A Correction With a Bearing

aka the ordered correction, the counting road plate

One of the census-engine's living-name corrections, struck into a fresh plate — and unlike the others, it carries a compass bearing, as if the engine were not only naming the closed but pointing toward where it means to close them.

Most of the engine's corrections read the same way: a name, a date of closure, a strike-mark, all in the machine's cold even hand. This plate is different, and Adept Maren was right to send you to it. Below the name and the not-yet-come date, the engine has cut a bearing — a compass line, a distance in old imperial paces, and a single word the surveyor Corren circled twice before he ran: TOWARD. Every ordered correction on the wall carries the same bearing, give or take the drift of a broken machine, and every one of them points the same way: east and down, out of the vault, under the hills, to the walled place the Vale does not say aloud. The engine is not scattering the dead across the parish at random. It is counting them toward Vallen's Barrow, one closure at a time, on a road only it can see. Read the bearing. Carry it. Maren will know what to draw.

This world ships in Valenfeld. Play the game →