Winter in the Northern March arrived the way Pell had described it: without drama and without mercy.
Not the theatrical onset of snow and frozen rivers that Junho had half-expected. Just a morning in the one hundred and sixty-third day when he woke before dawn and the air outside the farmhouse window had a quality it hadn't had the night before. A stillness. A particular density in the cold that told the body, before the mind had processed it, that something had shifted.
He looked at the east field from the farmhouse door.
The clover had gone to ground. Not killed — dormant, the surface mat brown and flattened, the roots alive in the soil doing the patient chemistry that the spring would reveal. The field looked dead. It was not dead.
I know the difference now.
Dead looks different from dormant, once you've spent enough time watching a field.
He closed the farmhouse door and went to the morning's work.
* * *
The hall roof went on during the first week of winter season, day by day, in the cold.
Tomas had produced 4,380 tiles by day one hundred and fifty-eight — slightly fewer than the 4,500 estimate, but close enough that careful layout would cover the roof without gaps. He had also, over three months at the outcrop, developed an instinct for which sections of the shale face produced the best splitting and which produced the most culls, and had organized his extraction pattern accordingly.
The tiling itself was Pol and Bett's work, primarily, with Calder handling the ridge and hip details that required the most precise cutting.
Junho understood tile work in principle — overlapping courses, fixed headlap, the nail pattern that prevented wind uplift — but he had never tiled a roof and said so on the first morning, which produced a brief exchange of glances between Pol and Bett that conveyed professional satisfaction at the rare occasion of a lord admitting ignorance.
'Watch the first course,' Pol said. 'Ask questions when you have them.'
Junho watched the first course and asked three questions. Pol answered them precisely. By the third day Junho was nailing tile alongside the crew, not fast — Bett was twice his speed without apparent effort — but correctly, which was what mattered.
Tink. Tink. Tink.
Tile nails going home in the cold morning air. The smell of the shale — mineral, clean, slightly different from stone, the particular scent of rock that had been formed under water and remembered it faintly.
The roof progressed from the eave upward. Each day the hall looked more finished. More permanent. Less like a construction site and more like a building that intended to be there for a long time.
* * *
On the sixth day of tiling, Brennan Liss arrived.
He came up the road on a horse that matched his letters — no-nonsense, efficient, built for distance rather than display. He was sixty, heavier than his correspondence suggested, with the deliberate movement of a man who had spent his career managing large physical things and had internalized their pace.
He stopped at the road junction and looked at the hall.
From the road, the hall on its rise was the first thing you saw now — the south face with its arcade posts visible, the new shale roof two-thirds tiled, the limestone courses of the lower walls pale against the darker forest behind. Not large by the standards of an established barony. But present, and real, and clearly built with attention.
He rode up.
Junho met him at the farmhouse. They shook hands in the way of two people who had been corresponding for three weeks and were confirming that the other was real.
'The roof,' Liss said, looking back at it. 'That's shale tile.'
'Calcareous shale from our north ridge slope,' Junho said. 'Four kilometers out. We found it two months ago.'
'How much deposit?'
'Significant. We've only opened a fraction of the exposed face. The deposit runs back into the slope — depth unknown, but the geological pattern suggests extensive.'
Liss looked at him with the evaluating expression of a man who had been buying materials for thirty years and was currently recalculating the value of a potential supplier relationship.
He's thinking about the shale, not just the oak.
The shale is a roofing material. His bridge and flood barrier construction projects need... no, wait. Not roofing. But shale has other uses. Flagging. Facing stone. Retaining wall infill.
'The oak first,' Junho said. 'Then we can talk about what else the ridge produces.'
Liss smiled — a brief, functional smile, the smile of someone who appreciated efficient thinking. 'Show me the oak.'
* * *
The timber yard had changed since the Colwick delivery.
The primary beam sections for Liss were staged separately — nineteen sections, each labeled with its measurements in Calder's careful hand, lying on trestles in the covered portion of the yard. The secondary old-growth structural pieces were beside them, sorted by dimension.
Liss went to the first primary beam and did what everyone did: ran his hand along the cut face, looking at the grain, assessing the heartwood color.
Then he did something no one else had done.
He produced a small knife from his coat and pressed the tip into the heartwood, not aggressively — just enough to feel the resistance.
Skk.
He held the knife there for a moment. Withdrew it. Looked at the mark.
