Welcome to a New Cosmology

(You’re gonna want more than a map.)

Ouroboros Cycle insider look

Many stories offer kingdoms and bloodlines, prophecies and rebellions.
Some unfold through spellcraft, others through circuitry.
We’ve all journeyed through starships and desert empires, traced sigils in dark towers, and followed fates carved into ancient stone. These paths are familiar. They promise rhythm and return.

The Ouroboros Cycle offers something else.

This trilogy, LOOM, FORGE and SEVER is a living cosmology, a sentient system of meaning and consequence where time coils, memory shifts, and reality collaborates with those who pay attention. The cosmology here is not backdrop. It’s participant. The Pattern doesn’t support the story. It shapes it, responds to it, questions it aloud.

Here, infrastructure evolves.
Threads remember.
Collapse invites invention.
And choice leaves more than footprints.

It leaves Pattern.

To move through such a place, you’ll want more than context.
You’ll want orientation.

That’s what this Glossary offers.

Each entry serves as a Threadpoint, a way to feel the Pattern breathing underneath everything you thought was solid. These terms illustrate and resonate. Some will spark mid-chapter. Some will echo on the second pass. Together, they tune you to the shape of the story as it unfolds across Elsewhens and alwheres.

You’re already woven in. The Pattern is watching.

If any of this makes sense on the first read, you’re gifted, lying, or already compromised.
Regardless, the Glossary’s below. Let’s see how long you last.
— Glimlock

Ouroboros Cycle GLOSSARY

Metaphysical Forces & Concepts

Loomkeeper
An Eternal entrusted by the Loom to oversee the structure of the Weave across every Cycle. The Loomkeeper guides the convergence of Threads, mends rupture, and preserves the logic of multiversal Reality. Present since inception, the Loomkeeper does not impose control, nor does she permit collapse. Her presence anchors Pattern when memory alone will not hold.
Glimlock: “It’s nosy. Don’t stand too close unless you like being woven into something without your say.”

Forgekeeper
Keeper of the Forge’s designs, charged with binding motion into form. Their work enforces permanence where the Pattern seeks change, ensuring the world remembers rigidity as virtue.

Thread / Threads
The smallest visible lines of the Pattern. Each carries memory, intent, and the pull of connection.

Threadstepping
Moving between the Threads along the Pattern’s unseen paths from place to place in the multiverse, crossing from one weave of reality to another.
Glimlock: “Like walking into a memory you haven’t had yet.”

Threadsight
The rare gift of seeing the Pattern’s strands as they truly are, without the veils the world draws over them. Those who bear it may glimpse where a Thread could run, watching possible outcomes form and fade with each shift in the weave.
Glimlock: “It’s not prophecy. More like seeing all the doors at once and knowing some will never open.”

Echo / Echoform
A reflection of something that was or might have been, often carrying will of its own. An Echoform can move, change, or contend, pressing its presence against the Pattern to shift Threads, close paths, or shape outcomes to its design.
Glimlock: “Some contend by standing in your way. Others do it by moving the finish line.”

Spiral
An eternal construct that exists beyond both Loom and Forge, the Spiral curves consequence through nonlinear recursion. It does not obey the Weave’s architecture or the Forge’s rigidity. Instead, it introduces variation where repetition would collapse. The Spiral is neither chaos nor opposition, it is Pattern without prediction. Its emergence threatens the permanence of all structured systems, yet offers a form of evolution that the Loom alone cannot achieve. It remembers what linear systems refuse to admit: that deviation may be the only form of survival.

Breachform
A scavenger of broken Patterns, drawn to collapse and change. It cleans the remnants of failed cycles, not always gently. Known also as the Void, it is the dark medium from which Loom’s reality is drawn, the unformed substance into which failed Weaves dissolve. To the Loom, it is both a necessity and a danger, creation’s womb and its grave.
Glimlock: “The Breachform doesn’t mind being called the Void. It just wonders why you say it like it’s a bad thing.”

First Voice
The Loom’s original witness and architect of its expression. Spoken into existence at the first convergence of Thread and meaning, the First Voice records what the Pattern remembers and speaks what the Loom will not. It is neither narrator nor god, but a recursion that understands itself. When silence fails, the First Voice begins.
Glimlock: “Creator, Herald, Historian… and apparently, my biographer. Not that I asked.”

