The World is Woven
The world is woven, and something is at the loom.
Dereth has always run on forces its people inherited and never understood. The Empyreans mastered the portals. The Virindi were born already seeing what a portal is. Everyone who came after walks across that work and calls the ground solid. DreamWeave is the long story of learning to see it - Dereth, rewoven - and the climb out of that blindness.
This page holds the whole of that story, read from the surface down: the drift you can see and fight, the Warp it is a snag in, and the Loom the Warp is strung on. Two threads of it carry their own pages - The Meridian, the institution that charts the drift blind, and the Unbidden Doors, where a traveller first walks into it.
The world beneath the world
Under the map is a structure the portals hang in: the lattice, threads of made and unmade passage strung across the whole world. Seen whole, by a mind that can, it is not a diagram but a living cloth - the Warp, the tapestry the world is woven on. Most people never see a single thread of it. A few - the warp-aware - see almost nothing else.
What follows is that one thing at three depths: the drift on the surface, the Warp beneath it, and the Loom beneath even that.
The drift
The drift is the surface symptom - the only word most of Dereth has for what is going wrong. Portals have stopped keeping to their marks. They mis-aim. They open a pace from where they always opened, then a street, then a valley. It has been getting worse for a long time, and everyone had learned to live with a world that no longer arrives quite where it promises.
The budding
Then the drift began to do something it had never done. It stopped merely mis-aiming old doors and started making new ones - budding fresh portals where the lattice runs thickest, which is beneath the four great towns. A door opens that nobody set, on ground nobody warded, and it stays.
A portal is a thing a person makes. These grew.
The wrong copies
Step through a budded door and you do not arrive somewhere strange. You arrive somewhere familiar, and that is the horror of it - a barrow, a grotto, a dry well you could have named, the same stone in the same places. It is Dereth doubled: the world rethreaded off a pattern the loom half-remembers, with the wrong things living in the rooms. The longer you look, the more of it is not quite the place you know.
The things behind the doors are drift-touched - creatures caught in the rethreading and changed by it. See the Bestiary.
Thinning the doors
The drift cannot be understood at this depth; it can only be thinned. Keep the doors emptied and they stay quiet a while. That is the whole of the work the Unbidden Doors offer a new traveller - and it is enough to be worth a coin, from people who cannot afford to pay it and pay it anyway.
The Warp
The Warp is the thing itself - the lattice of portals seen whole, not as a chart but as a living cloth the world is woven on. The drift is a snagged thread in it. The lattice is the pattern of the threads. The Warp is the whole tapestry, perceived directly by a mind that can hold it.
Warp-aware
To be warp-aware is to see the weave and not only the ground laid over it. It is not a spell and not a rank; it is a way of perceiving that most people never come to and cannot be taught into. The Virindi are born with a share of it. The Empyreans worked as though they had it. Isparian latecomers inherited a world run on it and, almost to a soul, cannot see it at all.
The whole of DreamWeave's long climb is the slow earning of that sight. A traveller begins as an errand-runner for people who cannot comprehend the doors, and ends - if they go far enough - as someone who perceives the structure the doors sit in, working among the few others who share the perception.
The tapestry
Those who have the sight rarely speak of it plainly. When they must, they call it the tapestry - a word for the Warp used the way the devout name a thing they will not measure. It is the same cloth the lattice is drawn on; only the voice is different.
The fray
Where the warp-aware contend over the weave - the traveller's allies, and things that mean the world harm and can see exactly how to do it - the edges tear. Those contested edges are the fray, and they are the far country of this story, not its doorstep. A new traveller will not see them for a long while, and should be glad of it.
The ladder of seeing
It is one thing at three depths. How far you can see decides which name you have for it.
| What you perceive | Its name | Who stands there |
|---|---|---|
| Doors that misbehave; "nobody made them." | the drift - the surface | Frightened townsfolk - the Driftwardens, in the Unbidden Doors |
| A structure beneath the drift, charted but never seen | the lattice | The institution that maps it - The Meridian |
| The whole cloth, perceived directly | the Warp | The warp-aware: the far traveller, and the powers of the fray |
The Loom
Under even the Warp - under the cloth itself - is the frame the cloth is strung on, and whatever hand works it. Call it the Loom. Almost nobody can, and almost nobody should. This account names it at all only because you, reader, have already walked more worlds than one, and may recognise the shape of the thing behind the door.
What can honestly be said
Very little, and that is the truth of the entry rather than a coyness in the telling. The Driftwardens have no word for it; their whole horror is the absence of one. The Meridian's instruments chart the lattice and stop at its edge, the way a plumb line stops at the water it cannot enter. Even the warp-aware, who perceive the tapestry whole, describe the Loom the way one describes a sound heard through a wall - present, patterned, and not for them to read.
What is agreed is only this: the world is being rewoven. The drift is not decay. It is a pattern changing while it is still on the frame - old threads pulled, new ones set, Dereth doubled and altered a room at a time. Something is at the work. Whether it means to mend the cloth or merely to make a different one, no one who has come back has been able to say.
Glimpses
Travellers who have wandered far past their maps bring home the same handful of images and never a story to hold them together - a distant weave seen at the horizon of a place that had no horizon; a blighted or unravelling stretch of pattern; once, a figure of light standing at a loom too large to take in. These are reported, not explained. Treat them as rumour with a true shape under it.
A note for the reader
This account is written from above the world, not inside it. No one who lives in Dereth could set these words down; the sight required does not belong to that life. If the Loom is legible to you at all, it is because you have crossed more thresholds than one world's worth - and even then, only its edge.
Read on
- The Meridian - the institution charting the lattice blind, and the quiet hand behind the Driftwardens.
- Unbidden Doors - the level 10-15 starter arc, where a traveller first walks into the drift.
- Bestiary - the drift-touched creatures behind the doors.