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.
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.
The wound
Something has gone wrong at the weave. Portals have begun to drift: to mis-aim, to open a stride from where they should, and lately to do something worse. They bud — they open doors that nobody made. Behind some of them Dereth repeats itself: a hold you have walked a hundred times, the same stone and the same rooms, rethreaded slightly and terribly wrong. The Unbidden Doors are most travellers' first sight 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 deep thing
And under even the Warp, at the edge of what any traveller should be able to say aloud, is The Loom — the frame the cloth is strung on, and whatever works it. The Driftwardens have no word for it. The Meridian's instruments do not reach it. 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.
Read on
- The Drift — the symptom you can see and fight.
- The Warp — the substrate, and what it means to be warp-aware.
- The Meridian — the institution charting the lattice blind.
- The Loom — the deepest, quietest thing.
- Unbidden Doors — where a traveller first walks into the drift.