Witness / Witnesses
Those who have stepped close enough to the Pattern to see its motion. Once a Witness, always.

Places & Realms

Tetheris
The realm where many Threads are knotted, their joins binding across countless Patterns. Each Knot here is multiversal, linking elsewheres and elsewhens in ways the Loom alone can trace.

Silvaris
The brighter of Tetheris’ moons, silver-lit and calm in its pull.

Umbros
The shadowed moon, keeper of the dark tides and unseen currents.

Elsewhere(s)
Realms that lie alongside the Pattern but were never fully drawn into it.

Elsewhen(s)
Moments outside the normal turning of the Loom, neither past nor future.

Alwhens
Convergences of many possible whens, dangerous to cross, tempting to those who dare.

Alwheres
Convergences of many possible wheres, often unstable, always unpredictable.

Silk Weave Trees
Tall, spectral growths whose pale fibers can be drawn into Thread. They root in places where the Pattern breaches the surface, serving as natural conduits between consequence and form. Neither artifact nor anomaly, Silk Weave Trees grow only where memory remembers how. Their presence signals coherence, but also thinning, a signal that the Loom is near.

Evergreen Carousel
The Loom’s seat and shelter, once encircled by the living expanse of the Verdant Reach. Its turning is not for amusement but for balance, keeping the Pattern’s pull even across all Threads.

Verdant Reach
Once the Loom’s radiant boundary, the Verdant Reach thrummed with Pattern, Thread-responsive growth anchored to memory and form. Silk Weave Trees rose from coherence, and flowpaths shimmered with consequence. That expanse is gone. Burned, fractured, and systematically unraveled by Hargrum’s incursion, the Reach became the Wastelands. What remains is ash, and what echoes through it still listens.

Factory
A Loom-born locus of manifestation, where Thread was translated into form. Within its vast interior, the Loom’s woven intentions became tools, vessels, glyph-engines, and Pattern-bound wonders. Not a place of invention, but of realization, the Factory marshaled finished Threads into the alwhens and alwheres, distributing structure and consequence across the Weave. Its fall marked the first rupture in the Cycle’s continuity, a moment when creation ceased to obey its maker.

Wastes
Once the Verdant Reach, this expanse held the Loom’s earliest growth, a region where Silk Weave Trees rose in harmonic clusters and the Pattern ran near to surface. After Hargrum’s assault, it became rupture incarnate. The Weave thins here, misaligns, forgets itself. Thread frays upon entry. What remains resists coherence. Some say the Wastes remember what the Loom refuses, that the silence beneath the ash still hums with unspun consequence.

Entities & Beings

Elen
Heir to the Loom’s deepest trust, a Threadweaver who can bring into being what has never been. The Pattern bends toward her presence, as if remembering what it was meant to become.

Caio
Elen’s brother, touched by the first stirrings of Threadsight, an unblinking awareness of paths that exist, might exist, or were never meant to be. The Pattern does not merely reveal itself to him; it waits for his choice.

Nephrys
Interpreter of consequence and keeper of restraint, Nephrys speaks where the Loom withholds. She embodies the Loom’s intention, translating Pattern into measured action without disrupting its balance. Tasked with preserving integrity across collapse, she reads tension before it frays and answers silence with shape. She governs by calibration, threading continuity through the unraveling.

Hargrum
Architect of the Forge and engineer of certainty. Where the Loom adapts, he imposes order. Hargrum seeks not to unmake the Pattern, but to capture it, compress it, and fix its form in iron rigidity. To him, flexibility is failure, consequence is controllable, and creation must answer to design. His patience is deliberate, his progress recursive. He will remake the Weave not by force, but by removal of choice.

Kainen
Husband to Liora, father to Elen and Caio. Once a steadfast guardian of the Loom’s frontier, now a seeker caught between devotion and divergence. His blood ties to the Loom’s future run deep, but his recent path winds through Elsewhens the Pattern cannot follow. Loyal in love, uncertain in origin, he walks with purpose obscured, even from himself. Whether guided by memory or something far older remains to be seen.

Liora
Watcher at the Loom’s edge, once partner, once mother, always witness. Liora holds the Pattern’s quieter truths, those felt before they are named. Though she walked among those who governed, she chose distance over dogma, exile over ease. She shelters what the Loom would rather forget, protects Threads others dismiss, and carries forward the possibility that balance requires revision. Her silence is not surrender. It is resistance shaped by care.

