Kinspinners

Overview

Kinspinners are the spiders of the Weave. They spin threads, not of silk, but of the plane's own connection, and they spin them between minds. Travellers who wake joined by one find that each feels what the other feels, and the thread does not always break at the Veil.

Appearance

A Kinspinner is the size of a thumbnail, its body round and translucent, shifting through the plane's soft pastels like oil on water. Its legs are long and fine, and it seems to walk on nothing. Its thread is invisible until the light catches it, and then it shows as a line of faint iridescence strung between two people, humming very softly when either of them feels strongly. The spider makes no other sound. It smells of fresh linen, as the plane does.

Habitat and Range

They live everywhere in the Weave, along the bridges of light between the floating islands and among its gatherings, and in greatest numbers wherever many minds are close together.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Kinspinner moves from mind to mind and joins them, drawing a thread from one person to the next as a spider draws silk from branch to branch. It does not feed on what passes along the thread, as far as anyone knows; it simply spins. It is gentle and unhurried and does not flee from a hand. Groups of travellers who sleep close together wake strung together like beads.

Abilities

Two people joined by a Kinspinner's thread share feeling. Pain in one is a dull ache in the other, fear spreads between them, and joy too. In the Weave, where all feeling is shared already, the thread only deepens the plane's hold. Outside it, the thread lingers, faintly, for weeks or months: a traveller may wake at night with a companion's grief, a day's ride away.

Life Cycle

Kinspinners hatch in clusters on the bridges of light and spread at once. They are said not to die, only to grow fainter until they are part of the plane's light; the Menders are believed by some to be made from them.

Uses and Dangers

To the Linked the spiders are a blessing, and a traveller who cuts a thread is seen as wounding the plane. Some on the Material Plane have sought a thread on purpose: lovers, twins, a mother and a child going to war. To most travellers the threads are a danger, a way for the self to bleed into others before the plane has even begun its work, and they cut them each morning with a knife passed through the air.

Lore and Belief

Travellers bring home tales of companions who came back strung together and later could not bear to be apart, or could not bear each other. The spiders are often confused in tales with the Fortune-Weavers of the Shifting Path, who spin threads of fate; a Kinspinner's thread ties nothing but feeling (see Knowledge of the Cosmos).

A ballad follows two sworn brothers who came back from the Weave strung together, rode to every war side by side, and died in the same hour on two different battlefields.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Planes