Notes: Cosmological Vomit

Spoiler Warning – Internal Reference Material

The following notes contain significant character lore, hidden relationships, cosmological theories, and narrative secrets not intended for general player or reader knowledge.

This document is designed for authorial use and continuity tracking. It is a chaotic dumping ground of big ideas, half-truths, deep lore, and metaphysical musings—many of which are not yet final, and some of which probably shouldn’t be true.

If you're not supposed to know what's behind the curtain—
Put the book down, Dave.

You’ve been warned.

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Cosmological Vomit Incoming

This is not a finished doctrine. It’s a chaotic dump of half-formed ideas, metaphysical nonsense, dramatic metaphors, and questionable truths about how reality might work (or fail to). It’s a working mess of thoughts around the Loom, the Last Home, dreams, threads, and whatever passes for structure in this setting. Nothing here is final. Everything is subject to change, contradiction, and sudden divine correction. If you’re looking for answers, you’re in the wrong bar. These are just my notes—cosmology, but scribbled after one too many cups of coffee.

Anyone who has some spare time who can stand reading though a long bullet point list of notes, please ask questions, poke holes and so on. Please. Thankyou and all that stuff.

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The Pattern / The Tilted Loom

“Reality is not a place. It’s a story someone kept dreaming too loud to forget.”

• Reality is a vast, infinite weave of dreams, stories, beliefs, and nightmares.
• Each individual dream or idea forms a Thread in the Loom.
• Threads with similar resonance attract each other, forming clusters.
• When enough threads knot, they become a World, Realm, or Plane.
• Worlds form at different scales depending on how many believe, and how strongly.
• The Loom isn’t stable—it tilts, tugged by emotion, story, and narrative pressure.
  This instability is called The Tilt.
• Travel between places isn’t always spatial.
  Sometimes it’s emotional.
  Sometimes it’s narrative.
  Sometimes it’s just weird.

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Threads, Realms, and Resonance – A Theory of Narrative Physics

“It’s not magic. It’s story behaving like gravity.”

What Is a Thread?

A Thread is a single narrative strand.
A person. A soul. A possibility.
It’s your story, spun through the Loom, defined by:

• The choices you make
• The emotions you feel
• The meaning others assign to you

Threads can entangle, fray, loop, or unravel.
But they never lie. They only resonate.

What Is Resonance?

Resonance is what gives a Thread weight in the Pattern.

• It’s the emotional and narrative force of your story.
• Strong resonance can:
• Create Realms
• Attract gods
• Shift how you’re perceived in the Tapestry
• Rewrite how Realms respond to you

A Thread without resonance is just... background.
A Thread with too much? That’s how myths are born.

What Is a Realm?

A Realm is a place in the Pattern formed by:

• Enough resonant belief
• A strong enough idea
• Or a cluster of threads orbiting the same narrative shape

Some Realms are born intentionally.
Others just... happen, like a story someone forgot to stop telling.

There are three main types:

1. Woven Realms – Emotional, dream-like, personal (e.g. Fae Wilds)
2. Belief Realms / The Unfathomed – Ideological, alignment-based, rigid (e.g. Spiral Hells, Blooming Road)
3. Failed/Fractured Realms – Nightmares, demi-planes, or broken echoes (e.g. Knotgrave fragments)

What Is the Pattern?

The Pattern is the whole damn thing.

• All Threads. All Realms. All stories.
• It's the Loomed Multiverse—a giant knot of narrative possibility.
• No one’s ever seen all of it.
  The Inn probably has. But it’s not telling.

The Pattern isn't fixed.
It shifts, changes, adapts—because it’s written by everyone, all the time.

What Is Resonant Gravity?

It’s the force that pulls Threads to the Realms they belong in.

• Based on your choices, story arc, emotional weight, and how others see you
• You don’t go where you want.
• You go where the Pattern thinks your Thread makes the most sense.

Can You Change Your Thread?

Yes. But not easily.

• Small changes alter perception.
• Big changes alter destination.
• Massive resonance shifts can spawn entire Realms, or erase you from the Pattern entirely.

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The Last Home and the Nature of Refuge

• The Inn is not part of the Loom—it exists outside, or beneath, or maybe before it.
• It was formed by a universal longing: “I just want somewhere to rest.”
• This makes it the strongest Thread in the Pattern, even though it appears weak.
• It is effectively the Cosmic Local—a living thread of humour, comfort, and existential exhaustion.
• The Inn is self-aware, dry-humoured, and plays jokes because it reflects the collective consciousness of people who are emotionally done.
• Dave may be the original dream, or the one who had it—or both.
• The One in the Backroom is the one who wrote it down and made it stick.
• The Inn connects to anywhere in the Pattern where the resonance of longing, escape, or story-fatigue is strong enough.

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How Do Patrons Who Leave the Inn Return?

“Some places you visit. The Inn visits you.”

