Massachusetts

Two hundred and sixty four years since the first grant, and the Commonwealth does not look like anything the founders would recognise.

Mills came first, then railroads, then a million people who were not English. Lowell, Lawrence, Fall River, New Bedford, Lynn. Cotton, wool, shoes, rope, ice, granite and fish, and behind all of it a labour force out of Ireland and Quebec and the Azores and, in the last fifteen years, out of southern Italy and Poland.

The old Yankee families still hold the land, the banks and the endowments. They have not held a majority of the votes in any city of size since the eighties. Most of them have not admitted it yet.

What has already been done

Not folklore. Matters of record, every one inside somebody's living memory.

What people believe

Something between everything and nothing, which is the useful part.

This is the great age of spiritualism. Séances in respectable parlours, mediums with society clientele, the Society for Psychical Research founded in 1882 to investigate the whole business as natural philosophy. A wealthy woman who speaks to the dead is fascinating. A poor one doing the same is a fraud, and if she takes money she can be prosecuted for exactly that.

And the countryside has not moved. Exeter was three years ago and it was not an aberration. New England hill towns have been digging up consumptives and burning their hearts since before the Revolution, and the Boston papers cover each one as proof that the interior is still medieval.

The line between those two is class and geography. Nothing else.

What is done about people now

Nobody hangs anybody. The witchcraft statute has been dead two centuries and the replacement is quieter and in some ways worse.

The asylum. Two physicians' certificates and a relative's signature commits a person indefinitely. The relative does not have to be close. It is modern, respectable, and requires nobody to prove anything.

The fraud statute. Claiming supernatural power for money is a criminal offence, prosecuted regularly, mostly against women and mostly against poor ones.

And the mob, which needs no statute at all. In a mill city a crowd assembles in about forty minutes, and the police are drawn from one ward and will not always walk into another.

Boston

Half a million people and the fourth city in the Republic. Filled land where there was water, an elevated railway going up, electric light in the good streets, and the first subway in America being dug under the Common right now.

Also the densest slum on the continent in the North End, and a mayor's office that has been the object of a twenty year war between the Yankee establishment and the Irish wards, which the Irish are winning.

An hour and ten minutes from Carlin by rail, eleven times a day.

The North Shore

Salem is genteel and declining, living on old China trade money and its own history, which it has lately begun selling to visitors.

Lynn makes shoes, is larger than Salem, and burned in 1889.

Gloucester fishes and buries a hundred men a year doing it.

The interior, twenty miles inland, where the hill farms went under after the war and the woods came back over them. Depopulated, poor, and where the exhumations still happen.

Carlin sits between the ports and the interior and has always taken from both.

Coldharbour and Carlin

Coldharbour is the old grant. Forty square miles of shore, wood, marsh and worn out farmland, bounded by the Boston road south and the swamp west, and it has meant that since 1631.

Carlin is the city. It took its name off Robert Carlin, who held the wharf lot and died in 1638 owing money to most of the men who buried him.

People from outside say Coldharbour and mean Carlin. People who live here do not make that mistake.

What happened in the war

Carlin was a loyalist town and it was the last one on this coast.

The money was English. The Company held the wharves, the merchant families held the Hill, and the whole city was pointed at London in a way that made it rich and, after 1774, made it a problem. Salem and Marblehead went for the Congress. Carlin did not.

In August 1776 it was taken by force. Not a battle anybody teaches. A militia out of four inland towns came down the Boston road, the harbour chain was cut, and there was fighting on the Wharf for two days that killed somewhere between forty and ninety people depending on whose account you read.

Eleven families were dispossessed. Six went to Nova Scotia and did not come back. Their wharves, warehouses and houses were sold at auction in 1778 to the men who had taken them, and every deed on the Hill traces to that auction.

A hundred and nineteen years on it is still the thing. The families who arrived in 1778 are the old families now. Three of the loyalist names are still in the city, having stayed and paid for staying, and they have not forgotten, and neither has anybody else.

The record

It should not be this size

Carlin ought to be fifteen thousand people. It is closer to thirty eight.

