Nine Cuts of the Grey Heron
You can only learn a technique from someone trying to kill you with it.
- ~100 min
- 23021 words
- 57 scenes
- 6 branch points
- 5 endings
- Second-world river city, an industrial-adjacent duelling age
2 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · generated placeholder backgrounds and character art in-game · licensed music, credited in the build · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
The Grey Heron school teaches nine cuts. Not by choice — a cut is burned into the body along a path of nerve and tendon, and the body has nine paths. Nor can a cut be given: you learn it only by standing in front of it while someone who means it tries to end you, and living. Every adept in Ashfen is a walking list of the people who failed to kill them. Isen Vale holds six. Her rival Chorem Ashe holds seven and refuses to use the seventh. They have shared a bed for two years, which is a problem, because two people who love each other cannot teach each other a cut without one of them meaning it. When an unschooled foreigner named Kavir Somme starts calling Heron adepts onto the Toll Bridge one at a time and beating them with eleven cuts nobody has a name for, Isen goes looking for the ninth — and finds that her master signed away the rest of the style in a treaty a century ago and has been teaching a mutilated art ever since. A martial-arts tragedy with a hard rule system and choreography written to be read: bridge fog, licensed steel, bets called from balconies, the specific mechanics of the Hook of the Left Wing and what it costs the wrist. Adult throughout — desire, drink, a rivalry that is also a marriage nobody registered, and violence that is graphic because it is earned. Five endings. Every path to the ninth cut runs through someone who will not refuse her, and the body keeps the receipts.
Content notice
- graphic violence and permanent injury
- amputation
- character death including a lover
- alcohol abuse
- sexual content implied, cuts away
- self-destructive behaviour
- grief
Cast
- I Isen Vale protagonist; Heron adept, six cuts no portrait yet
- C Chorem Ashe rival and lover; seven cuts, one of them unused no portrait yet
- K Kavir Somme unschooled foreign duellist, eleven cuts no portrait yet
- D Doyen Sabra master of the Grey Heron school; eight cuts, one dead arm no portrait yet
- R Registrar Aume Fisk the city's duelling registry; licenses, taxes, and the betting book no portrait yet
- B Brenn Oduya second-year adept, two cuts, Isen's student by accident no portrait yet