Hearthstones

• Hearthstones are fragments of Inn resonance, gifted to patrons the Inn chooses to trust.
• Holding one while focusing on the Inn allows you to return—if the Inn lets you.
• They’re not teleportation. They’re permission slips.
• The Inn can ignore them. Or change the destination.

Do Threads Remember the Inn?

Yes. But imperfectly.

• Most people forget the Inn until they need it again.
• Their thread remembers, even if their mind doesn’t.
• This is why you sometimes open a door you don’t recognise and step into somewhere that feels safe, weird, or unfinished.

Emotional/Narrative State

• The Inn appears when the Thread is bent, tired, or ready to change.
• It answers:
• Desperation.
• Longing.
• The moment before you give up.
• It does not respond to convenience.
• If you’re trying to get back because you want to, that’s rarely enough.
  You need to be at the point where your Thread might fray.

The Three Ways Back

1. A Hearthstone
   – If the Inn allows it.
2. A Narrative Pull
   – Strong enough emotional resonance triggers a door.
3. The Inn Decides
   – A door appears. Always where you least expect it.

“The Inn doesn’t lose people. Sometimes it just sets them aside until they’re needed again.”

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The One in the Backroom — The Weaver (Sort Of)

• Might be the Weaver, but not in the traditional “cosmic loom god” sense.
• Didn’t create the Loom. Didn’t start the Pattern.
• But he’s the one mending, smoothing, and sometimes rewriting the threads.
• Think reluctant janitor of metaphysical nonsense meets cosmic editor-in-chief.
• The Loom seems to listen when he writes. The Inn definitely does.
• More “caretaker of narrative resonance” than “controller of fate.”
• If Dave is the original dream, The One in the Backroom is the one who kept the dream from fading.
• Not omniscient, not omnipotent—just still here, making sure things don’t unravel completely.
• Possibly the only person who knows which threads are meant to be pulled and which should absolutely, absolutely be left alone.

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On Repair, Revision, and Other Quiet Disasters

“Not every story works out. Some get rewritten. Some get cut. Some just get quietly filed under ‘Maybe Later.’”

The Errr Book

• A metaphysical filing system for ideas that didn’t work.
• Contains:
• Broken threads.
• Half-realised gods.
• Abandoned realities.
• Bad narrative decisions.
• May or may not be a physical book. May or may not be aware.
• It hums faintly when you’re near it. Occasionally whispers critiques.
• If you read from it, the Loom might take your suggestion very seriously.
• Known entries include:
• A rewrite of a rewrite of a reality where names explode on use.
• Three pantheons that turned out to be the same people with different hats.
• “Dave, but too powerful”—redacted entirely.
• Maintained by The One in the Backroom, who uses it to file away cosmic whoopsies, dangling plot threads, and bad ideas he doesn’t want to delete entirely.

The Cosmic Scissors

“Not a force. Not a punishment. Just… necessary.”

• An inevitable function in the Pattern.
• Appears when a thread becomes unsalvageable—too contradictory, dangerous, or unstable to leave intact.
• Cuts the thread cleanly, often before anything notices.
• Not wielded by a known entity—only whispers of “a seamstress with no eyes.”
• Prophecies can sense them when their own thread nears collapse.
• Spells like Disintegrate or catastrophic Wish failures may briefly invoke this force.
• The cut thread doesn’t vanish—it falls into…

The Thread Bin / The Knotgrave

• A metaphysical dumping ground for cut, forgotten, or rejected threads.
• Not the Hollowdark (which is absence). This is rejects—ideas that didn’t form right or didn’t get enough belief.
• Known by many names:
• The Knotgrave
• The Spindle Pit
• The Weaver’s Waste
• The Unravel
• Inhabitants include:
• Half-born gods
• Dead realities
• Scrapped plotlines that still echo in dreams
• PCs might encounter it during failed summonings, narrative collapse, or while trying to destroy a god or realm.
• Some threads stay there.
• Others... crawl back up.

The Patchwork / Recycled Threads

“Not all dead dreams stay dead. Some get re-stitched with new colours.”

• Some broken threads get unpicked and rewoven into new forms.
• This creates recurring archetypes and mythological echoes.
• Gods may shift domains.
• Legendary heroes might return with new names.
• Entire stories can be reborn in new realms, distorted but familiar.
• Players might feel déjà vu, dream of things that never happened, or find recurring symbols in wildly different worlds.
• These are darned threads—not originals, but remembered into relevance.

The Cosmic Darn

• When a thread can’t be cut, it has to be patched.
• The One in the Backroom performs these repairs (grudgingly).
• Darned spots are weak points in the Pattern:
• Time loops.
• Contradictory memories.
• NPCs who seem rewritten.
• Some become stronger through the stitch.
• Some remain fragile forever.
• Often used to patch world-ending logic gaps, bad divine plans, or character deaths that “didn’t stick.”

The Red Ink Pen

“Red sky at night… oh shit.”

