tattered hem beyond the Fraying, where no Threadling had gone and come back, and found, though some say formed, the Imagine Isles adrift in the deep currents of the Void - thin, gossamer cloth, loose on the loom, where anything imagined carefully enough begins to take shape.
"A map is just someone else's adventure, folded up small. Here, have one of mine."
-- Venture
Venture saw at once what the Isles could be. Here, she could do more than tell learners what she had discovered. She could build it for them, with them, then have them build more on that. She could make a place where anyone could try, fail, reflect, and refine, with nothing lost but a little time.
So she began to create. Each charted isle holding a lesson from one of her adventures.
In one small collection of the Imagine Isles, Venture created the Dev Archipelago - inviting learners from not only Threadbare, but all possible worlds.
The Imagine Isles drift in the deep currents of the Void itself, and Venture has lived closer to it than almost any other Elder. The Isles survive because they are never abandoned: every learner who practises there, every experiment tried, adds a fresh thread to the drift. But the Void has made her work harder in every other way. The edges she once crossed have been swallowed. Roads she walked are gone. And in the places the Void has touched, fewer Threadlings believe there is anything worth learning, or any world beyond the one they were woven into.
Venture sees this as Null's second denial, None, turned against learning: nothing remains, so every lesson is already lost, and there is no point in teaching it. Venture's answer is her whole life's work. A lesson taught is a lesson that remains. Every learner who leaves the Isles carries what she found out there, and passes it on, and so nothing she has learned is ever truly lost.
Venture is the resident Elder of the Imagine Isles, and the keeper of Threadbare's templates and learning curriculum, including the Dev Archipelago. She is the Elder StoryWeavers meet when they cross the bridge from Frays End to learn, practice, and play, and she is the living reason the Isles exist - every island is an adventure turned into a lesson.
For contributors, Venture is the voice of every template, practice quest and learning module, and a model for how Threadbare teaches: learn it for real, then build a place where others can learn it safely. When a new mechanic or learning module arrives, it becomes a new island, and in the language of the world, it is one more of Venture's adventures brought home.
Note on breaking the fourth wall - Venture is the Elder who invites learners from all worlds. The Dev Archipelago breaks the fourth wall as we acknowledge outsiders existing, or at least visiting Threadbare via these islands.
- If - the FirstSpun of Imagination, the Spinner
- The Elders - the Elders of the Eternal Loom
- The Imagine Isles - the learning and practice ground, including the Dev Archipelago
- Rune - Keeper of the LoreQuests and Carver of Memory, child of Once, her closest kin and partner in reviving stitch-script
- ReedKin - the ancient carvers of stitch-script
- The Fraying - the ever-encroaching borderland of the Void
- The WeaveWatch Wale - the mountains that crown the world, Once's oldest threads
- Muse - Keeper of the StoryQuests, child of If