The Eastern Railroad came through in 1841 and explains some of it. The mills explain more. But Lynn had a railroad and mills too, and Salem had better water, and neither of them did this.

Ships put in that have no business putting in. Families arrive who cannot afterward give a straight answer about why here and not Lawrence, which pays better. In two and a half centuries there has not been one decade where more left than came, including the forties when the interior emptied out.

The Board of Trade counts this a triumph and prints it on things.

The city now

Thirty eight thousand, and a deep harbour that does not ice.

The railroad runs the shore into a brick depot at the head of the Wharf. Eleven trains a day to Boston, four north. Freight sidings run onto the wharves themselves, which is the whole reason the port beat Salem.

The mills are three. A cotton mill on the river employing eleven hundred, a shoe factory, and a ropewalk working since 1683, now mechanised and owned from London.

The fishery still goes out and is a smaller share of the city every year.

Electric light in the good streets since 1889 and nowhere else. Gas elsewhere. Telephones in perhaps two hundred buildings. A horsecar line everybody expects to be electrified within the year.

The Wharf

Everything below the tide line and three streets back. Warehouses, the custom house, the depot, the coal pockets, the ropewalk. Nine saloons that hold a licence and a dozen that do not.

Foreign shipping, crews ashore for a week, longshoremen who work when there is a ship and do not when there is not. The only ground in the county where a stranger is not automatically an event. Some people live down here who could afford not to.

The Hill

The good streets. Brick and brownstone, elms, the Congregational church and the Episcopal one that went up in 1871 when some of them decided they had had enough of the other.

The families from the 1778 auction, the bank, the Board of Trade, the mill owners, the physicians, and the two men who between them hold most of the Wharf on paper. Electric light, telephones, and a view of the harbour that was the point of building there in 1631 and still is.

The Yards

Between the two, and where the city actually works.

Machine shops, the gasworks, the freight yard, the tannery downwind by ordinance, the cooperage, the lumber yard. The oldest houses went up in the fifties for the famine Irish and most of the rest in the seventies when the mills expanded. Two and three family, wooden, and the grandchildren of the first tenants are in them now.

Mostly Irish, third generation, no longer new. Mostly Catholic. It votes as a block and has learned exactly what that is worth.

The Warrens

North of the Yards where the ground turns bad and the river runs slow.

It went up after 1880 and nobody planned any of it. Tenements four storeys and built to the lot line, courts behind courts, privies shared between eleven families. Italian since about 1885, Portuguese down by the flats, and a Polish street that arrived last year and has been fought over twice already.

The Board of Health has condemned buildings here that are still occupied. The police walk it in pairs. The census is guesswork and everybody knows the real figure is higher.

It is also the youngest, loudest and most alive part of Carlin, which nobody on the Hill would believe if you told them.

How it is governed

A mayor, nine aldermen, a common council, and a great many departments invented in the last thirty years because a city of thirty eight thousand cannot be run by seven men and a town meeting.

The mayor is Yankee, Republican, on his third one year term, and won the last by four hundred votes in a city where the Yards alone hold six thousand.

The aldermen are five Hill and four Yards, and the four vote together on everything.

The police. Ninety two men under a chief the mayor appoints, recruited almost entirely out of the Yards, which means Irish, which means the Hill does not entirely trust them and the Warrens do not trust them at all.

The Board of Health, created 1874, is now the most powerful thing in Carlin that nobody elected. It can condemn a building, close a factory, quarantine a household and order a body exhumed, and it does not have to ask anybody first.

The four interests

The Hill. Land, the bank, the mills, and two and a half centuries of assumption. They are losing and they know it, and their answer has been to retreat into institutions the vote cannot reach. The Board of Trade, the library trustees, the hospital, the historical society, the endowments.

The Wharf. Shipping, freight, the railroad interest, the Company. Money without local loyalty. They want the port open, the tariff low and the city out of their business, and they have bought exactly as much of the council as they need and no more.

The Yards. Six thousand votes, a machine, and a man named Dennehy who holds no office at all and has decided the last two mayoral elections. Coal in December, a job on the water board, a word with a judge. The Hill calls it corruption. Nobody in the Yards has ever been offered an alternative.

