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The RuneDelve
Type: Contemplation quarry, and Rune's second home
Region: The WeaveWatch Wale
Carved by: Rune, by thought alone, over thousands of years
Core Thread: Memory
Status: Still deepening
Themes: Contemplation, Memory, Permanence, Time, Wandering
"I did not dig it. I only kept thinking in the same place."
-- Rune
High on The WeaveWatch Wale, in a hollow among the great mountains, the ground falls away into a vast round quarry cut deep into the bedrock. From the ridge above it looks like a well, and the long climb down feels like walking into the inside of the world.
This is the RuneDelve, Rune's second home. The EverLasting Library in Frays End is where he works. The RuneDelve is where he thinks.
No tool has ever touched the RuneDelve. Rune did not dig it. He thought it.
For thousands of years, between his wanderings, Rune has returned to the same hollow to sit and to think. Slowly, the way water wears a step into stone, his thinking wore the earth and rock away. Each meditation took a little of the mountain with it, and left its mark on the stone behind. What remains is a temple of time-served contemplation, and it grows a little deeper with every visit.
The InkKeepers say that ink remembers what the hand forgets. Rune says that stone remembers what the mind has finished with.
Terraces spiral down the walls of the quarry, and every face of stone is covered in carving: the stories of Rune's wanderings, his prophecies, his observations and musings, and the stories he has gathered on the road. The higher walls hold his most recent thinking, short and clear. The deeper you go, the older the carving, until, near the floor, the marks are so old and worn that they can only be read with the fingers.
Most of it is Rune thinking aloud in stone. A single line about the way frost holds a leaf. A question he has never answered. The name of a friend. Some walls hold whole conversations he has had with himself across the centuries, the second half carved hundreds of years after the first. The prophecies are the hardest to read, and Rune has never explained a single one of them.
When a thought is finished, a stone comes free. Every Waystone that Rune sets out across Threadbare began as a piece of the RuneDelve, loosened by a meditation that had run its course. Wherever a traveller finds one, on a ridge, in a forest or beside a road, they are touching a small piece of the Delve, and of the thought that set it free. Some say the Waystones remember where they came from, and quietly point the way home.
The wind passes over the top of the RuneDelve and never reaches the bottom, which makes its floor the quietest place in Threadbare. Rune comes here alone. He sits on the floor of the quarry and listens to the stone, sometimes for a season at a time, and the moss has long since stopped minding.
Visitors are rare. The few who have climbed down say they found themselves speaking in whispers without being asked, and that they came back up having remembered something they had not known they had forgotten.
At the very bottom lies a single face of stone that is still smooth and uncarved. Rune has not thought it yet, and he will not say what it is waiting for.
- Carved by thought, not tools. The RuneDelve was never dug. Show it as worn, layered and patient, like a river canyon of ideas, not as a mine or a building site.
- Rune's second home. If Rune is not at the EverLasting Library or on the road, he is most likely here.
- A place to read. The walls make natural environmental storytelling: fragments of Rune's wanderings, prophecies and musings can be found, traced and read, at any depth.
- The Waystones. Any Waystone in the world can be linked back to the RuneDelve.
- Quiet, not secret. Anyone may visit, but it is a place for listening. Nothing loud happens here.
- Rune - who carved it with thought, over thousands of years
- The WeaveWatch Wale - the great mountains that hold it
- The EverLasting Library - Rune's base in Frays End, where he works
- Once - Rune's parent, the FirstSpun of Memory
- The InkWell - where Rune learned to write, as the RuneDelve is where he learned to listen
- The World of Threadbare - the lore, landscape and denizens of Threadbare
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