'How deep does the heartwood run?' he asked.
'Full cross-section,' Junho said. 'These trees were growing slowly enough that the sapwood proportion is minimal — less than ten percent by radius at the outer edge.'
'In my trade,' Liss said, 'sapwood is the enemy. It rots. Heartwood doesn't.' He looked at the marked face. 'Old-growth timber from a non-plantation forest is almost pure heartwood. You can't get this from managed woodland.'
'I know,' Junho said.
'Most people who sell it to me don't know.' He looked along the row of staged sections. 'They know it's valuable. They don't always know why.'
He's testing whether I understand what I have. The answer matters to him — it tells him whether I'll manage the ridge stand correctly going forward or strip it out in one harvest.
'The stand is a selective harvest,' Junho said. 'Sixty percent maximum. Seed trees retained. The ridge will regenerate over fifty to eighty years, which means it's a recurring supply rather than a one-time extraction.'
Liss looked at him.
'You've thought about this properly,' he said.
'It's my land,' Junho said. 'I need it to work for longer than one harvest.'
Liss made no further comment. He walked the full row of primary sections, checked six of them at various points, examined two of the secondary structural pieces. He spent twenty minutes total and then came back to Junho.
'I'll take everything you have staged,' he said. 'And I want first-right on future old-growth production from this stand.'
First-right again.
Everyone who deals with this timber wants first-right on future production. That tells me something about the scarcity of this material in the regional market.
The terms of Liss's first-right will determine how much flexibility I keep. Brek's clause was for twelve months; I negotiated it down. With Liss I need to be careful — he's a specialist buyer, which means his first-right has more exclusivity value than Brek's.
'First right on old-growth structural at specialist market rate,' Junho said. 'Three-year term. After three years, open market unless we renew. And the clause is limited to the northeast ridge stand specifically — not any other forest sections.'
'Four years,' Liss said.
'Three years plus an option to renew at end of term if both parties agree,' Junho said. 'That's effectively four if we're both satisfied.'
Liss considered. 'Define specialist market rate.'
'The rate you're paying today: 4.8 gold per cubic meter for primary sections, 3.9 for secondary. Indexed to the Northern March timber price index, adjusted annually.'
'How are you indexing to the March timber price? There's no official index.'
'Brek publishes a quarterly market rate summary for his commercial buyers,' Junho said. 'It's the closest thing to a standardized reference available in this region. We use Brek's published rate for standard structural oak as the baseline, and apply the specialist premium as a fixed percentage above it.'
Liss looked at him steadily.
'You know Brek,' he said.
'I sell timber to Brek,' Junho said. 'He's my primary buyer for standard volume.'
'And you've set up a pricing reference that uses your existing buyer's published rates.'
'It benefits both of us,' Junho said. 'You get a transparent, verifiable price reference. I get a rate that moves with the market rather than staying fixed while prices change.' He paused. 'If timber prices fall, you benefit. If they rise, I benefit. It's balanced.'
Liss was quiet for a moment. He had the expression of a sixty-year-old professional encountering a negotiating structure he hadn't been offered before.
'Done,' he said. 'Three years plus renewal option. Brek's published rate as baseline. We have a contract.'
They shook hands again.
Ping—!
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
[ CONTRACT UPDATE — LISS SPECIALIST TIMBER ]
Buyer: Brennan Liss, Civil Works Contractor (bridge/flood barrier)
Immediate sale: 19 primary sections + 40m³ secondary = est. 235 gold
First-right: Northeast ridge old-growth, 3 years + renewal option
Pricing: Brek baseline + specialist premium (indexed)
Settlement payment impact:
Liss sale closes the 28-gold gap — settlement payment NOW fully funded
Structural consultation:
Liss river crossing project — bridge design input requested
Scope: Review of primary span design and pier loading assumptions
Format: Written assessment + site visit if required
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
Settlement payment fully funded.
All the pieces are in place. The letter is already sent. The Galden Group will receive it and process the transfer.
In ten days, Ashmore's outstanding debt drops from 2,932 gold to 1,322 gold.
That's a number I can see the end of.
'The bridge project,' Junho said. 'Tell me about it.'
Liss told him.