The Warrens. No votes yet, most of them not naturalised. In four years perhaps eight hundred will be, and the Yards have worked out that this is a threat rather than an alliance.

The rest of it

The union. The spinners organised in 1889, struck in 1891, and lost. They have not struck since and everybody is waiting.

The temperance societies. Hill women mostly, and genuinely powerful. Eleven saloons closed in five years, every one in the Yards or the Warrens and none on the Hill, which is noticed.

The papers. Two. The Carlin Register is Hill money and prints what the Board of Trade would like printed. The Evening Star is four years old, cheaper, prints anything, and passed the Register in circulation last spring.

What this means for an accusation

Nobody hangs anybody. One of three things happens instead, and which one depends entirely on who the person is.

A woman on the Hill who is strange is eccentric, and if she becomes inconvenient she is committed. Two certificates and a relative's signature.

A woman in the Yards or the Warrens who is strange is a fraud if she takes money and a nuisance if she does not, and either way the police and the Board of Health are the instruments.

And in the interior, twenty miles inland among the hill farms, nothing has changed since 1692. The Register runs the story afterward under the word SUPERSTITION.

Who is here

Nobody governs anybody else. The three have not fought since 1671 and none of them could win if they did.

The rest of this page is how that arrangement came about, which matters because every rule all three of them live under was written in the same five years.

Ashwick

Eight miles inland there is a cellar hole, a chimney and forty acres of stone wall running through second growth woods. The maps have marked it Ashwick since 1698. Nobody has lived there in two hundred and twenty nine years.

In 1666 it was a town of four hundred people, and in March of that year it hanged six women.

The fifth of August

Four of the six were nothing. Two were not.

Nine women were left of that circle, out of Ashwick and the townships around it, and between them they had lost a mother, two sisters and a daughter. They spent five months deciding.

At midday on the fifth of August the meetinghouse came down during service. Thirty two died inside it. The roof went first and then the west wall, and it took under four seconds.

Nobody has ever known why.

The coroner sat on it for eleven days and returned an opinion about the gallery being overloaded and the tie beams being undersized, which satisfied the county and satisfies the two local histories that mention it now. There was no investigation because there was nothing to investigate. A building fell down.

The nine never told anybody. Not that year, not afterward, and not to the two orders who spent the following decade tearing the region apart over it. The last of them died in 1709. The Society has held her commonplace book since 1843. There is one line in it about that summer and it reads we were nine and the roof was the easiest of it.

The bite

Aurelius Bray was the nocten Elder of the region and he went out to Ashwick himself in the week after it happened. Eleven of them in the whole colony, and a building had come down on thirty two people eight miles from the only port that mattered. Somebody had to find out whether it was one of theirs.

On his fourth night out there a beast came out of the trees at him on the Ashwick road.

It was the eighth of August and the moon was full, and that road was walked by anybody who had reason to walk it. Nothing about it was arranged. It took him nine days to die and he was lucid for six of them.

The war

The bite did not start it. The argument did.

The packs came to the nocten in September and said what was true, which was that nothing had been aimed at anybody, that the beast had not known who it met and could not have, and that this was simply what the thing was and had always been.

The nocten heard a body admitting it could not govern itself and had no intention of trying.

It ran five years. Nobody declared it and nobody wrote it down, and by 1671 the nocten and the packs of New England had reduced each other by something close to half. Barns, roads, the woods. The coast watched a great many unexplained things happen over those five years and drew conclusions that were wrong in every particular.

The packs lost, and not for want of being dangerous. Twelve households cannot fight something that can sit in a room and decide things, and for twelve nights a month every one of them was somewhere known.

The hunters

They started arriving in 1668 because a great deal was happening and it was possible to be paid for it.

Le Guet sent four the moment word crossed and all four were dead inside a year. Everybody else came on their own account, mostly out of England and the German lands where the trade had been dying for a generation, and here was a coast that would pay by the head.

They hunted all three. They also killed several hundred people who were nothing at all, because a man paid by the head does not check carefully.

By 1680 there was about a third of what there had been. The work ran out and the families stayed.