• A mythic narrative implement kept by The One in the Backroom.
• Rewrites a thread permanently.
• Cost is always unknown—but the Loom takes something else in trade.
• Only used in absolute emergencies (or after three cups of coffee and a complete loss of patience).
• Myths say:
• If you smell ink and no one’s writing, it’s already too late.
• You only get one clean rewrite. After that, the stains start spreading.
• The last time it was used, a continent vanished—but one man remembers it and keeps asking how to get back.

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The Relationship Between Time and Threads

“Time isn’t real. Story just needs you to think it is.”

Do Threads Age?

Yes—but not biologically. They age narratively.

• A Thread ages as its story unfolds.
• If someone’s narrative arc stalls, they can become temporally adrift.
• Some patrons have been alive for centuries.
  Others age a decade in a week.
  The Loom tracks arcs—not calendars.

Can Stories Be Undone?

Not truly.

• A Thread can be rewound, but it leaves scars.
• Some people get rewritten, rethreaded, or sent back to an earlier point.
• They always feel off—like they’re living something twice.
• This is why time loops happen. And why some people break them.

Time at the Inn

• The Inn rejects linear time.
• Time at the Inn is stable only because it wants to be.
• Patrons return from adventures and days may have passed. Or months. Or none.
• The Inn exists in a “soft now.” Thread motion is tracked by resonance, not clocks.

Time a Story Product

• Time exists because narratives require causality.
• In realms with strong structure (like The Unfathomed), time is rigid.
• In dream Realms, it’s emotional.
• In the Hollowdark, it’s missing.

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The Realms of Element and Emotion (Former Inner Planes)

• Called The Elemental Echoes.
• Fire, Water, Air, Earth—and others—exist as frequencies rather than discrete spaces.
• Realms bleed into one another and reflect the emotions of the worlds they border.
• Not navigated physically but by resonance and story.

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The Unfathomed (Outer Planes Equivalent)

“It’s not Heaven. It’s not Hell. It’s just what happens when too many people agree on something for too long.”

What Is the Unfathomed?

The Unfathomed is a vast collection of Realms formed not from emotion or memory, but from ideology—belief taken to its extreme.

Where the Woven Realms reflect personal dreams, and the Tapestry Beyond echoes longing, the Unfathomed is where shared conviction becomes geography. It is:

• Alignment made literal.
• Philosophy turned landscape.
• Consensus built into walls.

You don’t visit the Unfathomed.
You resonate into it.

Spiral Architecture of the Unfathomed

“You’re not in a realm. You’re on a journey through belief. The realm is where you paused to catch your breath—and forgot to start moving again.”

The Realms of the Unfathomed are not static locations—they’re anchored points along a pair of vast metaphysical spirals:

The Spiral Hells

• A descent through guilt, punishment, and self-inflicted suffering.
• Souls spiral downward the more they believe they failed.

The Ascendant Spiral

• An upward climb through self-justification, affirmation, and legacy.
• Souls rise as they believe their story mattered—and should be remembered.

The Plateau

• In between the spirals lies a neutral core—Realms of pure law, record, or detachment.
• Souls here neither rise nor fall. They simply are.

Realms of the Unfathomed (by Alignment)

Each Realm is an ideological echo chamber—formed from shared belief, maintained by narrative gravity, and occasionally escaped from.

Lawful Good – The Quiet Sanctum

Perfect order. Eternal purpose. No one suffers. No one resists. No one leaves.

• Everything has a place. Including you.
• Your value is defined by your role.
• Peace through control. Safety at the cost of choice.

Spiral: Upper Ascendant Spiral

Neutral Good – The Hearth of Gentle Ends

Kindness without change. Mercy without motion.

• Everyone is safe. No one is challenged.
• It’s warm, quiet, and infinitely forgiving.
• But you’ll never move forward again.

Spiral: Mid-upper Ascendant Spiral

Chaotic Good – The Blooming Road

Joyful rebellion. Empathy unbound. Kindness that burns.

• Roads bloom as you walk.
• You will be loved, even if it kills you.
• The wild is sacred. Nothing holds still.

Spiral: Lower Ascendant Spiral

Lawful Neutral – The Clockwork Accord

Justice without empathy. Process without pause.

• Everything is documented. Everything is enforced.
• You can appeal, but the queue is infinite.
• The system is perfect. It just forgot why it exists.

Spiral: Central Plateau

True Neutral – The Grey Archive

Everything is recorded. Nothing is judged.

• Pure observation. Pure detachment.
• No punishment. No purpose.
• You are here because you fit nowhere else.

Spiral: Edge of Plateau (some drift toward Hollowdark)

Chaotic Neutral – The Ember Stand

The war that never ends. The silence is just breath between strikes.

• The Courts and the Hells both deny it—but they never left.
• The ground is ash. The banners still fly. No side remembers why.
• Only once did the battle falter—and someone paid for that.

Spiral: Central Plateau (contested ground)

Lawful Evil – The Gilded Cage

Obedience weaponised. Cruelty with a signature.

