Backstory
In his youth, Rhys was lively and endlessly curious. Seeking purpose, he joined a secluded temple order sworn to guard ancient, forbidden relics and codices. Their sacred duty was not to study, but to ensure these dangerous artifacts, especially the texts, were locked away in underground vaults, never to be read again.
But his curiosity was not so easily contained. He discovered a secret: a small group of acolytes, led by a cleric, was clandestinely studying the forbidden lore. Rather than report them, he demanded to join. To his initial disappointment, most texts seemed nonsensical, filled with impossible descriptions and outlandish phrases that felt like elaborate fakes.
This changed with the Treatise of Loss. A small, unassuming volume, its concepts burrowed into his mind. It described reality as a vast, interconnected Pattern, a tapestry to which every living being was a single thread. The text theorized that a thread could be slowly strained, pulled, and with great effort, severed entirely from the weave.
Then, one night, a new passage appeared to him alone, a precise ritual for the severing. Elated, he rushed to share this revelation, but his comrades saw only madness in his eyes. Fearful, they resolved to confess and destroy their work. To him, this was an unthinkable betrayal of the truth. They had to be silenced. Permanently.
The cleric was first. The ritual was exhausting and seemed to fail, until he realized its true effect: not death, but erasure. When he mentioned the cleric’s name, his fellow acolytes had no memory of the man. When the confused cleric returned to the monastery, he was turned away as a stranger. Seeing his chance to tie off the loose thread, Rhys lured the cleric away under the pretense of being the last person who remembered him. There, in the shadows, he finished the work with a blade.
One by one, the rest of the study group was severed from the Pattern and then killed, their existence wiped clean before their bodies fell. To ensure no legacy of the temple or its secrets remained, he performed the ritual on every remaining soul within its walls, rendering them blank, forgotten souls before meeting their end. Finally, he set a cleansing fire to consume the empty shell of the monastery. No one would take the texts from him.
He walked away with only the Treatise of Loss. It was no longer just a book, it was his guide, his muse. His curiosity had not been quenched, but twisted into a chilling purpose.
Alone in the world, he needed coin. Theft was beneath him, his art was far more precise. In a shadowed tavern, he found a crooked merchant plagued by a rival. Rhys made a simple offer: “I will not kill him. I will erase him.” Intrigued and unnerved, the merchant agreed.
Days later, Rhys returned. The job was done. When asked for proof, he simply said, “Think of your rival’s name.” The merchant’s face went pale, then baffled. He could recall the feud, the anger, but the who was gone, a blurry, empty space in his memory. All he remembered was that he had hired someone to make a problem disappear. The payment was handed over in trembling silence, spiced with fear.
Word of this “Unraveler” began to spread in the darkest corners. For the right price, he offers the cleanest solution: not murder, but unmaking. He walked the world, a ghost in plain sight, tending to the Pattern by cutting the threads deemed unfit. The only question that remains was who would hire him next, and what part of reality would be quietly redacted out of existence.
For a time, this new “profession” was clean, elegant, and profitable. He was a surgeon of the soul, excising problems with precision. But the Pattern, it seems, does not suffer such violation without cost. The act of severing a thread does not destroy it, the frayed end remains, seeking a new connection. And his own thread, the instrument of the cutting, is the closest anchor.
The consequences began subtly.
It started with reflections. Catching his own eye in a darkened window, he did not see himself, but the stern, confused face of the merchant’s rival, the first soul he erased for gold. He blinked, and the vision was gone. A trick of the light, he told himself. But weeks later, in the polished brass of a guard’s breastplate, he saw the weeping eyes of a young acolyte from the temple, just before her thread was cut. The images never linger, but they return, unbidden and increasingly frequent.
Then came the memories. Not his own, but theirs. A sudden, vivid recollection of the secret study group, not from his perspective, but from the cleric’s. He felt the cleric’s fear, his conviction that he had to be stopped for the good of all. He experienced the memory of making that fateful decision to confess. The emotion was so alien, so righteous, that it left him shaken for hours.
The intrusions grew stranger and more physical. For years, he believed he wielded a principle. He thought the Pattern was a passive tapestry, and he a tailor. He was wrong.
The visions, the echoes, the stolen reflections, they were not mere side effects. They were bleed-through. Each severed thread was not dissolved, it was drawn elsewhere, pulled taut into a darker, vaster loom. His rituals were not deletions. They were offerings.
One night, in a fever-dream state between the memory of a slain acolyte and his own crumbling consciousness, he saw it.
Beyond the Pattern of the world, in a negative space that hungered for form, hung an entity. To call it a being was to diminish it. It was a living, breathing Absence, a silhouette against the void. Its form was the sum of all the threads he had ever severed, woven into a shape of profound stillness. Its attention, vast and cold as a dead star, turned upon him. He felt the scale of his folly. He was not a wielder. He was a parasite. A tick drawing blood from reality and feeding Nothingness. His power, his very identity, was a tiny filament spun from its impossible essence.
The pact was never a choice. It was a consumption that began with the first page of the Treatise.
His desire for mere death evaporated. Death was a thread with a neat end, a story concluded. It would leave behind the memory of his sins, the scars on the Pattern, and the abomination he had nourished. It was not enough. He needed more than death. He needed un-existence.
A new, terminal purpose crystallized within him, cold and clear as a shard of void-glass: Unravel the Loom.
If every severed thread strengthened the entity, then the ultimate severance, the cutting of the primary weave, might collapse it all. If he could fray the fundamental threads of reality, of cause and effect, of history itself, he might cause a cascade of unmaking. The world, the Pattern, the entity, and his own stained existence would snap, twist, and dissolve into a final, silent, static nothing.
He would not die. He would retroactively negate.
He now walks the world with a smile that doesn’t reach his hollow eyes. He takes contracts, not for coin, but to practice. Each target is a test, a study in finding the load-bearing threads in the tapestry of a life. He is searching for the equivalent in the world itself. He is polite, eerily calm, and utterly, cosmically damned.
Background Questions
You and your patron are similar in a very specific way. What characteristic do you share, and how do you feel about it?
We share a hunger for the quiet that comes after the last question is answered. I wanted to know everything. It… is what comes after knowing. My mind was a library it wishes to burn down. I see my own reflection in the void, and it terrifies me.
Your patron has given you one task you must accomplish above all else. What is it, and why does it worry you?
It didn’t, I gave myself the task to find the Anchor. The one thread that holds this whole tapestry taut. Cut it, and the whole weave will loosen… forever. It worries me because I don’t know what it is. It could be a king, a mountain, a child, a god. I might have to care for it before I cut it. The ultimate betrayal disguised as the ultimate purpose.
What desperate situation led you to pledge your life to your patron?
I didn’t. Not knowingly. I read a book. I followed instructions. I cut a thread, then another. Every severance was a signature on a contract I couldn’t see. By the time I looked up and saw the thing I’d been feeding… I was already theirs. My life wasn’t pledged. It was devoured piece by piece, and I was the one holding the fork.