1789

Ambrose Vane had held the order since 1671 and had written its articles, and without him there would not have been an order.

Ezra Coffin took his head off in a stable yard in Salem in October 1789 and was paid forty dollars for it by a wool merchant named Peter Ash. Ash was not a hunter and had never had anything to do with any of it. He had a daughter, and Vane had taken an interest in her.

Nineteen months followed with no successor and no article covering the case, and the order in New England was eleven frightened people and a book.

Josiah Renn ended that in March of 1791. He staked the two who had been arguing longest and put them under the ropewalk, where they still are, and then called the rest together and told them how it was going to be. Six of the eleven were in that room. Four are still alive and none of the four has ever been heard to discuss it.

The Court

The nocten order of the region. It is not a democracy and has never pretended to be.

Renn decides. There is no vote, no appeal and no procedure for disagreeing with him, and a man named Aldous Frey went to the rest of the order in 1834 to argue that there should be. He has been under the ropewalk since November of that year.

The Hand enforces. Appointed by Renn, and the appointment lasts as long as he likes. They are not the strongest and they are not the oldest. They are the ones who will do it. When somebody is to be found, moved, warned or put down, it is the Hand that comes, and everyone in the order knows them by sight and none of them by trade.

The rules

Four, unchanged since 1671.

You do not make another without leave. You do not feed in a way that leaves a body. You do not stay past your term. You go where you are put.

The sentence

There is only one and it is not death.

They stake you. A stake through the heart holds a nocten desiccated, and desiccation is sleep. You do not suffer, you do not know, and you do not age. You simply stop, and you go into the dark under the ropewalk with the others, and you come out when the Elder decides you come out, if he decides it.

There are several down there. The oldest went in during the Revolution and the reason went with the people who put him in.

Removal, when it happens, is not a sentence. It is a decision, and it is taken by Renn alone, and there is no record of it having happened more than four times.

The Elder

Mr. Josiah Renn. Two hundred and fifty four years old, nearblood, and Elder since 1791.

A nearblood called Margery Stow turned him in Bristol in 1641, when he was thirty one. She was taken by a mob outside Gloucester the following year and he has never spoken about her to anybody in the order. He came over in 1729 as a factor for a wool house, took a warehouse lease, and was in the order forty years before anybody thought of him as anything.

He was not the obvious choice. He was not the oldest, he was not liked, and he held no office at all. He was there and he was willing, at a moment when that was the entire qualification.

Publicly he is a director of the Coldharbour Wharf & Warehouse Company, sits on the Board of Trade, and endowed the west wing of the public library in 1884. He passes for sixty one, in poor health, and unmarried. It is his fifth name.

He does the cycle on paper and not in fact. Josiah Renn arrived from Philadelphia in 1871 and bought his uncle's interest; before that Amariah Renn, who died at sixty eight and is buried on the Hill; before that a cousin, and back through five names to a wool factor in 1729. The graves are real, the probate is filed, and the Renn plot has five headstones over nothing at all.

He is not interested in being feared, which is most of what frightens people about him. He does not raise his voice and he has never once been seen to enjoy any of it. Men who go against him lose, and cannot afterward name the day he moved, and the order has exactly the same difficulty.

The company

The Court owns a business and has since 1658, which makes it thirteen years older than the order and the only thing that survived from before.

The Coldharbour Wharf & Warehouse Company was chartered in London, seized in 1778 with everything else English in Carlin, and brought back in 1841 as an American corporation the week the railroad survey was published. It files accounts. Its directors attend meetings. There has never been anything wrong with the paperwork.

It holds the wharf leases, the coal pockets, the ropewalk, the bonded warehouses, and a controlling interest in the freight sidings joining the port to the Eastern Railroad.

Work, lodging, papers and passage. In a port city that is not most of what matters.

The dark under the ropewalk is Company property. That is not an accident.

Where the nocten stand

There is one Court and it covers the whole region. Most of its people are in Carlin and the rest are scattered across the county, reporting by letter twice a year. There are more of them than there were a century ago, and the rate of it is the one thing anybody at the top of the order argues about.

