Fate Is a Thread: Starting with "Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave"

In a game group chat I saw someone post a screenshot: Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, out on 17 September 2026. Someone read the title as though fortune meant money — "the weave of wealth" — and the group laughed for a while.

I stared at that line of English for a long time. Fortune's Weave — fortune is something woven. Put that way, it is far gentler than "fate is settled".

According to the release date registered on Nintendo's official product page, the game comes out on Switch 2 on 17 September 2026. A tactics game put "fate" into its name, and the cloth-working metaphor it reaches for was already in use more than two thousand years ago:

• Ancient Greece: in the Homeric epics, a person's fate is spun out at birth; in Hesiod's Theogony, the three Moirai are the goddesses who tend that thread.
• The Norse world: in the "Prophecy of the Seeress" (Völuspá) of the Poetic Edda, three Norns sit at the foot of the world tree, and the thread they spin decides the course of all living things.
• China: in Li Fuyan's Tang-dynasty collection Xu Xuanguai Lu (Further Records of Mysteries and Strange Tales), in the story "Dinghun Dian" (The Engagement Inn), the Old Man Under the Moon carries a cloth bag filled with red cords, which he ties to the ankles of men and women — the saying "a marriage a thousand li away hangs by a single thread" comes from here.
• Japan: what we call the "red thread of fate" is written in Japanese as 「運命の赤い糸」. It is generally thought that legends of this kind, once they crossed over, put down roots and grew a version of their own.

The more I looked, the clearer the virtue of the thread became: a verdict is one word, and once it is said, that is the end of it; a thread is something you can knot, something you can take the long way round with, something you can tug on.

If you have ever had the thought "I want to know how my own thread runs", write the trouble out clearly on 占卜迷指, and it will recommend a method suited to your question, then chart, interpretation and export let you take your time with it. It will not cut or tie a single thread for you — threads are something you have to reach out and sort out yourself.

Sources

• Nintendo's official product page (release date 17 September 2026): https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/fire-emblem-fortunes-weave-125688/
• Li Fuyan, Xu Xuanguai Lu (Further Records of Mysteries and Strange Tales), Tang dynasty — original text of "Dinghun Dian", the source of the Old Man Under the Moon and his red cord, at Wikisource: https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E7%BA%8C%E7%8E%84%E6%80%AA%E9%8C%84
• The Poetic Edda in English translation (including the "Prophecy of the Seeress", Wikisource translation): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poetic_Edda

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