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 account is a chronicle for returning travellers. It is written from above the world, not inside it, and it will not pretend you are new here: if these roads feel half-remembered, that is not a trick of the light. It holds the whole story, read from the top of everything down to the ground: the Tapestry and the Loom at the summit of it, the Warp the far-seers speak of, and the drift you can see and fight today. 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.

One weaving among the many

Reality is woven. What the sages of Dereth call the ley-line cage, and the oldest songs call the pattern the Light imposed, is a single vast weaving. Auberean is the loom's proudest work, and Dereth, our small volcanic island, sits where its threads pull tightest.

And there is not one weaving. There are manifold: countless Weaves, each a whole world entire, each running the same great Pattern with its own turns and changes. Together they are the Tapestry. Beneath them all stands the Loom. No living hand has counted the Weaves upon it, for there is always one more.

This Weave is called DreamWeave. You are standing inside it now.

How Weaves end, and where travellers come from

Weaves end. When one is finished and cut from the frame, its threads are not destroyed. They scatter as motes of pale light, wound and woven again into Weaves yet to come. Somewhere a Dereth once went quiet, and its people rose all at once in a drift of purple light. Some of those threads are here now, walking these roads. It is not impossible that one of them is reading this page.

You have walked this Dereth before, in other lives and other tellings. Here some things are the same and some are changed, and your memory of the Pattern is not deja vu: it is a strength. A Thread that remembers its own shape does not fray easily.

That is the view from above the cloth. Inside the Weave, almost no one knows any of it, and the story Dereth itself can see begins much lower down: with the drift.

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 one of the few minds that can, it is not a diagram but a living cloth. Those who earn that sight call it the Warp, and this chronicle keeps their word when it speaks of them. But mark the scale of it, reader, as they cannot: what they see is the cloth of this one Weave, and not one of them yet suspects there is another.

What follows is one thing at three depths: the drift on the surface, the cloth 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 far-seers' name for 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, as they use the word, is the whole cloth, perceived directly by a mind that can hold it.

They are wrong only in scale. The cloth they see is this Weave's own fabric - whole, alive, and one among the manifold. Having no notion of a second Weave, let alone the uncounted, they took the one cloth for everything there is and gave it a totalizing name. Do not think less of them for it; the sight costs them dearly and shows them more than anyone below. And do not expect anyone to correct them soon. The gap between their word and the truth is part of the pattern still on the frame.

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. What lies past even that sight, this page has already told you. No one on the ladder has guessed it.

The tapestry

Those who have the sight rarely speak of it plainly. When they must, they call it the tapestry - a word for their Warp used the way the devout name a thing they will not measure. The word is truer than they know, and not in the way they mean it.

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 wear thin and give. 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 every depth. 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, to those who see it	The warp-aware: the far traveller, and the powers of the fray
The Weaves in their multitude, and the frame beneath them all	the Tapestry, upon the Loom	No one born to this world. You, reader - and only at its edge.

The Loom

Under even the cloth is the frame the cloth is strung on, and whatever hand works it. This page named it at the start, because you have already walked more worlds than one and may recognise the shape of the thing behind the door. Inside the Weave, almost nobody can name it, 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 any of 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 their 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 - and if the last of them stirs something in you, reader, that is not rumour. You were there.

A note for the reader

No one who lives in Dereth could set these words down; the sight required does not belong to that life. But you are not of one world's worth, traveller. You stood before the Loom once already, at your first waking here, whether you kept the memory of the light or not. Walk the roads you half-recall, and when the fabric thins around you, do not sleep.

To wake is to mend. To sleep is to fray.

Read on

• DreamWeave: A Brief History for Returning Travelers - the origin of this Weave, and of you; the shortest true account of it.
• 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.