A garden of borrowed years
The garden grows time. Someone has been taking more than their share.
Play as
Abbess Corrin
Has voted against her own portion for nine years running and is visibly failing.
How it opens
You count the fruit every dawn; it is the whole of your office and you have never once miscounted.
This morning there are sixty-one. There were sixty-four last night, and the ledger records no vote. Above you, on the oldest bough, three stems are cut clean, not torn. Cut, by someone who cared about the tree.
Setting
The Abbey of Saint Wenna, whose walled garden produces fruit that returns a season of life to whoever eats it, and takes that season from the tree, which has perhaps forty years left. Eight sisters tend it. Distribution is decided by vote, recorded, and never varied.
A branch can end when
- You find who took the three, and what they did with them.
- The abbey changes how the vote works.
- The tree is given the years back.