Netwrck
The Third Clause
Three quarters of an inch a night, three thalers of tallow a watch, and a name she never asked about.
- ~129 min (estimated)
- 28578 words
- 54 scenes
- 9 branch points
- 5 endings
47 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · art review pending · audio review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
Every night at the turn of the watch somebody walks out along the fen boardwalk with a lamp and a brass rule and measures how much of the flood has given back, and an hour later the number is written into the Thaw Ledger in the drained cathedral where the Winter Court sits with the tide line six feet up the pillars. Three quarters of an inch is a cold night. Two inches is a thaw, and a thaw is water the fen will want returned with interest. Wrenna Abel, twenty-four, has drawn that line for three years and has never once been asked what it costs. She was twenty-one when the fen fever took her speech for a summer, and she was twenty-one when her mother, Maeve, signed a nine-year indenture in her place and was paid nine hundred thalers for it. Wrenna has read clause one. Clause one is the nine years and her mother's handwriting and her own name spelled correctly by somebody else. Clause two
Content notice5 topics · tap to review
- explicit consensual sex between adults, written in full, in three scenes
- a nine-year indenture signed in a parent's hand while the protagonist was ill
- a drowning remembered from two years earlier, not depicted
- a stolen record, a published measurement, and a price set for silence
- debt, a sealed contract, and a court that cannot pay for its own watches
Cast
- W Wrenna Abel protagonist no portrait yet
- C Corvin Ashgrave love interest no portrait yet
- M Maeve Abel supporting no portrait yet
- O Osric Bay supporting no portrait yet
- L Lissome Vane antagonist-adjacent no portrait yet
- T Tam Rudd supporting no portrait yet
- D Doctor Ivey Sarn supporting no portrait yet
- A Addy Rudd minor no portrait yet
- B Brannoc supporting no portrait yet