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Salt on the Windward Side
The Windward Reach is a hard western coast of sea stacks and low cliffs, fourteen miles long, with four lamps burning on it in a chain and four families who have kept them for six generations.
- ~56 min (estimated)
- 12346 words
- 33 scenes
- 5 branch points
- 5 endings
28 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
The magic there is tidal and conversational. A keeper can walk out onto the black shelf at her own lamp at low water, put one question to the water, and get an answer. The price is never the water's. The asker names it out loud, before the question, and the water takes the nearest instance of whatever was named, and it takes it before it answers. Nera Quill is twenty-three and the fourth lamp-keeper of the fourth lamp. She is the first person in her family to work the tide deliberately rather than by habit, and she has three questions written on a chit and one winter's asking. The first costs a boat, and the boat is the Reach's only boat, and it leaves a winch at Kettle Cove at the ninth hour with the chain coiled and nobody in it. The second costs a name, and the name is the last name her family can say out loud, and once it is gone it is gone from every mouth on the coast. The third co
Content notice7 topics · tap to review
- Destructive magic with a named, unrefusable price
- Loss of a family word and a family name
- Institutional habit of thirty-one years examined in a public meeting
- A boat and a season of work lost, described
- One branch spends a year of another living person's life
- Sleet, gale, and a winter deadline
- Chosen adult company, non-sexual, nothing depicted
Cast
- N Nera Quill Fourth lamp-keeper of Quill Rock and viewpoint character no portrait yet
- O Otho Brey Third lamp-keeper of Brey Ninefoot for forty years and the only keeper on the Reach who has never asked no portrait yet
- T Tamsin Low Apprentice at the fourth lamp, from the Sallow side, and the only person arguing that the keeper should not ask no portrait yet