Netwrck
The Iron Sultan's Daughter
In the Furnace Marches, war is not a spell.
- ~44 min (estimated)
- 9816 words
- 33 scenes
- 4 branch points
- 4 endings
25 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
It is ore. The armies to the south are fed with iron that is smelted from Marches rock, cast as debt-iron in plate moulds, struck with a name, and carried out on a road that nobody garrisons. Every casting has a name on it, and the name pays for the casting over the years that follow — six years off a foot soldier's life, eleven off a cavalry horse's rider — taken in instalments the bearer never feels until the last one. The Iron Sultan of the third furnace holds the furnace, the floor, the plate moulds, and a bill against the Marches that runs to nine years. Sabra Keln, twenty-nine, is his daughter, and she has spent seven years at an assay bench in an office forty feet from the front door, weighing iron and reporting its worth, and has been inside the casting hall eleven times. Her father is dying of the furnace fume. The furnace does not transfer by blood, so nothing has been settled,
Content notice8 topics · tap to review
- Inherited debt and coerced labour
- A magic system that draws years off a named person's life
- Institutional pressure and a public admission of fraud
- A death from occupational fume, reported
- War casualties, reported as a figure
- Mass layoff, lost wages, and a winter in one ending
- A final choice that strands the protagonist in her own body or her own house
- Chosen adult company, non-sexual, fades before anything is depicted
Cast
- S Sabra Keln Assayer of the third furnace, the Iron Sultan's daughter, and viewpoint character no portrait yet
- B Berrin Tal Master founder of the third bank and the man who has been running it two per cent under for nine years no portrait yet
- O Oswin Grey Clerk of the assay office who has been copying the quarterly bill out by hand for two years no portrait yet