• You signed the contract.
• You agreed to the rules.
• Now you live by them. Forever.

Spiral: Upper Spiral Hells

Neutral Evil – The Maw That Smiles

Need. Hunger. Efficiency. Love made into consumption.

• You are useful. You will be used.
• The Realm devours you gently, while thanking you.
• It smiles the whole time.

Spiral: Mid Spiral Hells

Chaotic Evil – The Roil (lower layers)

Collapse, but messier.

• Everything is broken, bleeding, or about to explode.
• It’s not even joyful anymore. It just is.

Spiral: Lower Spiral Hells

The Spiral Hells & Ascendant Spiral (Shared Structures)

These two spirals are not realms—they are narrative gravity wells.

The Spiral Hells

“You walk in. You keep walking. Eventually, you agree you should be there.”

• Descending through layers of guilt, punishment, and belief in personal failure.
• Each step reinforces the idea that you deserve your place.
• Leaving requires genuine self-forgiveness.
  Most never make it.

The Ascendant Spiral

“You ascend with every compliment you think you earned.”

• Climbing through legacy, story-worth, and emotional closure.
• The higher you go, the more convinced you are that you deserve to be there.
• At the top is The Halo Loop: perfection so complete you forget how to grow.

The Hollowdark – Outside the Spiral

• Not evil. Not ordered. Just absent.
• Where resonance fails and narrative unravels.
• Souls who drift here are forgotten, erased, or never fully formed.
• The only Realm not bound to belief—because it has none.

Angels, Demons & Ideological Beings

• Not born. Not made. Dreamed into form by the Realm they serve.
• They don’t follow gods. They are the functions of the ideas that created them.
• Their appearance changes to match their purpose.
• Some wander the Pattern. Some visit the Inn. Most forget they were ever stories.

Afterlife by Belief (And Belief by Afterlife)

• When you die, you don’t go where you wanted—you go where your story fits.
• Your own belief plays a part.
• But the belief of others may pull harder.
• You land in the Realm that resonates with:
• What you thought you were
• What others thought you were
• What the story says you became

The Inn’s Relationship With the Unfathomed

Yes, the Inn connects to the Unfathomed.
No, it does not care about your divine purpose.

“Belief is welcome. Bullshit stays outside.”

• Angels drink. Demons sulk.
• Philosophical constructs mop the floor.
• The wallpaper ignores your aura.

The Inn isn’t impressed by ideology.
It’s here for the people who can’t remember what side they were on anymore.

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The Fae Wilds (Overview & Intent)

A cluster of interconnected dream-realms shaped by emotion, myth, and shared longing. Not one place, but many—layered and shifting, like stories told in moonlight. The Fae Wilds are where dreams grow roots, and beauty learns how to bite.

This section will eventually explore the Courts, rules, and emotional logic of the Wilds, but for now, here’s the core idea:

• It’s inspired by traditional fae folklore, Pan’s Labyrinth, and anime that treats fae as beautiful, terrifying, and alien.
• The Wilds are emotionally structured realms where logic bends to meaning.
• Time, identity, and memory are fluid—held together by bargains, names, and narrative weight.
• The fae can’t lie, but everything they say is a trap.
• There are Courts, but they reflect feelings, not politics.
• Deals have power. Names have weight. Emotions shape the land.

Eventually, we’ll do a proper breakdown of:

• The major and minor Courts
• What happens when mortals enter (or stay too long)
• The cost of leaving
• How the Fae Wilds interact with the Loom

But for now: this is the place where beauty is dangerous, truth is a trick, and you are never the same twice.

Are the Fae Wilds Part of the Unfathomed?

Not directly.

The Fae Wilds are not born of ideology or alignment.
They are born of emotion, story-logic, and longing wrapped in metaphor.

That means:

• The Fae Wilds are part of the Woven Realms—a dream-cluster of deeply resonant emotional truth, rather than structured belief.
• The Unfathomed is belief-heavy, ideal-structured, and morally rigid, even when chaotic.

The difference is tone and function:

Fae Wilds	The Unfathomed
Emotion > logic	Belief > truth
Stories and metaphor	Ideals and alignment
Rules exist but are felt, not stated	Rules are stated, then enforced
Time is flexible	Time is philosophical
You get lost because you feel wrong	You get sorted because you are wrong
Makes sense only through personal logic	Makes sense only through collective belief

How They Interact

• The edges of the Fae Wilds brush the Unfathomed.
• Some Courts may temporarily resonate with Unfathomed Realms:
• An Unseelie court might echo the Spiral Hells during a season of grief.
• A Seelie glade might bloom with fragments of the Blooming Road.
• But they are not part of it.

In fact:

The Unfathomed finds the Fae Wilds deeply annoying.
No alignment. No consistency. No clear hierarchy of suffering.
Just beauty, danger, bargains, and emotional violence.

The Fae Wilds are truths told sideways, while the Unfathomed is a library of cosmic manifestos.

