Before anyone kept records, there was the Loom.
Threads of water and fire, stone and sky, were drawn together by hands no one ever saw. From those threads rose ridgelines that wore winter like a crown, low valleys where orchards settled, and a rim of sea that kept folding the world into itself. Balance held. The pattern felt deliberate. If you stood still in a field at dawn, you could almost hear it, the quiet hum of something working as intended.
People lived beneath that hum and called it ordinary. Builders cut rooms into cliff-face and tucked smokeholes under the wind. Riverfolk read the floodmarks and tied their boats to rings of iron. Herds moved with the grasses; city gates swung open at sunrise and shut at the second bell. No one thought themselves small. They were part of the weave.
What bound it all was not a secret so much as a habit learned early. Children traced small figures in chalk before they learned their letters. A palm lifted, and the frost let go of a field. A line murmured at a doorstep kept illness from crossing the threshold. Fishermen changed the temper of a storm with a few careful words; midwives sealed a wound with touch and breath. To live without that knack seemed as unlikely as living without weather.
There were troubles, of course. Markets soured, oaths broke, land was argued over and sometimes taken by force. Banners appeared and disappeared. Walls were raised faster than they were later repaired. Yet after each season of noise came a season of mending. People trusted the Loom, or at least trusted that the pattern would not drop them.
Years turned. Caravans traced the long roads and wore them smooth. Work guilds posted contracts at dawn; the ink was always dry by noon. Bells marked beginnings, endings, weddings, warnings. At roadside tables, travelers traded stories of narrow passes, spare winters, long summers, and sometimes of wonders that sounded like mistakes: a pond that froze and thawed in the same hour; a flock that wheeled against a wind no one else could feel.
From rooftop to harbor, forge to quiet chapel, the world looked complete, alive, bright, coherent. You could walk from the highest stair in a watchtower to the lowest cellar and never find a seam.
But sometimes, not everything seems to… run properly.