PirateKitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twelfth question comes from clare_dragonfly and is for Stranded World

Was there a first person to discover the strands?

From an earlier question this month:

There are those who believe that, at one time, all humans had this power, but most of them are poo-pooed; studies show that almost every case of a known Strand-Weavers can be traced genealogically to a handful of magically inclined people in approx. 450 AD.

The literature here disagrees, and there is quite a bit of literature.

Not out on the public shelves of the library or your local Barnes & Noble, of course, but if you know where you’re looking, there’s information to be found – texts and treatises and long boring papers and short graphic novels. The Strands tend to attract those of a curious and artistic bent, and that leads to a great deal being written about them.

If you look back at the earliest known material – in the era of the end of the Roman Empire – you are more searching for clues than reading information; many of the books of that era are believed to have been burned in purges through the centuries.

There is a tapestry in a museum in London which shows a woman plucking multi-colored strings out of the clouds; rain falls onto parched crops where she plucks. It’s been dated to approximately the seventh century AD.

Deep in catacombs under Austria, there have been clay tablets found describing the way that threads could be used to bind people together, or to unbind them if the binding was unwanted. They are assumed to be from about 800 AD.

And so on. Common theories suggest that one person found the Strands and taught their friends about them, or that several people in different places around the globe found out about them at about the same time.

When the proper sort of anthropologist has been sent in to newly-discovered isolated communities, in almost all cases the people there have demonstrated neither the ability to manipulate or see the Strands of the knowledge thereof.

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