The Void Weaver

Overview

The Void Weaver is the face of the Unformed against connection: loose ends from before anything was woven together, the absence of the weave.

It comes from before the first stitch, when the world was not a fabric of linked events but a heap of loose threads. It is not disorder among things; it is things that will not connect, the state in which link, bond, story and whole are still mixed with strand, loose end and scrap. Where it works, "how this fits with that," which tells us what each thing is, comes undone.

It is "Void" because it is the empty space between the threads where the pattern should be, and a "Weaver" because it works at the seams of reality, not to make but to unpick.

Appearance and Manifestation

No pattern holds it together, so it has no form; it is seen as a dissolution of the seam.

The Visual

• Visuals: Reality frays.
• Scale: A rope that unravels at a touch, a sentence that loses its sense mid-speech, or a world hanging as a loose net of strands.

The Sound

• Sound: The sounds of parting: a thread snapping, cloth tearing, a link clicking open, a conversation whose words no longer fit together.
• The Echo: A dry rasp, like a needle drawing thread through a hole that is not there.

The Feeling

• Touch: Looseness: your hand no longer quite attached to your arm, nothing tying you together.
• Thought: A story's beginning does not lead to its middle. A face will not connect to its name, and "cause" and "effect," "part" and "whole" fray into "Loose."

Nature and Motivation

The Nature of the Unformed

It bears connection no grudge; as with all the Unformed, bonds simply come undone near it.

The Motivation: The Great Unravelling

Its one compulsion is to untie the knot: to leave a tale without its thread, to cut crime loose from punishment, to part a god's power from its domain. The overburdened call this freedom from obligation; the Weaver has no such purpose, and threads part near it as frayed cord parts under strain.

Abilities and Powers

The Severing of Threads

It cuts the connection between any two things.

• Effect: A sword comes away from the hand holding it; a word from its meaning; a memory from the one who lived it.
• Cost: The victim can no longer relate to anything around them, a strand with no weave.

The Fray Field

In its field cause comes loose from effect and part from whole. Speech never reaches the listener; an order never reaches the soldiers.

• Transmission: The Fray runs along every bond inside it (see how the fields spread).

The Tapestry of Strands

It can unpick a being into threads.

• Effect: The body loosens into fibres, the mind into unrelated thoughts; the Weaver pulls them apart.
• Effect: The unpicked one feels every strand and cannot find the weave.

The Unravelling Tide

At full strength it would undo every link at once, among the Primes and across the Material Plane, until everything hung as loose ends.

The Threat to the Cosmos

It ends the whole.

• To Umbra Prime: It opens gaps in the Whispering Trace so that echoes no longer join to what made them.
• To Verba Prime: It unpicks the Binding Song's sentences into unrelated words.
• To the Material Plane: A chronicle no longer runs from one reign to the next, oaths stop binding, and the story a people tells about itself falls into separate episodes.

The Cascade Failure

At the Boundary it cuts the threads that join "Inside" to its edge (see the cascade failure).

Relationships

With the Primes

The Void Weaver is a remnant of the substrate the Primes differentiated from, from before anything was woven together. It is their kin and their shadow: the potential for connection, never knotted into a principle.

• Umbra Prime: The Weaver is the shadow before the light, the silence before the sound, the gap before the bridge.
• Verba Prime: The Weaver is the word before it was spoken, the sentence before it was written, the story before it was told.
• Lux Prime: The Weaver is the light before it was focused, the image before it was formed, the pattern before it was seen.
• Memoria Prime: The Weaver is the event before it belonged to a story, the episode before anyone tied it to the next.
• Terra Prime: Its binding holds against the Weaver's cutting; see its page.

With the Beyonders

The Beyonders are wary of it; a breach is a seam, and the Weaver unpicks seams.

With the Cast-Outs

A Cast-Out binds everything to its one idea, and the Weaver would cut every one of those bindings (see the overview).

With Other Unformed

Beside the Echoing Dark, the Weaver goes deeper: the Dark removes the label, the Weaver what the label was attached to. It lies near the Fractured Mirror; the Mirror asks "What do you see?", the Weaver "How does it fit?", for it cuts the links between the Mirror's many views. Against the Grey Mist it works the other way: the Mist blurs edges together, the Weaver cuts them apart, and neither leaves a self that holds together.

Encounters and Legends

The City of Loose Threads

A city weary of duties and ties felt them slacken as the Weaver passed and let go. Buildings came apart brick by brick, its chronicles fell into unconnected days, oaths lost their force. When the Weaver had gone, the city lay as a frayed tangle of streets that no longer led into each other.

The Weaver's Knot

A weaver weighed down by a great tapestry felt the threads loosen in her hands when the Void Weaver came to her loom, and took it for relief. She did not tie them off. Her pattern unravelled, and she never again could make two threads hold.

The Last Stitch

Weavers whose patterns it has unpicked hold that one perfect stitch survives in it: the first connection ever made.

The Unravelled Rope

Four ruin-delvers went down an elder shaft roped together, after the gold the tales put at its foot. Halfway down they felt the rope go slack between them. Strand by strand it came apart in their hands, and the knots opened of themselves. Only one came up: the youngest, who had been taught by her mother to tie every knot twice and to say aloud what each one held. The gold is still at the foot of the shaft, if the tales are true.

Weaknesses and Countermeasures

The Power of Connection

It cannot unpick someone who keeps saying "this is part of that" and acting on it.

• Strategy: Accept that depending on others is part of being whole.

The Power of the Weave

A handshake that means something, a vow kept, a story told from beginning to end: each completed link is a knot it must work around.

• Strategy: Bind. Tie off what you start, and tell the whole story.

The Power of the Primes

The Primes knit against it with the Resonance of Connection: Umbra Prime in the trace and the remnant, Verba Prime in the word and the sentence, Lux Prime in the pattern and the image.

Role in the Cosmology

The Void Weaver is the ghost of the unbound: the reminder that a thing is partly made of what it is tied to.