The Last Good Well

A deep imperial well that still runs sweet in a rib-notch, ringed by the scratched marks of everyone who found it and lived.

In the chaos of the flats' false water, this one is real: cold, sweet, and deep enough that the peat-fire cannot foul it yet. The stone lip carries a hundred scratched marks — initials, arrows, the private shorthand of the living — that have become their own kind of map. Someone has lately fouled the water near the mouth, and the flats turn very fast on whoever did.