The Widow's Bridge
Every word she carries for the dead costs her a memory of them.
- ~90 min
- 14586 words
- 40 scenes
- 5 branch points
- 5 endings
- Second-world river town, pre-industrial
2 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · generated placeholder backgrounds and character art in-game · licensed music, credited in the build · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
In Ostrey the dead cross the river to be buried, and they cannot cross while they are still carrying something they failed to say. Only the bridge-keeper can hear that word, and only she can deliver it. The price is exact: for every word she carries, she loses one of her own memories of the person who gave it to her. A stranger's word costs nothing. Her mother's word cost her her mother's voice. Ceriad Mabb has been keeper for eleven years and has delivered four hundred and six words. Fourteen months ago her husband drowned upstream and never arrived at the abutment, which is not supposed to be possible. In the autumn he arrives — far too late, worn thin by whatever he has been doing in the meantime — with a word for her. A keeper cannot deliver a word to herself. Meanwhile the town's death-priest, who has loved her for six years with complete propriety, signed that drowning as an accident when it was not. A quiet, cold fantasy about grief with a rule system that hurts: the abutment filling up as she stalls, the specific texture of a memory going, a marriage examined by a woman who is losing the evidence of it while she examines it. The love triangle has three real positions and no correct one. Desire is frank and closes the door; the violence, when it comes, is domestic and brief. Five endings, and the only one where he crosses is the one where she will not remember why she is standing on a bridge.
Content notice
- grief and bereavement throughout
- memory loss depicted as loss of self
- drowning, murder, and a concealed cause of death
- suicide
- sexual content implied, cuts away
- domestic violence in the past
- child death (a delivered word, offscreen)
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Cast
- C Ceriad Mabb protagonist; keeper of the Ostrey bridge no portrait yet
- I Ilyan Mabb her husband; fourteen months dead, arrived late no portrait yet
- J Jorun Halle the town's death-priest; keeps the register no portrait yet
- A Annec Mabb Ceriad's sister-in-law; keeps the inn and the town's opinion no portrait yet
- S Sabel a girl of nineteen apprenticed to the bridge no portrait yet
- A Alderman Voss the town's authority; pays the keeper's stipend no portrait yet