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The Cartographer Who Drew the Sea
The Selvage Coast is a long run of chalk and timber, and every chart drawn of it is a promise the world has to keep: surveyed, fair-copied by an engraver who never saw the field book, signed by two hands, and sealed.
- ~50 min (estimated)
- 11123 words
- 41 scenes
- 6 branch points
- 4 endings
29 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
The coast keeps its promises. It pays for them out of whatever was true before. Ivo Marchant, 33, is the cartographer who drafts those charts at a Survey office in the inland town of Callow, and he has never had to walk into one of his mistakes before. Drafting the second edition of the Selvage sheet, he draws a deep-water bay forty miles inland at Holdmere, with a river mouth, a town called Selen, and nine fathoms off a jetty. He walked that same ground at nineteen and recorded good grass, three springs, and a chapel with a yew. The plate is already cut, the harbour council of Marren has already bought twenty copies, and the Survey is twenty-one days from press. The bay is not a mistake. It is the true position of the harbour of Marren, which has stood on every chart in the world in the wrong place for twenty years, held there by a promise cut into the margin of the first issue in a han
Content notice8 topics · tap to review
- A false sealed chart and a record that is wrong on purpose for twenty years
- Coercion through a job, a signature, a wage account, and other people's licences
- Named self-interest and a career ambition pursued against the public record
- Relocation of four hundred and six people in the rain
- Nineteen deaths, described and counted, including two named adults
- A career-ending disclosure and a resigned commission
- Loss of a harbour's legal position and of two hundred and eleven men's work
- Chosen adult company, non-sexual, bounded, fades before anything is depicted
Cast
- I Ivo Marchant Protagonist and viewpoint; a Survey cartographer drafting the second edition of the Selvage sheet, and the man who signs it no portrait yet
- S Surine Ault A pilot licensed to the Selvage coast, and the only person alive who has navigated it as drawn; she has kept a private seven-year log of the discrepancy no portrait yet
- C Corvin Hale Survey Hydrographer for the Selvage coast, second hand on four editions, and the man who drafted and signed the sheet that put Marren in the wrong place no portrait yet
- N Nell Drewe An engraver's apprentice three years and nine months into a five-year indent, and the only hand that has worked the Selvage plate no portrait yet