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The Quarantine of Bellwether
Bellwether is a market town of eleven thousand on a slow brown river, with a north ward, a river gate, and a bell tower whose hours mark the time the ward is shut.
- ~37 min (estimated)
- 8237 words
- 37 scenes
- 4 branch points
- 4 endings
26 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
The ward was shut on the ninth of Frostmonth. It is now the twenty-sixth of Thawmonth, eleven weeks on, and the town is reopening it. Nothing in the ward is ill. There is no fever, no rash, no humours gone bad, no corpse and no cough. Four hundred and eleven households, eleven hundred and forty people, and not one symptom between them. The Board has kept them inside for eleven weeks on the say-so of a thing nobody can produce, and the town has begun to find that arrangement expensive. The sickness is called the Saying. It has no body and it does not travel on breath. It travels on agreement: it takes hold in a place the first time somebody says out loud, in company, that a named household is not to be trusted. What it does is smaller and worse than fever. It makes the small decencies stop. Water not carried up. Bread not left on a sill. A latch not lifted for the old woman next door. A s
Content notice7 topics · tap to review
- Quarantine and enforced confinement
- Hunger and food rationing
- Mass civic distrust and a shared false agreement
- A public record used to erase a group
- Institutional pressure and a public vote
- A hard moral choice that no option resolves
- Illness described without any symptom being visible
Cast
- O Orrin Slate Protagonist and viewpoint. The north ward's quarantine runner for seventy-seven days, carrying food, letters and notices through a shut ward without going in. no portrait yet
- H Hespa Lund The ward's herbalist, inside since the shut, keeper of the roll of four hundred and eleven names and of the morning rule said at the well-head. no portrait yet
- M Master Corwen Ash Master of the Bell-Mastership of Bellwether, a hereditary civic office, who rang the town's hours eleven minutes wrong for ten days on purpose. no portrait yet