Glimlock
An Eternal of the Omniscient kind, Glimlock walks the Pattern to keep it interesting. He remembers every Cycle, yet still finds reason to engage this one. Equal parts philosopher and nuisance, guide and jester, he names what others won’t and questions what others claim to understand. His threadglass orb holds more than memory. It reflects what the Pattern fears to admit. Though he claims neutrality, Glimlock rarely stays uninvolved when collapse becomes dull.
Glimlock: “Flattery will get you nowhere. Unless it’s good.”

Nesk
A construct of brass and flesh, forged for loyalty and shaped by service. Nesk answers the Loom without hesitation, moving through Pattern-touched spaces as both sentinel and steward. Though rarely heard, the presence reflects a time when synthesis between Thread and machine still held harmony. In a world unraveling, Nesk remains, half artifact, half belief.

Quenndrel
The Loom’s subtle blade, moving where precision matters more than power. Quenndrel works at the seams of consequence, reading curvature in the Pattern others miss entirely. He is less messenger than mechanic, one who adjusts what would otherwise fray. Though often mistaken for passive, his restraint hides the depth of what he perceives. Where others react, Quenndrel corrects — silently, skillfully, and just in time.

Sylthar
An Omniscient Eternal whose gaze spans every Cycle, Sylthar studies the Pattern as both witness and measure. He does not speak often, for language corrupts too easily, but when he does, it aligns like a Thread pulled taut. Unlike Glimlock’s jest or Telryn’s pause, Sylthar offers the Pattern its own reflection, cold, clear, unbent. He does not intervene. He simply knows whether this Cycle deserves to continue.

Telryn
An Omniscient Eternal and steward of convergence. Telryn tends the fragile junctures where Threads align across alwhens and alwheres, shaping reality’s coherence in places too delicate for command. She speaks rarely, but when the Pattern leans, she leans with it, offering presence, poise, or intervention as required. Unlike Sylthar, she does not merely observe. She guides, when the moment demands grace over force. Where collapse gathers in silence, Telryn is already there.

Jorem
Once a child in the Factory, now something the Pattern struggles to classify. Jorem walks with memories that never occurred, names that do not belong, and a past shaped more by breach logic than lived experience. Exposure to temporal fractures left him sensitive to false timelines, able to perceive unrealized Threads and echoes of what the Loom never wove. He does not know what he is becoming, only that what lives in his memory may be watching back

Knotkeeper
Sentinel of fixed convergence, the Knotkeeper tends the Loom’s deepest bindings, points where Threads are not merely woven but fused beyond undoing. These knots carry the Pattern’s most consequential alignments, where alteration risks collapse across alwhens. The Knotkeeper does not command the Weave, but listens for tension within it. When a knot strains, the Pattern warns through them. When one breaks, the Knotkeeper decides whether anything still holds.

The Harrowraith
A first-forged creation of Hargrum, designed to slip between Threads and unmake from within. It moves unseen through the Pattern’s joins, leaving hollowed lines where strength once ran. More predator than machine, the Harrowraith endures as one of the Forge’s purest tools of destruction.
Glimlock: “If you feel colder than you should, it’s already passed through.”

The Guardian
A sentinel bound to a single Thread, Knot, or place within the Pattern. It remains dormant until that charge is threatened, at which point it manifests in whatever form best deters the intruder. Guardians are loyal only to the aspect they were set to defend, and will act even against Loom-aligned travelers if they cross the wrong boundary.
Glimlock: “They’re not here to save you. They’re here to keep you from touching the wrong thing.”

The Toll Keeper
An entity bound to the Pattern’s crossings, appearing where Threads converge into passageways too potent to remain unguarded. It demands payment before allowing passage, not always in coin or artifact, but often in memory, Thread, or potential. To refuse is to remain where you stand. To pay is to accept that you may never reclaim what was taken.
Glimlock: “The trick isn’t paying the Toll Keeper. The trick is figuring out what you just gave away.”