It was a river crossing over the Ash tributary — a different section of the same waterway that ran through Ashmore's east boundary, thirty kilometers south where the tributary widened before joining the main river. The crossing needed to carry heavy cargo loads year-round, including the spring flood period when the tributary ran fast and high. The current design had a central pier in the channel which Liss's foreman said was necessary for the span length and which Liss's stone contractor was arguing was going to be undercut by flood scour.
Pier scour. One of the oldest bridge failure modes. A pier in a fast-flowing channel creates turbulence that erodes the foundation over time until the pier fails.
The question is whether the span can be handled without the pier, or whether the pier can be protected against scour.
'What's the span width?' Junho asked.
'Fourteen meters between abutments. The foreman says a timber beam bridge can't span fourteen meters without a central support. The stone contractor says the pier will fail.'
'The foreman is right that a standard timber beam bridge can't span fourteen meters,' Junho said. 'A single beam at that span would deflect unacceptably under load. But a truss structure can. You don't need the pier if the structural form is right.'
Liss looked at him.
'A truss,' he said.
'A timber truss. The load path goes through the diagonal members, not just the top and bottom chords. The triangulated geometry gives you stiffness that a simple beam can't achieve at that span.' Junho reached for a piece of parchment — he always had parchment now, a habit from the first week that had never stopped — and sketched quickly. The parallel chords, the vertical members, the diagonals. 'This is the basic form. Fourteen meters is within the range where a well-designed timber truss works without a central pier.'
Liss looked at the sketch.
He looked at it for a long time.
'My foreman has never built a truss bridge,' he said.
'Has he built any truss structure?'
'I don't know.'
'If he hasn't, this is learnable,' Junho said. 'The joint geometry is the critical part — the diagonal connections need to transfer load without splitting the chord timber. I can write out the connection details.' He was already thinking through the geometry. 'What timber is available for the primary members?'
'I can buy from you,' Liss said drily.
Yes. His bridge project, my timber. The relationship just became more integrated.
'I'll write the structural assessment,' Junho said. 'Full connection details, member sizing, construction sequence. If your foreman can follow detailed specifications, he can build it.'
'If he can't, can I send him here?' Liss said. 'To watch how you build.'
...He wants to send his foreman to observe Ashmore construction methods.
That's a significant implicit compliment. It's also a significant potential complication — having a stranger in the construction site for an extended period, watching how things are done.
But the Harren carpenters came and integrated well. And a civil works foreman learning truss construction is a different kind of visitor from a surveyor or an inspector.
'After the hall is complete,' Junho said. 'Mid-winter. He can spend a week. There's enough construction activity here that he'll see what he needs to see.'
'Done,' Liss said. He stood. 'The payment for today's timber — I have it.'
He produced a sealed purse from his coat. Not coins — a banker's draft on the Veldmark exchange house. More practical than carrying 235 gold in metal.
Fwp.
The draft on the table. Endorsed. The settlement gap closed.
* * *
The Galden Group's confirmation arrived on day one hundred and sixty-one.
Not from Crane — from the administrative secretary again, the same formal hand, the same official paper. It confirmed receipt of the lump-sum payment and the updated debt schedule: outstanding balance 1,322 gold, annual payments adjusted accordingly, Crane's fifty-gold working capital advance repaid from the settlement payment per the agreed terms.
It also contained a single handwritten line at the bottom, separate from the official text.
In a different hand — a cleaner, more angular script.
It said: *Well done. — A.C.*
Junho looked at the two initials for a moment.
Aldous Crane.
Two words at the bottom of an administrative letter. From a man who had told me in his office that competent borrowers were rare.
I'll take it.
He put the letter in the operational log and went to tell Pell.
Pell read the balance figure: 1,322 gold.
He sat down by choice for the second time since Junho had arrived.
'That's—' he started, and stopped.
'Manageable,' Junho said. 'That's what it is. Year-two payment will be approximately 386 gold. Year-three is 350. Year-four closes it.' He sat across from the steward. 'Three years, Pell. Three more years and the debt is gone.'
Pell looked at the table.
'When you arrived,' he said, 'I had been steward of this barony for twenty-two years. And for the last four of those, my primary occupation had been watching it die slowly.' He was quiet for a moment. 'I had started — not planning, exactly. But thinking about what I would do after.'
'After,' Junho said.
'After the foreclosure. After the territory changed hands. Whether the Galden Group would need an experienced steward for whatever they installed, or whether I was too old and too associated with the previous administration to be useful.' He looked up. 'I had made tentative inquiries. Discreetly.'
