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The Last Sweep of the Glasshouse
Verrin Hollow is a hill town built around a wizard's glasshouse: one long room under a pitched glass roof, two hundred and forty feet from the fire wall to the cold end, standing on the shoulder above the town where the hill gives up and the streets stop.
- ~5 min (estimated)
- 1257 words
- 13 scenes
- 2 branch points
- 3 endings
26 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
The magic in Hollow is horticultural and nothing else. Heat, light, and a soil that remembers who tends it. Slow-growing plants are kept warm there for the tower's kitchens, and the tower's kitchens cook for ninety-one people. Tobin Ashe is nineteen and does the last sweep. He is in at a quarter past ten and out at twenty to six, for three and six a night, four on a Sunday. His round is four heat marks and one vent pane, then the floor nobody sweeps in daylight: a nine-foot gravel strip under the cold beds where the leaf falls all night, because there is no wind inside a glasshouse. Three rules are the whole job. Write what you see. Do not decide what it means. Do not touch a thing that is not on the sheet. On his eleventh night he finds a seed in bed seven. The bed is down as cleared since the twenty-second of last spring and its label peg has been blank for two hundred and fifty sweeps
Content notice5 topics · tap to review
- A falsified official record and a cut page in a bound ledger
- Institutional pressure and an admission of wrongdoing
- A hard moral choice that no option resolves
- Labour conditions and a rota with a named person on it
- A child character, non-sexualised and in no adult role
Cast
- T Tobin Ashe Night sweeper and viewpoint character, last person through the glasshouse no portrait yet
- H Hessa Vane Head glasskeeper, keeper of the year-book, and the institutional pressure in the room no portrait yet