Netwrck
Sixteen Doors, One Key
Marrowgate is a walled city cut into seven terraces, and each terrace holds sixteen named doors that the city keeps locked as promises.
- ~26 min (estimated)
- 5886 words
- 29 scenes
- 4 branch points
- 4 endings
53 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
The lock is made, the maker says a promise into the mechanism, and a promise held long enough stops being a promise and becomes a fact about the building. Ivo Rask is eighteen and in his fourth year as an apprentice locksmith on Terrace Three, where the work now is hanging new locks on condemned doors so the demolition crews can take them out whole. On the sixth of Cold Lock, climbing the Ninth Stair with his master to hang escutcheons, he finds one on the ninth landing that is barred from the inside. Behind the bar is a lock no member of his trade has ever set. Behind the lock is a person who is alive, and who has been alive in a nine-square-foot room for nine years. The room is the Unlet Room, number sixteen on Terrace One, named for a promise the city made in a siege and has never kept. The Bench keeps one key for the whole Ninth Stair run, because a run of sixteen doors is sixteen an
Content notice6 topics · tap to review
- Institutional negligence and an uninspected record
- Nine years of confinement in a room nine feet by one, described without injury
- A threatened demolition of an occupied room
- A clock of eleven days and a hard moral choice with no clean option
- A career and a stipend placed at risk
- A dated mention of an adult's action as a minor, not depicted
Cast
- I Ivo Rask Apprentice locksmith in his fourth year at the Bench and viewpoint character no portrait yet
- M Mers Tallow Master locksmith of thirty years, holder of the Ninth Stair run key for twenty-two, and Ivo's master no portrait yet
- C Cael Dunne City surveyor of the Surveyor's Guild, forty-one doors a week, and the hand that has certified Terrace One empty for nine years no portrait yet