He was looking for a way out. Of course he was. He watched three years of decline and prepared for the end of it.
'And now?' Junho said.
'Now I'm not looking for a way out,' Pell said simply. 'I'm trying to keep up with the pace of things coming in.' He touched the balance figure on the confirmation letter. 'Three years.'
'Three years,' Junho said.
'I'll be seventy by the time it's clear,' Pell said.
'I know.'
'I intend to be here to see it,' Pell said, with the matter-of-fact decisiveness of a man stating a plan rather than expressing a hope.
Junho said nothing. Nothing needed saying.
* * *
The hall was finished on day one hundred and seventy-three.
Two days past the original estimate. The delay came from Calder, who had spent an extra two days on the door frame — the spiral-grained northeast ridge oak — not because it needed more work but because he had found, in the final shaping, a quality in the piece that required patience rather than speed.
Nobody had told him to take the extra two days. Nobody had suggested he should rush.
The finished frame was installed on the last day. The hall door hung in it — a simple plank door, banded with iron from Gorvan, functional and honest — and the grain of the wood was visible in the frame around it. The spiral in the heartwood. 180 years rendered as a line of color change from the core outward.
Pell was the first person to walk through the finished door.
Not because anyone designated him for the privilege. Because he had been at the site at dawn supervising the final small installations — the iron hooks for lanterns in the public room, the wooden latch fittings on the private room doors — and when Calder set the main door in its frame and Junho stepped back to check the hang, Pell was simply the nearest person standing.
He walked through without ceremony.
Stood in the middle of the public room.
Looked at the roof beams — the mill-cut oak, dressed and fitted by Pol and Bett with the clean joinery of experienced craftsmen — and the plaster walls, and the window openings with their small panes of oiled cloth that let in diffuse light.
He said nothing for quite a long time.
...
Then: 'It smells like new wood.'
'It is new wood,' Junho said.
'The farmhouse smelled like this once,' Pell said. 'When I first came here. Before everything—' He stopped. 'Before.'
He walked to the window and looked out at the northwest rise and the forest beyond and the grey winter sky.
'It's a good hall,' he said.
'Pol and Bett built it,' Junho said. 'And Calder. And Hendry and Ott.'
'And you designed it,' Pell said.
'And Sera picked the site,' Junho said.
Pell looked around the room one more time. He nodded — once, precisely, the motion that meant something specific from him.
Then he went to find the lantern hooks and finish his work.
Ping—!
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
[ QUEST MILESTONE ACHIEVED ]
Hall of Ashmore — COMPLETE
Day 173. Construction duration: 58 days from foundation start.
Specifications:
Public room: 12m × 7m, seats 24, standing 40
Private wing: 3 rooms + steward's office
Kitchen: Separated by stone fire break wall
Arcade: South face, 15m × 3m
Roof: Shale tile, 30° pitch, 4,380 tiles
Walls: Limestone lower courses, lime-plastered timber frame above
Door frame: Northeast ridge old-growth oak, 183-year growth
REWARD:
[Blueprint: Lord's Hall (Improved)] — UNLOCKED
[Territory Status: DEVELOPING → ESTABLISHED]
+350 EXP
New capability: Garrison billeting (20 soldiers, 60 days/year)
New capability: Formal reception of Crown officials and trade delegations
New capability: Permanent administrative seat for Ashmore Barony
―――――――――――――――――――――――――――
Territory status: Established.
From Critical to Established. In one hundred and seventy-three days.
Six classifications. One every twenty-eight days, roughly.
That's not how I thought about it at the time. I thought about it one day at a time, one problem at a time.
Looking back at the progression is disorienting. It doesn't feel like one hundred and seventy-three days. It feels like a longer kind of time, the kind measured by what happened rather than how long it took.
He stood in the hall doorway and looked at the public room. The beams, the plaster, the winter light through the oiled-cloth windows. The room smelled like new wood and lime and cold air.
The farmhouse had been where the operation ran. It would continue to run from there — the wall of documents, the correspondence table, Sera's workspace, Pell's administrative work — because the farmhouse was the working brain of the barony and the hall was something else.
The hall was evidence. Visible, physical, permanent evidence that the barony existed as a going concern that intended to keep going.
