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The Undertaker's Apprentice
In Gallowmere, a northern town on the trade road, a body is a document.
- ~57 min (estimated)
- 12723 words
- 41 scenes
- 5 branch points
- 5 endings
31 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
That is not a figure of speech. It is the working rule of a trade that has kept the dead of eleven miles of road for four hundred years, and the rule runs both ways: a body can be closed, and a closed body stays closed; and a body that was closed falsely does not stay closed. It comes back. Not as a ghost. As a claim. Rook Halsey is twenty-eight and has been the undertaker of the Bellhouse Yard since he was twenty-three, and the yard is a flagged square, a chapel, and a long stone room with a screw press in it. He signs every certificate himself, because there is no second marked man in the district. Fen Arder is nineteen and has been his apprentice for two years and four months and cannot witness a closure, cannot sign, and cannot use the press. Fen is also the person who is right. Nine days after a drowned carter is buried at the ford, the carter is found under his own kitchen table, s
Content notice7 topics · tap to review
- Death and burial described at trade level
- Burned remains and their recovery
- A house fire with six adult deaths
- Financial ruin of four households
- Self-destruction offered and declined aloud
- Institutional pressure and a public naming
- A hard moral choice with no clean option
Cast
- R Rook Halsey Undertaker of the Bellhouse Yard and the only marked man in the district no portrait yet
- S Sister Ivel Registrar of the Chapel of the Long Name and keeper of the district death rolls no portrait yet
- F Fen Arder The Bellhouse apprentice, uncertified, and the person who is right no portrait yet