They feed off the hospital. Carlin General has had a surgical theatre since 1882 and disposes of a great deal, and the orderly who handles disposal has been paid by the Company for nineteen years and believes he is assisting a physician with a research interest. It is thin, kept blood. It keeps a nocten fed and brittle and unsatisfied, and it is what Renn requires.

Beyond that there are arrangements. A handful of people in the Warrens take money regularly and are told it is for a tonic manufacturer, which is not implausible in a decade that puts cocaine in toothache drops. The Hand inspects these, and the inspection is the point.

Their trades run at night, which is far easier now than it was. Night watchmen at the mills, the telegraph office, the freight yard, the gasworks. Two work the newspaper presses, which Renn considers useful and has said twice is a thing he will have to deal with.

And one of them nobody can place. Eleven years in Carlin, on the roll, answers when written to, and no member of the order has established what he does or where he sleeps. The Hand has been told twice to leave it.

Where the packs stand

There are two packs and both are out in Coldharbour. Neither is large. Most of the people in them carry it and never wake, and both are poorer than they were.

After the war the interior emptied and the hill farms went under, and the packs bought land nobody else wanted, which was sound policy in 1850 and is a slow disaster now. They farm badly on exhausted ground, cut timber, and burn charcoal, which is the last trade that pays a man to be out all night with nobody asking.

They come into Carlin every week and are not supposed to. Market days at the depot. The hiring on the Wharf when a ship needs loading fast and nobody is taking names. Half the produce in the city comes off land held by people who cannot lodge here overnight.

The moon is handled and it is not simple. Both keep proper ground, which is the one advantage of exile: forty square miles of emptied country and nobody to hear it. The Harrow has a stone pit under a hillside that took four years to dig. The Deadfall uses what it has, which is worse.

A hundred and sixty years without losing a beast into a populated place. Both of them know exactly what the count would be if they ever did.

Where the gifted stand

There is one coven in Carlin and it is called the Spring Coven. It is old, it runs the city's institutions, and it is not looking for members.

Some of it can work. Most of it cannot and knows everything anyway. Both count.

There are also gifted women in Coldharbour who belong to nothing, either because nobody found them or because they said no. The coven knows about most of them and leaves them alone.

They meet when there is a reason to. There is no schedule and there never has been.

What they use the working for is mostly small. Wards on their own houses. Mending a physician cannot manage. Knowing what a room thinks before they walk into it. Anything larger is decided together and it has happened twice in living memory.

Where the hunters stand

They did not leave in 1680 and they did not stop.

Four families in Coldharbour keep the books. Ledgers, descriptions, methods, and in two cases a list of names added to in every generation since 1673. None of the four speaks to the others, over an argument in 1809 whose substance nobody now alive remembers.

They are not organised and they are not amateurs. A druggist, a foreman at the shoe factory, two farming families, and a man who repairs clocks. What they have is two centuries of accumulated method, considerable patience, and a correct understanding of what silver does.

One of these families took Ambrose Vane's head in 1789 and has the payment entered in a ledger that still exists.

Most of them do nothing at all. The books get kept, the sons get told, and a generation passes. What starts a hunter is always local and always personal, and there has not been one in Coldharbour since 1878.

The excursion letters are being read by at least one of the four.

The Spring Coven

The coven of Carlin. The name is just the name and has been since 1671. Nobody now in it knows where it came from and nobody has ever thought it worth asking.

Publicly it is the Coldharbour Dorcas Society, founded 1843, which sews clothing for the poor and has done for fifty two years. There are Dorcas societies in every city in New England and nobody has ever looked at one twice.

A minority of the membership can work. The rest are ordinary women who know exactly what they are in and have known for years. The Society is not a front the coven hides behind. The Society is most of the coven.

They meet at each other's houses, in the Society's rooms, and occasionally somewhere out in Coldharbour when they want distance from the city. There is no fixed night and no fixed place.

What they actually run

Everything that does not require a vote.

The hospital board. The library trustees. The Board of Health, through two physicians' wives and a clerk. The overseers of the poor. The school committee. Three of the nine aldermen have wives in the Society and one has a mother.