Any Crown inspector who comes through here now sees a working mill, a hall on a rise, a surfaced road, a drained field, and a school in a barn. That's not a failing territory. That's not a recovering territory. That's a territory that is doing the thing a territory is supposed to do.
Three years to clear the debt. Another year to build the wall. Five years to full agricultural recovery on the east field. A decade to establish the ridge stand rotation on a permanent footing.
A decade is a long plan. I didn't come here with a decade in mind. I came here with ninety days.
The ninety days worked. The decade is what came after.
* * *
The evening gathering happened without planning.
Junho had not called it. He had not scheduled it. He had simply mentioned to Pell that they should mark the hall's completion somehow, and Pell had apparently mentioned it to Mara, and Mara had mentioned it to the tenant families, and by evening the hall's public room was full of people who had appeared with food and the Coris family's apple brandy and no particular agenda except to be in the new room together.
Forty-three people.
The full adult population of the barony, plus Pol and Bett who were still resident for another two weeks, plus Tomas Fen who was technically not an adult but was seventeen and had made the tiles and Mara had made a judgment call.
Junho stood near the door — the spiral-grained oak door frame — and watched the room fill.
Coris and his wife in the corner with the brandy. The Dunwick family taking up an entire section of the room, Wyll and Eddy and their younger siblings, Mara talking to Fen at the center. Hendry Voss and Garret and Ott, the three generations of Voss men, the family that had built the foundation and the housing and the mill and the mill upgrade and the bridge and now this. Calder near the fireplace, which Pol had lit with the practiced efficiency of someone who had spent fifty winter worksites starting fires in new hearths. Sera by the window with Carra, talking, Carra with her notebook and Sera with the particular attentive posture she used when she was learning something.
Brin the thatcher was there, because Brin came to everything.
Pell stood at the far side of the room with a cup of the apple brandy and the expression of a man who had decided, on balance, that the present moment was acceptable.
It was loud. Not chaotically loud. The specific good noise of a room full of people who knew each other and had things to say and were saying them.
Junho stayed near the door.
He was not uncomfortable in the room — he had passed the point where the noise of this many people in an unfamiliar context created the low-grade anxiety it had in the early weeks. He had spent too much time with these people, knew too many of their names and their specific work, for them to be unfamiliar.
But he was an observer by habit and disposition, and the doorway gave him the full room in one sightline, which was the way he thought about rooms: the whole picture before the details.
Mara appeared beside him with two cups of the apple brandy. She handed one over.
He took it.
'You're not going to make a speech,' she said. Statement, not question.
'No,' he said.
'Good,' she said. 'If you made a speech, half of them would feel obligated to look attentive and the other half would feel obligated to respond, and then everyone would be performing instead of just being here.'
She's thought about this.
'You've organized gatherings before,' Junho said.
'I've organized the barony's harvest festivals for fifteen years,' she said. 'Because nobody else did.' She looked at the room. 'The key is to create the conditions for people to be comfortable and then get out of the way. Events manage themselves when the conditions are right.'
Create the conditions and get out of the way. That's not just event management.
That's the entire philosophy of the last six months, expressed in seven words.
He drank the apple brandy. It tasted exactly as it had the first time — autumn distilled into something technically illegal.
'The clover field,' Mara said, after a while.
'What about it?'
'I want to turn it in early spring. Before the ground hardens back.' She looked at her cup. 'There's a timing — about two weeks after the last frost, when the clover has had time to start its spring growth but hasn't put energy into seeding. Turn it in then and the nitrogen is still in the roots.'
'When will you need equipment?'
'I have the turning plows. What I don't have is enough draft animals for the whole field in the right window. The timing is about four days. Three plows, three draft animals, four days.' She paused. 'We have two. I need a third.'
Draft animal for the spring plowing. Three weeks of use in a four-day critical window.
Buying a third horse for three weeks of intensive use per year is inefficient. Borrowing or leasing is the right answer.
'I'll talk to Harwell,' Junho said. 'Colwick has draft animals. A seasonal lease for the spring plowing window is something his estate management can handle — it's a known requirement for them too, just on a larger scale.'
'Can you get it settled before winter ends?'
'I'll write the letter this week.'
Mara nodded. She looked at the room again — at her family, at the Voss men, at Brin in the corner with a cup of brandy and the satisfied expression of someone who had come to something and found it worth coming to.
'My youngest,' she said. 'The stomach complaint.'