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The Tapestry Beyond

“It’s not a place you go. It’s the space between stories. The breath between dreams.”

• The Tapestry Beyond is the space between threads in the Loom.
• It functions as your Astral Plane analogue, but is far more than a travel lane—it's a field of raw narrative resonance, memory, potential, and conceptual bleed-through.

Core Functions

• Not a realm—a frequency field.
• Exists between Realms and dreams.
• Used for:
• Projection (you send your story, not your body)
• Travel between realms by narrative resonance
• Divine/arcane communication
• Soul-passage after death

Dream Layer & Dreaming in the Tapestry

• The Tapestry is where we dream.
• Dreams are projections into this space—your thread reaching out while unbound by waking logic.
• Most dreams are static. But vivid, lucid, or prophetic dreams?
  → Those are direct resonance contact with the Tapestry.
• When you dream:
• You may slip past other threads.
• You may encounter new ones forming.
• You might leave echoes behind—or carry one back with you.

Where Threads Begin

• New Realms form here.
• A belief, a fear, a longing—if strong enough—gathers resonance in the Tapestry.
• Once stable, it pulls itself into the Loom as a thread: a world, a god, a being.
• Some fail to form and remain in the Tapestry as narrative ghosts, haunting dreams, or half-realised myths.

Death & Passage

• Dead souls pass through the Tapestry Beyond en route to their destination.
• Some:
• Move on to belief-driven afterlives.
• Return to the Pattern.
• Linger and become echoes, wraiths, or whispers.
• Strong souls leave trails. Lost ones dissolve, unless remembered.

Travelling Between Realms

• Travel is not always physical—it’s about resonance, emotion, and story.
• Portals form:
• Through Doors.
• Through Dreams.
• Through emotional climax or despair.
• The Inn can “appear” at any point in the Pattern where the narrative thread is tight enough.

Dangers

• Staying too long unravels identity.
• Dream-walkers can get trapped.
• Wandering ideas, abandoned gods, or predatory echoes dwell here.
• The Tapestry doesn’t want to hurt you—it just doesn’t care if you get rewritten.

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On Fanfiction, Thought-Echoes, and Narrative Parasites

“Some dreams are shared. Others are stolen. And some are just really passionate commentary that accidentally births a new reality.”

• When a story is loved enough, believed in deeply, or just made someone feel too damn much—
• The echo enters the Tapestry.
• The resonance increases.
• If it’s strong enough… it might form a shadow-thread.

These don’t always become full realms, but sometimes they:

• Linger as alt-threads (what-if timelines)
• Splinter from the original Realm (AU echoes)
• Reshape the original thread subtly through narrative pressure (retroactive myth)

Known Outcomes of Excessive Narrative Echoes:

• The Phantom Archive – A theoretical cluster in the Tapestry where fan-spawned echoes collect. Stories of stories. Threads-of-threads. Sometimes they're harmless. Sometimes they believe they’re realer than the source.
• Thread-Parasites – Echoes so strong they attach to existing characters and begin altering their trajectory.
• The Mirror Realms – Entire alternate versions of known realities formed by collective headcanons, retcons, and strongly held emotional beliefs.

Who Deals With This?

• The One in the Backroom has a whole drawer labelled “Fix-it Fics That Got Too Real”.
• Seraphis once found a shelf in the Library that didn’t exist the day before—full of books where she was a very different person. She refuses to talk about it.
• The Inn itself occasionally references things that “never happened”—but someone remembers them anyway.

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Magic

• Magic is the manipulation of narrative frequency—tuning into the Loom’s threads and bending them to your will.
• Different worlds understand magic differently:
• Spells.
• Songs.
• Sacrifices.
• Machines powered by belief.
• The underlying truth is dream-resonance. Spells work because they align with how a world expects them to work.

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Science Worlds (Earth & Beyond)

• Worlds like Earth still exist, but their Thread is tight and rationalised.
• They haven’t lost magic—they just forgot how to see it.
• Magic is relegated to:
• Urban legends.
• Greek myths.
• Déjà vu.
• Forgotten dreams.
• Portals to the Inn still appear, but only when emotional resonance or narrative weight forces a break in the rules.
• These worlds dream more slowly, but their dreams are no less powerful.

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Demiplanes & Threads That Refused to Let Go

“A realm doesn’t have to be big. Just loud enough that the Pattern can’t ignore it.”

What Is a Demiplane?

• A narrative pocket in the Loom.
• Formed when a thread is too resonant to unravel, but too narrow to form a full Realm.
• Not a world. Not a dream.
  More like an echo chamber with furniture.

How Do They Form?

• Created by:
• Unfinished souls
• Dreamers with too much magic and not enough sense
• Powerful emotions at the edge of death
• Gods who forgot how to let go
• Often unintentional.
  Sometimes deliberate.
  Occasionally spiteful.

What Are They Like?

