The Weft and Warp
The Weft and Warp, Kalinor's weaving school, is located in the very center of the city, a sign of how important that particular trade is to the Symenestra. The building that houses it is neither the oldest nor the biggest one, but it is certainly one of the most beautiful ones. It is easily reached by the red strand road, one of the main pathways through the city. Symenestra can be seen leaving and entering throughout the day. While the building mainly serves as a school for those that want to learn one of Kalinor’s most respected trades, they also sell some of their products. It is said that the students of the school produce some of the finest cloth in Kalinor.
The building is roughly tear shaped. The upper side where the entrance is located, the side that connects it to the red strand road is quite narrow while the rooms at the bottom are big enough to house the teachers, their students and their customers quite comfortably. Like most buildings in Kalinor, the school is made of stone, but it doesn’t appear to be made of stone. The walls are covered with fine silver white cloth so that it looks like a gigantic coccoon, a coccoon that almost seems to shimmer in the relative darkness of the cave. Upon closer inspection you can see that those cloth walls aren’t completely smooth, but that ornaments have been weaved into them. It is said that the founders of the school themselves have created the building.
The door is hidden behind curtains of silk. A narrow staircase leads downwards from it, towards the main area of the school. Surface dwellers will find it almost impossible to descend, but for a Symenestra the decline is not particularly steep. Once at the bottom of the building, visitors will find themselves in a round room. Lamps are attached to the walls and fill it with a pleasant, golden light. Alessa Anthurium, the woman that currently presides the weavers, sits on a soft cushion in front of her loom in the very center of the room most of the time. Her students, male and female Symenestra dressed in white silk robes, are gathered in a circle around her, working on their own cloth. They rarely speak, but are entirely focused on their looms.
If somebody comes down the stairs, one of them will quietly rise to their feet and approach. Potential students rarely have to pay for their training, but are instead asked to donate some of their first finished clothes and teach other students in turn.
There are no walls per se in the school. Instead the different rooms are separated by curtains that are made of shimmering white and golden cloth. They all surround the main room. Most of them house other weavers and their students, but there are also storage rooms and rooms where the weavers go to talk to their potential customers or people that have come to bring new raw material. Most of those raw materials come from silkworms that are bred on the outskirts of Kalinor or plants that are harvested on the surface. Some of them are hard to get which makes the cloth that the weavers produce all the more valuable.
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