'Yes?' Junho said.
'It's gone. Two weeks after the well repair.' She was quiet for a moment. 'I didn't say anything at the time. But I want you to know.'
She's thanking me for the well.
Except she's thanking me for Sera finding it, really. And Hendry fixing it. And the fact that someone did the housing assessment that identified it.
But the chain of causation ends somewhere, and she's choosing to end it at me. That's what the 'I want you to know' means.
'I'm glad,' Junho said. Inadequate. But true.
Mara looked at the room one more time. Then she went back to her family with the empty practicality of someone who had said the thing she needed to say and was done standing in doorways.
Junho stayed where he was.
Calder appeared next to him after a while, carrying his own cup, having apparently tired of the fireplace.
They stood in the doorway together in the comfortable silence of two people who had worked alongside each other for long enough that silence was not a gap to fill.
'The door frame,' Calder said eventually.
'It's good work,' Junho said.
'I've been a carpenter since I was twelve,' Calder said. 'I've made — I don't know how many things. Frames, furniture, components, mechanisms.' He looked at the spiral-grained frame in the wall beside them. 'That's the best piece of work I've ever done.'
He's twenty-six. The best piece of work he's ever done is in a hall he helped build, in a barony he helped save, and he's telling the person who created the conditions for all of it to happen.
Don't think about it too hard.
'You had the right material,' Junho said.
'Yes,' Calder said. 'But material isn't enough. You have to know what the material wants to be.'
He looked at the frame for another moment.
'I'm going to stay,' he said. 'If you'll have me. Properly — not as a day laborer. As a craftsman with a commission, a workshop, a fixed role in what you're building here.'
He's asking to be permanent.
As if there was any question.
'There's a woodshop building on the seven-item list,' Junho said. 'Item nine, actually — the list has grown. It's been waiting because I needed to finish the hall and the housing repairs before starting new construction. Spring project.'
Calder looked at him. 'You already planned it.'
'You were already staying,' Junho said. 'It seemed efficient to build the workspace.'
Calder looked back at the room — at the beams he'd helped fit, the joinery he'd cut — and something in his face had the same quality as the door frame. Something that had found what it was supposed to be.
'All right,' he said.
* * *
The hall emptied slowly in the way of a good gathering — not suddenly, but by degrees, people remembering that morning came early and children needed to be in beds and the walk home in the cold was not nothing.
By the tenth hour most of them were gone.
Junho stayed to bank the fire with Pol, who had started it and had strong opinions about how it should be left. They worked in comfortable silence — Pol an experienced man at the end of a long project, Junho aware that in two weeks Pol and Bett would return to Harren and the hall would be fully his to manage.
'The truss bridge design,' Pol said, banking the last coals.
'Liss's project,' Junho said.
'I've built simple beam bridges. Never a truss.' He looked at the fire. 'I'd like to see the design when you write it.'
'You'll be back at Harren when I finish it,' Junho said.
'Send it,' Pol said. 'I read.'
Of course he does.
'I'll send it,' Junho said.
Pol went. Junho stood alone in the banked-fire warmth of the hall's public room.
The room was quiet. The smell of new wood and lime plaster and woodsmoke and forty-three people. The specific composite smell of a space that had just been used for the first time and had received its first story.
He thought about his apartment in Seoul. He had not thought about it in a long time. A small space, functional, containing only what the work required. He had not looked at it when he left for the last time — he had been running late, always running late — and the last image he had of it was the half-empty instant ramen cup on the blueprints on the desk.
I never said goodbye to it. It was just the place I was in before I died.
This is the place I'm in now.
This is more like a home.
He turned off the last lantern.
He walked back to the farmhouse in the cold and the dark, the two moons above making their different arcs, the hall behind him on its rise with the shale tiles visible as a darker grey against the sky.
Day 173.
The ninety days ended eighty-three days ago.
The work didn't.
He went inside.
The farmhouse was warm. The operational log was on the table where he'd left it. The list of things to do had grown past the original seven items to something that required two pages now.
He sat down.
He opened the log to a fresh page and wrote: *Day 173. Hall complete. Status: Established. What comes next:*
And then he wrote the list.
Skrrk— skrrk— skrrk—
Charcoal on parchment. The sound of planning.
The sound of a thing that intended to keep going.
—
[ End of Chapter 17 ]
~ To be continued ~
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