See: Factions INDEX, Shattered Peaks, Stone Giants of the Shattered Peaks
The Soulweaver Conclave was a gathering of necromancer dragons who inhabited what is now called the Shattered Peaks in an era so deep in the past that the giants who came after them are themselves considered ancient. They are listed under Factions by mortal taxonomic convention, but the convention is a poor fit. The Conclave was not a faction in any sense a Tatharian political scholar would recognize. It had no banners, no shared territory beyond the range itself, no internal hierarchy that survived in any record. What it had was a practice, soulweaving, and the dragons who gathered in the Shattered Peaks gathered there because the practice was best performed in that particular location, for reasons no mortal scholar has ever fully understood.
They were necromancers, but the word necromancer is borrowed from a much later mortal vocabulary and carries connotations the dragons would have found incomprehensible. They did not raise the dead. They did not animate corpses. They did not bargain with shades or trade in the deaths of others. What they did was weave, and what they wove was the substance of souls themselves, in a discipline that treated the soul not as a unitary thing but as a fabric, capable of being unraveled, restitched, recombined, and reshaped at the level of its underlying threads.
What Soulweaving Was
The discipline is best understood by analogy, and the analogy mortal scholars have settled on is embroidery. A soul, in the Soulweaver view, was not a single object. It was a structure of interwoven threads: some inherited from ancestors, some grown over the course of a life, some braided in from encounters with other souls, some left dangling and unfinished. Most souls, in the dragons’ assessment, were poorly woven. The threads were tangled. The pattern was incomplete. The fabric was strong in some places and gossamer-thin in others. A soul that had lived a chaotic life had a chaotic weave, and a soul that had lived a placid life had a placid one, and neither was artful.
Soulweaving was the art of taking such a soul and weaving it better. Not changing the person whose soul it was, which was considered a vulgar misuse of the discipline. Refining. Tightening. Repairing the worn places. Bringing out the patterns that were already implicit in the existing threads but had never been allowed to fully emerge. A soul that had been soulwoven by a master of the Conclave was, in the dragons’ words, finished. The same person, with the same memories and the same temperament and the same future, but with a soul that held its shape in ways that an unwoven soul did not.
The Conclave’s masters claimed they could perform this work on the living and on the dead alike. The living had to consent, and the work took years. The dead were a more difficult case (a dead soul was unbraided, dispersed, in the process of becoming the substance from which new souls were drawn) and the Conclave’s specialty, the thing they were known for and the thing the Wild Magic Pilgrims who came centuries later were still trying to understand, was the recovery and reweaving of dispersed souls. They could, the records suggest, sometimes pull a soul back from its dispersion and reweave it into something coherent enough to be again. Not a resurrection. Something stranger: a soul that had been allowed to forget itself, brought back to a state in which the forgetting could be examined.
Within the framework set out in Ordering of Chaos, soulweaving sits at the far edge of the discipline: mythek applied not to the world but to the substance of being itself.
The mortal religions of Rolara would call this many things, most of them blasphemous. The Soulweavers themselves called it housekeeping.
Why Dragons
It is not entirely clear why soulweaving was a draconic discipline. The Conclave’s records contain no explicit account of how the practice originated, only the assumption that of course it was dragons who developed it, the way mortal craftspeople assume of course it is the children of weavers who become weavers. The closest thing to an explanation is a fragmentary line, recovered from one of the residual workings in the Hollow Crown gallery, which renders into mortal language as: we are old enough to remember when the threads were first laid, and our memory is the loom.
The practical interpretation is that dragons live long enough to actually see the patterns of soul-fabric across multiple lifetimes, to notice which threads recur and which do not, to develop the long view that the discipline requires. A mortal soulweaver, even a very skilled one, would be working from a single life’s worth of pattern recognition. A draconic soulweaver was working from thousands of years of it. The difference is the difference between a child’s first sketch and the work of a master draftsman who has been drawing the same subject every day for a century.
