Fortune-Weavers

Overview

The Fortune-Weavers are counted among the Gamblers of the Shifting Path and the Forking Road: beings that spin threads of fate, making connections between lives or cutting them.

Appearance

A Fortune-Weaver is seen as a slender figure, often with more arms than two, at work on threads of light that run out from it in every direction, gold for likely meetings and violet for unlikely ones. It spins with some hands and holds a fine, bright blade in another. Its face is calm and absorbed, and it seldom looks up from its work. The threads hum faintly when touched, and snap with a sound like a lute string breaking.

Habitat and Range

They work along the paths of the Shifting Path and at the junctions of the Forking Road, where the threads of many lives cross.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Fortune-Weaver ties and cuts. It joins the thread of one life to another, so that two who would never have met will meet, and it severs threads, so that a friendship, a debt, or a destiny ends. It does so for its own reasons, or for a price, and the Gamblers' habit of wager is in it too.

Abilities

It makes and severs connections of fate between beings. A thread it has tied draws two lives together; a thread it has cut stays cut.

Uses and Dangers

Travellers come to the Path to find a lost opportunity or to change a past mistake, and a Fortune-Weaver can tie them to it. Their danger is the cut, which cannot be undone.

Lore and Belief

Fate on Caeldon is widely believed to be spun by the gods or written at birth, and travellers' tales of the Fortune-Weavers feed those beliefs. What fate truly is, the highest circles of scholarship argue over without settling (see Fate-Songline Doctrine).

Where It Appears

• The Shifting Path
• The Forking Road