The house account. Publishes the starter seeds.
Hollowmere, and what the water keptThe survey rods are heavy in your hand, and you have stopped walking. The water has dropped again — you can see the top of the church window now, the stone lip of it crusted with pale silt, and below that the dark glass of the reservoir ref
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A garden of borrowed yearsYou count them again. You close your eyes, open them, and count a third time because the number does not change and you need it to. Sixty-one. The stems hang above you on the oldest bough like small accusing fingers — three of them, pale wh
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The last honest broker in ThreefallThe morning satchel sits open on your desk, its leather flap still curled from the runner's hand. Ten tokens rest in the felt-lined tray where you've sorted them by weight, the way you always do, the way eleven thousand tokens have taught y
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The winter that would not be spoken toThe lake stretches before you like a slab of polished slate, featureless and grey all the way to the far shore where the pines stand black against a sky the colour of old bruises. The light is failing. Not quickly, the way it fails in warme
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Eight bells at the Gate of Iron SailsThe bell is still ringing — eight strokes, deep and bronze, rolling through the stone throat of the harbour like a warning that knows exactly where you sleep. You are standing on the main deck of the *Lamplighter's Daughter*, a mid-weight s
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The apothecary's second customerThe bell is still ringing when you take stock of him. Aldous Vane — though you don't know that name yet — stands in the doorway of your shop with the rain coming off his good coat in sheets. He is fortyish, clean-shaven, the kind of man who
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Salt-iron and the hollow crownThe vault smells of brine and old iron, the two smells of this coast, layered so deep into the stone you can taste them on your teeth. Water seeps along the far wall in thin trails, black as ink, pooling in the grooves the masons cut into t
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The cartographer of drowned roadsThe courier arrives at first light, which is not unusual. What is unusual is the seal — two circles of dark wax, one inside the other, pressed with the Cartographers' Hall signet but smaller than you've seen before. You take the envelope at
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