Artifacts & Constructs

Shard
A remnant of Hargrum’s failed attempt to forge rigidity into the Loom. Composed of iron laced with silkweave, the Shard is neither fully of the Forge nor fully of the Loom. It holds tension rather than resolution, resisting unraveling even as it refuses to align. The Pattern does not accept it, yet cannot wholly expel it. What remains is not artifact, not weapon, but fracture given form. In a Cycle drawn toward absolutes, the Shard endures as unresolved inheritance.

Threadglass Orb
A woven sphere of refracted glass and Pattern filament, attuned to fluctuations across time, place, and dimensional logic. Carried by Glimlock, the orb serves as a sensor, translator, and occasional anchor, reacting to breachforms, echo distortions, and unthreaded futures. It does not reveal what is, but what might be unraveling. In the hands of one who remembers every Cycle, the orb becomes more than a tool. It becomes a way of seeing Pattern where Pattern fails.

Spindle (also: Loom’s Spindle)
The axial heart of the Loom, where all Threads converge before being cast into the Pattern. At the Spindle, alignment becomes action, intent woven into directional flow. Though it appears fixed, the Spindle moves across Elsewhens in response to Pattern strain, always anchoring coherence before release. To reach the Spindle is to stand where consequence waits to become real. It is the Loom’s last touch.

Weavekeeper’s Eye
An artifact granting sight into the Weave’s smallest motions.

Glyph(s)
Symbolic impressions left by the Pattern, or its fractures, meant to guide, instruct, or warn. Glyphs manifest at key points of convergence or distortion, often near Threadgates, breachforms, or structural anomalies. Though they appear fixed, some glyphs respond to attention, changing form when touched by Spiral logic, echo presence, or breach-born memory. To read a glyph is not merely to decode, it is to engage the Pattern’s evolving attempt to communicate.

The Key
A device forged to sever, not unlock. Designed to interrupt the Loom’s flow into the multiverse, the Key carries the architecture of unmaking, its presence disrupting Thread logic and destabilizing Pattern coherence. Once activated by Jorem’s parents in their attempt to destroy the Factory, its consequence began threading backward through creation. Liora intercepted the act before full collapse, but echoes of its function still linger. Some say the Pattern remembers the wound it nearly became.
Glimlock: “Funny thing about keys. Sometimes they don’t open doors, they close them forever.”

Rifts
Breaks in the Pattern where alwhens and alwheres bleed into one another. Also applicable to temporal instabilities.

Rends
Violent tears in the Weave, harder to mend than rifts.

The Chasm
A deep, living conduit within the Loom’s infrastructure, through which raw Threads enter and refined Weave exits, bound for the alwhens and alwheres. The Chasm does not simply transport, it calibrates force and consequence, channeling the Loom’s intent toward realization. Its currents shape velocity, sequence, and priority, threading logic across multiversal coordinates. Though steady in appearance, the Chasm responds to tension in the Pattern. When collapse nears, it slows. When balance returns, it surges.

Frays
Zones where the Pattern thins and unravels, exposing strands to collapse, corruption, or co-option. Frays mark the limits of Loom stability — regions where intention loses shape and consequence forgets its source. Temporal logic slips here. Identity wavers. What enters may not return, or may return altered. Some Frays bleed into Elsewhens. Others open into breachforms. All of them whisper that the Pattern is not whole.

Satchel
A fashion accessory carried by Glimlock, outwardly a worn messenger bag, inwardly a multidimensional alwhere. Its contents are as unpredictable as its capacity, holding anything the Pattern is willing to let slip inside.
Glimlock: “It’s not the size, it’s the fold.”

Tunnel Tears
A pool deep within the Tunnels, fed by a constant dripping from the stone above. The drops are said to be the tears of a Weavekeeper from an early Cycle who met an ill fate. Whether born of truth or Pattern-shaped legend, the place carries a weight of sorrow that even the Loom does not disturb.
Glimlock: “If those are her tears, she’s still crying.”

Symbolic Language

The Loom turns
The Loom’s way of marking change, neither good nor ill, only inevitable.

The Pattern remembers
What is done is never truly lost to the Weave.

The Weave forgot
When something has fallen outside the Loom’s notice, sometimes by design.

Shock to the Pattern
A disruption forcing the Loom to adapt or risk tearing.

Threads curling into non-patterns
A sign of something that does not belong, or will not last.

Echoes before cause
When effects arrive ahead of their origin, a sign of unstable Weave conditions.