• Small. Dense. Intimate.
• Shaped entirely by the thread that formed them.
• A dying moment.
• A need unmet.
• A loop that refuses to close.
• Common forms:
• Memory sanctums
• Grief prisons
• Battlefields trapped in narrative rewind
• Houses that remember people who no longer exist

Can They Be Made on Purpose?

Yes—but with difficulty.

• Some gods, mages, and creatures build them as:
• Hidden sanctuaries
• Magical laboratories
• Narrative prisons
• Dream vaults
• Requires:
• Extreme resonance control
• Or help from something that knows how to stitch sideways

Can They Become Realms?

Yes—if they’re fed.

• More belief = more structure
• More resonance = more permanence
• If a demiplane gathers enough weight, it can be woven into the Loom fully, becoming a true Realm

If not?

• They collapse into:
• The Tapestry Beyond, drifting as dream-echoes
• Or the Knotgrave, where half-born realities rot quietly and sometimes scream

Examples (Real or Theoretical)

• A lich’s last thought: “There was another way.”
  Now a demiplane where they try it, over and over.
• A childhood home that never existed—but several orphans dreamt it into place together.
• A battlefield caught mid-charge, formed by a war god who didn’t die well.
• A mirror that shows the life you could have lived. Only found on rainy Tuesdays.

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Nightmares, Rejected Realms & Realities That Shouldn't Be

“Not every dream is meant to come true. Some fight you when you try.”

Where Nightmares Go

• Not all threads become stories.
  Some twist.
  Some break during resonance.
  Some were never meant to be woven.

These become:

• Loose horrors in the Tapestry
• Rotting pockets in the Knotgrave
• Nightmare-realms—formed of fear, obsession, or corrupted belief

Nightmare Realms

• Born from shared terror, mass trauma, or cultural repression.
• Can form when:
• A demiplane is fed by fear instead of faith
• A failed Realm refuses to collapse
• Something in the Pattern feeds on pain

They are self-sustaining loops of dread, not evil by nature—but often horrific in experience.

• Common traits:
• Warped time
• Unbreakable loops
• Invasive memory
• Residents who aren’t sure if they’re real

Rejected Realms

• Threads that nearly became Realms but were:
• Unstable
• Contradictory
• Too niche to sustain belief
• Often end up in the Knotgrave or Tapestry margins, half-formed and occasionally predatory.
• Some function like parasites, trying to latch onto stronger Realms to finish their formation.
• Others lure travellers with false narrative structure—a world that feels right until it doesn’t.

Forced Realms: Cults, Factions, & Belief Experiments

“You can’t shortcut resonance. But people keep trying.”

• Some groups try to create Realms deliberately:
• Cults praying to a god that doesn’t exist—yet
• Warlocks shaping belief into structure
• Scholars attempting to codify new afterlives
• Occasionally it works.
• More often, the result is:
• A half-alive Realm fed by desperation
• A sentient belief-construct with no grounding
• A Narrative Feedback Loop, where worship warps faster than the believers can adapt

Some of the Realms now accepted as stable and long-standing may have begun this way—as belief constructs seeded by mortals with enough resonance to shape reality. Not every cult-fathered realm collapses. Not every god began as a divine truth.
Sometimes, the story sticks.
And once it does, the Pattern just… accepts it.

Dangers

• Travellers may be drawn into false Realms and not realise they're trapped in a story with no centre.
• Cult-created spaces may unravel violently if the belief wavers.
• Rejected Realms may mimic known worlds as camouflage.
• Nightmare-born demiplanes can be invasive, leeching into dreams, stories, or spellwork.

The Inn’s Relationship

• The Last Home rarely connects to these spaces.
  But when it does, it's usually by accident… or because something inside asked nicely and lied just well enough.

Some rooms of the Inn are cautiously avoided, just in case they aren’t fully part of the Inn at all.

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Echo Alchemy: Curses, Bottles & the Things That Shouldn’t Exist

“You don’t have to believe in the nightmare. It believes in you.”

Bottled Nightmares

Some nightmare threads don’t fade.
They condense.

• Caught in jars, bound to relics, sealed in tattoos—nightmares can be harvested.
• Once bottled, they become tools:
• To curse someone with dreams they’ve never had.
• To infect Realms with forgotten terror.
• To make kindness feel like a trap.

The most infamous collector is Mother Threadgloom:

• A nightmare-born hag who bottles pain that doesn’t belong to you.
• Gifts them to the undeserving.
• Laughs in dreams. Appears in mirrors. Leaves no footprints.

“She only knocks if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t deserve what’s coming.”

Echo-Cursed Items

Some objects serve as anchors for failed threads:

• They’re not evil. They’re unfinished.
• A blade that remembers every kill it never made.
• A mirror that reflects who you would’ve been if you had mattered.

Cursed items:

• Feed on use.
• Grow stronger with belief.
• Sometimes rewrite the user to fit the story they were meant to be part of.

Monsters of Nightmare

Some nightmares are too loud to stay thoughts.

• These become Nightmare-Born Beasts—living echoes that:
• Can’t be explained.
• Often can’t be killed.
• Shouldn’t have names—but do.

