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Once
FirstSpun - The Weaver - Memory.
Patron of the Warp, Identity, Survival, Education, Patience.
Most often depicted as an old man, facing backward, or head turned, looking behind.
Once is the second of the FirstSpun, the three ultimate beings from whom the Great Weave began. Despite this, Once is often considered the oldest, often despicted as an old, crooked woman. After If spun the first thread out of nothing, Once studied it. Measured it, laid it long and taut across the frame of the world, and then laid another beside it, and another, until there was a warp: the long, strong, patient threads that everything in creation hangs from.
"The world did not begin with the first thread. It began the moment someone remembered it."
-- Milly MinuteMender - Horologist of the Observatory of the Unseen - The Book of Ages, Volume Yesterday The Warp
Any weaver in Frays End will tell you that the warp is the unglamorous part, and the most important. It must be laid first, before a single thread of weft can cross it. It must be strong. It must be held under even tension, neither slack nor strained. And a weaver who skimps on the warp will lose the cloth, however beautiful the pattern.
This is Once's work, and Once's nature. Every place, creature, culture, and story in Threadbare runs along one of Once's warp threads, which is why, when a Threadling, a tree, or even an entire settlement is lost to the Void, they say its threads were pulled...It was unwoven.
Where If is never still in the tellings, Once is never hurried. Once is pictured as a vast, yet crooked and aged figure in a series of poses that reflect their memorial being - in portrait only depictions, usually carved in stone, Once's eyes are traditionally closed, not in sleep, but in remembrance. When seen standing, Once tends to have their back to the viewer, facing away, the distant horizon generally considered the past. This image is sometimes created to show their right hand resting on a loom, with their left hand attached to the ground with long threads running from the ends of each finger, down into the fabric of the world below. Or standing side-on and at a complex loom, head turned all the way around, facing behind. In this last depiction, Once's eyes have beams of light cast straight back, and can sometimes have tears shown beneath. Many depictions show Once holding, or standing among, the Warp Stones: the loom weights of the First Loom, on which the Great Weave was made, that held Once's warp long and taut. The Warp Stones were kept for ages at Frays End by the LoomWardens, until Null stole them (see Threadbare Plot). Once speaks slowly, in the tellings that give them a voice at all, and always speaks in the past tense. Was, were, once.
The bowed back is no accident. The Elders of the Eternal Loom are bowed too, from the weight of the books they carry, and they are said to be Once's closest heirs: the keepers who forget nothing they have promised to remember. Every Elder was woven on the Eternal Loom, and each is a child of one of the FirstSpun in particular. Once's children among the Elders, Page ProseStitch, Echo OnceHeard, and Rune RidgeScribe among them, carry memory more deeply than any others. Null was woven by all three of the FirstSpun equally, Once included, which makes Null's stance of worshipping the absence of the world a deeper cut in the memory of Once.
The oldest words in any story in Threadbare are once upon a time, and the University of the Unseen's linguists have traced them further back than any other phrase in the Weave. The Elders say the words are so much more than just an opening to a tale. They are the very act of committing that story to the warp thread, so that it will be remembered long after it is told.
The Atrium of First Words, in the Everlasting Library, is said to be built around the very first 'once' ever spoken aloud.
When the first Threadlings were woven into the world, each of the FirstSpun gave them a thread of their own. Once's gift was memory: the oldest and most essential technology a Threadling has ever possessed.
Memory is survival - which plants hurt and which heal, where a river floods in spring, how to read the sky before a storm. Memory is identity - the story of a Threadling's journey through the world, and of every generation before them. Memory is education: the wisdom that lets each generation stand on the last, rather than paying the same price for the same lessons.
Once's gift to the world is what makes and sustains all cultures as unique and diverse. It is also what binds all cultures together through shared memory.
While If brings the childish excitement of wonder, and Ever brings the flush of glory, Once is felt in the quiet moment before a story begins, when a room of listeners settles and leans in. Once is felt in the Memoir Mines, where each shaft echoes with the tales of lives once lived, and in the InkWell, where the worlds first stories were given shape.
Most of all, Once is felt in the Eternal Loom. The Elders say that its warp has never been restrung. The long threads running the length of its frame are the very threads If made and Once laid at the beginning, and every story rewoven in Frays End is woven across them. This is why the Elders lay a hand flat against the warp before they begin, the way a Threadling might touch the shoulder of an old friend. They are not checking the tension. They are greeting their creator.
Of all the FirstSpun, it is Once whom Null's rebellion wounds most deeply, because Null was an Elder, woven by Once as much as by If and Ever.
Where the other Elders hold that forgetting is a wound to be mended, Null teaches that forgetting is simply the truth of things, and that holding on to what is gone is its own kind of cruelty. Once is only a word for what is over, the Obscurists say. Null believes that the Void is part of the natural order of finally forgetting, and so the undoing of all of Once's work. In a final confrontation with the other Elders, before marching the Obscurists North to take the Observatory of the Unseen, Null was said to have implored their brothers and sisters of the Loom to consider the peace of a world of nothing.
The Elders answered with the oldest line attributed to Once in scripture: "Gone is not the same as nothing."
Once is not encountered as a character. Once is learned about, and read about, and remembered in and through every story. Contributors should treat Once as the quiet foundation beneath every LoreQuest and StoryQuest.
In the main narrative, Once's presence runs through every region, and in particular those rich in Memory, and the StoryWeaver's adventures echo Once's work.
For contributors, Once is the patron of every LoreQuest, the main narrative of Threadbare. Each lost history, tradition, or name recovered and woven back into Threadbare is a warp thread restored and reinforced.