The Loom

Under 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.

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.

See also

• The World is Woven · The Warp · The Drift · The Meridian