The Conclave was never large. Most accounts suggest it never exceeded a few dozen members, and at its height included perhaps fifteen masters and twice that many apprentices. Soulweaving was not a populist discipline. It required the kind of patience and precision that, even among dragons, was uncommon.
The Shattered Peaks Site
The Conclave settled in what is now called the Shattered Peaks because the high-altitude valleys of the range had a property the dragons valued: the local mythek was thin enough to be worked easily, but ordered enough to hold what was woven into it. In most parts of Rolara, soul-fabric is too tightly bound by the ambient cosmological order to be reshaped without enormous effort. In a few places, it is too loose to hold any reshaping that is performed on it. The Shattered Peaks were one of the rare locations where the balance was right.
The site they built was not architectural in the conventional sense. The dragons did not need walls. What they constructed was a network of workings: patterns of soul-fabric that they wove directly into the air of certain valleys, anchored to specific geological features, and left in place to be used and refined by successive generations of practitioners. A workings-site, viewed by a mortal sensitive enough to perceive it, would look like nothing in particular. A workings-site, experienced by the same mortal, would feel like walking through a half-finished thought that had been waiting several thousand years for someone to complete it.
Some of the workings remain. They are why the Wild Magic Pilgrims came. They are why an occasional traveler in the Shattered Peaks today reports remembering a life that is not their own: those travelers have walked through a residual workings-site and brushed against the soul-fabric the dragons left behind. The fabric is not malicious. It is waiting. What it is waiting for, no one has ever determined.
Departure
The Conclave is gone. They were gone before the Stone Giants arrived to begin their carving, and the gap between the two cultures was thousands of years. The dragons did not leave a forwarding address. The few accounts that survive (most of them in the form of inscriptions the Wild Magic Pilgrims later attempted to translate) suggest that the Conclave’s masters reached some kind of consensus that the work in the Shattered Peaks was complete, or that the work could not be completed in that location, or that the work needed to be moved elsewhere. The accounts disagree on which of these it was. They agree only that the decision was made, and that the dragons left in an orderly fashion, and that they took most (but not all) of the workings with them.
Where they went is not known. The hypothesis favored by the Ineffable scholars is that they did not go anywhere in the spatial sense, that the Conclave dispersed itself the way an individual soul disperses at death, and that the dragons are now part of the soul-fabric they had been working on, woven into their own discipline. This is a deeply unsettling hypothesis, even by the standards of the field. It implies that the residual workings in the Shattered Peaks are not just patterns left behind, but the dragons themselves, in a state mortal scholarship has no vocabulary for.
The Soulweaver records that the Stone Giants found, and that the Wild Magic Pilgrims later transcribed, contain one repeated phrase that may be relevant. The phrase translates roughly as the loom remembers the weaver. It appears at the boundary of every major workings-site. The dragons may have meant it as a signature. They may have meant it as a warning. They may have meant it as a literal statement of where they had gone.
Relationship to the Stone Giants
There was none. The two cultures did not overlap by a margin of several thousand years. The Stone Giants arrived, found the residual workings, acknowledged them in stone (some of the inscriptions on the sunward northern slopes of the Shattered Peaks are believed to be addressed to the absent Conclave) and built their own civilization around them without disturbing them. This was characteristic of Stone Giant courtesy. The dragons had been there first. The dragons had left their work. The work was honored.
Whether the Stone Giants ever attempted to use the workings is unknown. The Wild Magic Pilgrims, who lived among the Stone Giants and would have noticed, recorded no evidence that the giants treated the workings as anything other than features of the landscape that deserved respect. The giants were not soulweavers. They were not curious about soulweaving in any way the Pilgrims could detect. They were carvers, and the carving was their discipline, and the dragons’ discipline was the dragons’ discipline, and the two were left to coexist by not interfering with each other.
This is also characteristic of the Ineffable Ones. A giant does not borrow another being’s tools.