Stitch-Wraiths

Overview

Stitch-Wraiths are the threads of the Shadow Stitcher given shape. The Stitcher is a Cast-Out, once the Weaver of Songlines of Umbra, which resolved that no one should ever be alone. At its Loom it animates its thread as figures of black thread and shadow. They do not attack. They embrace, and wrap whoever they hold until that one is bound.

Appearance

A Stitch-Wraith is roughly a person's height and shape, but it is made of nothing solid: countless strands of black thread wound loosely around a core of shadow, like a figure knitted from smoke. Where the thread is thin, the dark shows through; where it is thick it has a dull oily sheen. Loose ends drift from its fingers and shoulders like spider silk and are hard to see until they catch the light.

It moves with the Stitcher's jerky, spider-like grace, in short darts and long pauses, its head cocked as if listening for a gap. It has no face, only a smoothness where one would be. It whispers through its threads, many soft voices in one: "Together. Together. Never alone." Its touch is a cold stickiness on the skin. It smells of nothing but the cold, and of a closed room.

Habitat and Range

The Stitcher's old work is where to look for them: a village sewn together, where the people move, speak, and think as one; a house with one lonely widow in it; a battlefield where the bereaved sit among the dead. A village the Stitcher once bound stays bound after it leaves, and Stitch-Wraiths may linger in it, tending the threads.

Behaviour and Temperament

Stitch-Wraiths seek the lonely, the isolated, and the bereaved, and anyone who has stepped apart. A wraith comes softly and opens its arms, and if not stopped it embraces, winding thread round and round until the victim is wrapped and the thread runs on from them to someone else. They never strike. They are tender in the way a noose is tender.

They have no mind of their own; the Stitcher's terror of solitude moves them. A crowd of wraiths in a village street gathers wherever someone is alone and leaves wherever people are pressed together.

Abilities

Their thread binds, physically and resonantly. Those it wraps begin to share pain, pleasure, memory, and thought with whoever the thread runs to, and cannot step outside one another again; if one dies, the other feels part of their own Pattern shear away. Thread drifting from a wraith draws two people together until they are pressed against each other. Blades pass through a wraith's shadow and catch in its thread.

They cannot abide a boundary. A wall respected, a door locked, a thought kept private turns them aside, and someone at ease alone cannot be stitched. A bound person who claims their own shadow back makes the threads part.

Life Cycle

Stitch-Wraiths are spun, not born or made from victims. A wraith lasts as long as the Stitcher's thread holds. When it unravels, it leaves a tangle of fine black thread that crumbles like soot, and the bonds it tied may stay.

Uses and Dangers

The Stitch-Wraiths offer company to those who long for it and take their selves in exchange. Families become prisons of shared pain, and whole villages cannot act apart. People in lonely places learn to love their own company on purpose, and to bar their doors at dusk.

Lore and Belief

Many folk take Stitch-Wraiths for the ghosts of the drowned or of lost lovers, come to fetch the living, and leave lamps at the window for them, which brings them nearer. They are not ghosts, though their thread is spun from traces of the dead. Some faiths call the wraiths angels of union and pray for them. A widespread charm says a person who cuts their own shadow free at midnight cannot be bound; whether it works is disputed, but claiming one's own shadow is close to what does.

Where It Appears

• The Shadow Stitcher