Maren the Threadkeeper

Patron of Apprentices, Mentors, Craft Guilds, and Intergenerational Wisdom

Maren was a cobbler’s daughter in a mountain city in Velanos, where war and plague had thinned the ranks of every craft. As guilds floundered for lack of skilled workers and the poor were left untaught, Maren opened her home to orphans, castoffs, and unclaimed apprentices, many of whom had been rejected by formal guilds due to lack of lineage, funds, or connections. Rather than bind them with harsh contracts, she taught with gentle discipline and fierce expectation, recording each student's progress in a long woolbound ledger she carried everywhere, thus earning the title "Threadkeeper", as she wove new destinies from broken strands. Over time, Maren's workshop evolved into a model guild school, where master crafters came to train not just in skill, but in mentorship itself. She insisted that instruction was a sacred duty, and that no craft could truly endure unless its wisdom was passed not only with hands, but with honor. Upon her death, every apprentice she had trained laid a single stitch into her burial shroud — some of them by now masters themselves.

Maren is depicted as a middle-aged woman with a thread-bound ledger in one hand and a needle in the other, seated beside a young student at a workbench. Her sigil is a thread looped through an open circle, symbolizing skill passed from generation to generation without break.