They come from shared fears and failed stories:

• The Wishing Dog – Answers your wish wrong, then follows you until you ask again.
• The Cradle of Teeth – A nursery loop with no exit, full of lullabies that bite.
• The Rag-Dream – A stitched child that forgets it's not alive, and wants company.

Nightmare-born monsters often:

• Appear in dreams first.
• Grow more real the more you think about them.
• Bleed into the Inn when no one’s looking.

What This Explains

• Why cursed items feel like they belong to a different reality.
• Why nightmares sometimes leave physical residue.
• Why no one opens the third door down in the east hall anymore.
• Why The Inn has a "no bottles left unattended" policy.

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Gods: On Belief, Multiplicity, and What Happens When They Sit Down for a Pint

“A god is just a story that got too loud to ignore.”

What Are Gods?

• Gods are threads of belief, formed when enough resonance—fear, love, need, myth—accumulates and condenses into identity.
• They are not born. They are woven by the Loom when a concept becomes too heavy, too shared, or too longed for to ignore.
• Belief doesn’t have to be worship:
• Folklore.
• Archetypes.
• Symbols repeated across Realms.

All can shape a god.

Shared Threads, Many Names

“The Devil has many names. So does everyone else who matters.”

• A single divine thread may be woven through multiple Realms, expressed under different names, myths, and masks.
• These are not separate gods—just localized expressions of the same core resonance.
• The Loom doesn’t care about canon—it recognises emotional truth.
• Some gods are aware of their many aspects. Others are not.

Change, Division, and Collapse

• Gods change as belief changes.
• If pulled in too many directions, a god may:
• Split into separate entities
• Shed aspects (former roles turned independent)
• Or collapse into legend, becoming background noise in the Pattern
• Divine identity is both fluid and fragile—too much contradiction risks unraveling.

How Gods Fade

• Gods fade when belief wanes, contradicts, or forgets.
• They lose narrative mass and fall into:
• The Knotgrave (dead and broken threads)
• The Tapestry Beyond (as lost echoes)
• Or mythic dormancy, waiting to be remembered
• Some gods persist in symbols, phrases, or inherited emotions even after their names are lost.

Mortal Ascension

• Mortals can become gods through resonant legend:
• Stories told about them.
• Cults that focus their belief.
• Deeds that echo across the Loom.
• These Thread-born deities are unstable:
• Torn between who they were and what others believe they are.
• Prone to splintering, distortion, or forgetting.
• Some don’t realise they’ve become gods until they try to leave—and the Pattern doesn’t let them.

Gods at The Last Home

“You don’t walk into the Inn as a title. You walk in as a truth.”

• Gods who visit the Inn appear as their core resonance—not the name on their temple, but the thread that holds all their aspects together.
• In this form, they are:
• Fully aware of all their selves.
• Free of obligation, masks, and performance.
• Sometimes deeply uncomfortable.
• The Inn provides neutral ground:
• A place where gods can rest from belief.
• Or confront the parts of themselves they forgot existed.

Some gods love it here.
Some can’t stand it.
Some never leave.

Angels, Demons, and the Politics of Ideals

• Angels and demons are not good or evil by default—they are functionally manifested beliefs.
• They represent ideals, roles, and divine mandates, rather than personal morality.
• Created by the same resonance systems that birth gods, but shaped into servants, symbols, or executors of divine intent.
• Celestial vs Infernal conflicts are not wars of light and dark—they are editorial disputes about how reality should be written.

They're not fighting because they hate each other.
They're fighting because they disagree on the story.

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Death in the Pattern (And Why You Might Wake Up Somewhere Else)

“You don’t stop existing when you die. You just lose the plot. Sometimes literally.”

What Happens When You Die?

• Death is not the end of the thread—it’s where it unravels, branches, or tightens elsewhere.
• A soul’s narrative resonance determines what comes next:
• Fades if weak or forgotten.
• Moves on if tethered to a Realm or belief.
• Lingers if unresolved or entangled.
• Rewrites if the Loom finds further use (isekai logic).

The Tapestry Beyond as Transit

• All souls pass through the Tapestry Beyond upon death.
• Most drift briefly. Some dissolve. Others get stuck.
• The Tapestry acts as a narrative limbo—a resonance field sorting souls by meaning, weight, and destination.

Afterlives and Destination Logic

Souls end up where their thread belongs:

• Divine Realms – Anchored by belief or allegiance to a god or ideal.
• The Spiral Hells – For unresolved guilt, narrative loops, or punishment-as-purpose.
• The Blooming Road – Peaceful closure. A rare, resonant rest.
• The Hollowdark – Oblivion by neglect. Lost stories. Forgotten names.
• The Knotgrave – Dead dreams, broken gods, unformed threads.
• Rebirth – If the Pattern sees a thread still worth using.

These aren’t “rewards” or “punishments”—they’re resonant destinations, shaped by the story you told and how much it mattered.

