Hello!

Somehow we have reached the 1st September already and while I’m not quite sure how that happened, I’m excited because that means we’re officially into Self-Published Fantasy Month. There will be a lot happening here on the blog, across on twitter and on The Guild Discord Server, so please do check it out and feel free to join in.

Today I am kicking off with the Self-Published Fantasy Month Daily Challenge (See image below or for more information check Here). I will be sharing book recs for all the prompts across on twitter, but I will also be doing short posts about the world of the Citadel on here as well as we are only a few months away from The Ravyn’s Words release.

For today’s prompt I am focusing on culture, and drawing inspiration from an answer I gave for the #TheRookeryChallenge across on twitter, I am going to talk about Weave Pendants.

Weave Pendants are unique to the people of the Grasslands area of Kalinsar, where most people predominantly worship The Weaver and where as the legends tell it, she was raised in secrecy among their people. Other worshippers may well wear similar pendants, but these are set apart. For one, they must be made – from the glass, to the weave inside and the thong that holds it – by a Priestess of the Weave. The weave itself is made of silvery thread, spun on a spindle made from wood harvested from the Spindelwood, home of the Goddess herself. The weave is made of concentric circles, connected with meandering threads to show the many paths of fate.

Once an individual is born, a drop of their blood is added to the centre of the weave to indicate that they have become part of it. In some places, an extra layer of weave will also be added to indicate circumstances of the birth – gold for a healthy, easy birth and black for a difficult birth, or one that resulted in the loss of the mother – to indicate which Goddess (The Singer or The Harvester) the newborn had been taken from. The weave is then encased in a clear glass pendant and blessed at a pool deep in the forest, before being entrusted to the parents until the child is six years of age – a year to honour each of the Gods, before the child will be given the pendant to wear.

Upon death, Weave Pendants are broken by a Priestess. The weave inside is given to the fire along with the body, while the glass is melted down to be used in fresh pendants to ensure that all are part of the same Weave.