Weak Threads & Absorption

• Weak souls—those with minimal resonance—often:
• Unravel in the Tapestry.
• Dissolve into ambient dream-noise.
• Or get drawn into stronger threads with similar emotional structure.
• Not consumed. Incorporated.
• Background myth. Shared memory. The unnamed mourner in someone else’s vision.

Belief as Afterlife Anchor

• If you believe in a god or specific afterlife—and others do too—your soul is naturally pulled toward that Realm.
• Belief acts as a thread-tether.
• Once there, your thread can:
• Persist as an individual.
• Merge into the Realm’s fabric.
• Or slowly become part of the divine structure—a whisper, a halo, a star.

The more threads bound to a god’s Realm, the more real it becomes.

Divine Judgement & Redirection

“Just because you knock on a god’s door doesn’t mean they’ll open it.”

• Gods have narrative authority over their Realms.
• They can:
• Accept your soul.
• Bind it into their story.
• Reject you outright, even if your belief pulled you there.
• Or—if they’re feeling whimsical—throw you somewhere else.

Some gods reject souls because they no longer resonate with their ideals.
Others because they’ve changed, or you have.
Some just don’t want to deal with you.

• But rejection doesn’t mean oblivion.
  If a god casts you out, the Pattern still listens—especially to everyone else.

Belief vs Self: When the World Sends You Somewhere

“You don’t have to believe you belong in Hell. But if everyone else does… the Loom might agree.”

• Your own belief matters—but so does the belief of others.
• If enough people are convinced you were a monster, a saint, a martyr, a coward—
  their resonance pulls your thread just as hard as yours does.
• You might end up in:
• The Spiral Hells you didn’t think you earned.
• A false paradise built on someone else’s idealised memory of you.
• A Realm in the Unfathomed, formed by consensus about what you were meant to be.

It’s not justice. It’s narrative gravity.

Divine Redirection (a.k.a. “Not My Problem, Try My Ex”)

• Some gods believe in second chances. Others believe in redistribution.
• If a god doesn’t want your thread, or thinks you’d “fit better” elsewhere:
• You’re thrown back into the Pattern.
• Woven into a different Realm.
• Often with altered memory, timeline displacement, or inconvenient prophecy entanglements.

Some gods do this out of spite.
Some out of love.
Some just like seeing what happens.

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Enemies of the Loom

“The Pattern doesn’t unravel because someone cuts it. It unravels when the weaver falters.”

What This Section Is

This is a meta-layer of the setting—a space where narrative threats reflect real-life obstacles to writing.

Because The One in the Backroom is a metaphor for me—the writer behind the world—the enemies of the Loom are not just cosmic forces.
They are the things that stop me writing.
The things that steal clarity, break focus, or make me feel like this world isn’t worth continuing.

They are not evil.
They are interruptions made mythic.

How This Works In-World

In setting, these afflictions become existential threats to the Loom:

• They eat threads.
• They infect Realms.
• They unwrite things that should matter.

The world doesn’t know they’re connected to The One in the Backroom.
But the Inn might.
And the fact that these forces target stories, cause forgetting, and destroy narrative cohesion is the setting’s way of processing the moments when I, the writer, struggle.

Real-Life Origins → In-World Manifestations

Here’s a breakdown of how personal experiences are mythologised:

Real-Life Affliction	In-World Entity / Concept	Manifestation
Forgetting ideas / mental blanks	Thread-Eaters	Devour names, plots, memories—leave narrative holes
Burnout, tangled writing, confusion	Snarlbeasts	Formed from narrative contradiction or too many edits
Depression / not writing at all	The Hollowdark	Where unspoken stories fade—absence incarnate
Fear that none of it matters	The Unmakers	Erase meaning, purpose, and character identity
Rewriting too much / perfectionism	Ink Rot	Narrative corruption, echo loops, tonal collapse
Self-doubt, imposter syndrome	The Whispers Beyond the Pattern	Suggests the Inn isn’t real. That none of it is.

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How These Are Portrayed In-World

• No one agrees if they’re real.
• The staff of the Inn don’t speak of them—except maybe Lars. Once. On a very bad day.
• When a Thread gets eaten, no one remembers what was lost—only that something’s missing.
• Sometimes a Realm goes quiet.
  No stories. No memory. Just fog.
  That’s often a sign something from beyond the Pattern got in.

Some say the Inn protects against them.
Others say the Inn only delays them.
No one knows where the One in the Backroom goes when he’s absent—but the Red Ink Pen is usually missing, too.

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Why This Exists

Because this setting is deeply personal, and some days the hardest thing is picking up the Thread again.
These enemies are not villains.
They’re the reason the Inn matters.

And the reason the writing continues.

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Changes:

• Upper Roil removed and replace with "The Ember Sands" a perpetual battlefield between heaven and hell.
• Reorganized plateau, its now in rings to mimic the spirals, the ember sands is on the outside nearest the hollowdark, the end of all things.