They do not hold office. They decide who is fit to, and they have been deciding it since before the war, and there has not been a mayor of Carlin in forty years who was not acceptable to the Hill parlours before he was nominated.

Which is why the accusations stopped. Not mercy and not modernity. A commitment needs two physicians. A fraud prosecution needs a complaint sworn and a district attorney willing. An exhumation needs the Board of Health. Every one of those doors has a Dorcas woman standing in it, and has had for two generations.

And it is not safe

A great many women in one organisation, minute books going back to 1843, a membership roll, and a treasurer who files with the state.

Since about 1870 the Court has known what the Society is and has never moved on it, which several of the younger nocten regard as the single greatest unexplained fact about the Elder.

The exile

No lycan has lived inside the city bounds since 1671.

They are out in Coldharbour, which is forty square miles and mostly emptied hill farm, and there are two packs in it. The Harrow to the north among the old wolf pits. The Deadfall west toward the swamp. They have not spoken in five years and both of them would put the city before each other if it came to it.

No law was ever passed about it. It is that the Court owns the wharves and the Society owns the boards, and between them a lycan family cannot get work, lodging, a lease, a licence or a physician inside Carlin, and never has been able to.

They are not permitted and they come in anyway. Market days, the depot, the hiring on the Wharf when a ship needs loading and nobody is asking names. Every week. Everybody involved knows it.

For two hundred and twenty nine years the packs have been the only one of the three powers with no stake in Carlin at all. Nobody in the city has properly considered that.

Why here

None of them chose this ground. They will all tell you they did.

The split ledge and the cold spring were avoided by everybody who lived within walking distance of them, going back further than there is a record for. Timber cutting stopped two hundred yards short of the ledge in 1634 and the man who gave that order gave a reason about the terrain that nobody believed.

The quarry company bought the lot in 1871 and has never worked it. Their surveyor's report is at the county registry and says the stone is unsound, which anybody who has stood on it knows is untrue.

The ground here is thin. Not poor. Thin, in the sense that there is less between here and whatever is underneath than there is elsewhere.

Working goes further at the cold spring than it has any business going. A few people in the coven know that. None of them has ever put in writing what she thinks is underneath it.

How the silence holds

There is no statute and has not been for two centuries. It is held instead by a coven that controls every institution capable of starting a proceeding, an order that removes its own before the city has to, and thirty eight thousand people with two newspapers.

The newspapers are the new thing and neither of the other two has adjusted. In 1666 a rumour travelled as far as a man could walk. The Evening Star prints eleven thousand and they are on the Boston train by seven in the morning, and it is owned by a man from Lowell who has no wife in any society whatsoever.

You are born with it or you are not. It runs in families, though not dependably, and it turns up often enough in households that have never had it before.

It cannot be taught to somebody without it, handed over, or taken away. Learning to control the thing you already have takes years.

Trier

The gifted have one story and they all know it and it is not a good one.

Between 1581 and 1593 the electorate of Trier burned somewhere over three hundred and fifty people. It was the largest witch persecution in Europe to that date, it took in two entire villages, and it reached high enough that a judge who had helped run it was himself executed in 1589.

Of the three hundred and fifty, eleven were actually gifted, and they were a circle, and they had been quietly useful in that town for thirty years.

They were taken over eleven months. The last was Ursel Weber, who was Tier Four and who spent a fortnight in a cell in Trier deciding.

On the ninth of October 1589 she brought down the hall she was being tried in. The suffragan bishop died, and the two commissioners who had signed for the others, and eleven more.

She did not survive it either. Nobody at that level does.

What it taught them

Nothing about hiding. Every gifted woman in Europe already knew how to hide.

Trier settled the other question instead, the one that comes up in every circle sooner or later. Whether it is possible to answer. Ursel Weber proved it was, and then the electorate hanged four hundred more people over the following four years and burned out every family within thirty miles of her, and the answer to the question turned out to be that it is possible and it costs everything.

European circles went dark after 1593 and have not come back up.

And the nine at Ashwick knew all of it. The Trier story crossed with them. Their grandmothers had told it. They did it anyway, in 1666, and the only difference between Ursel Weber and the nine at Ashwick is that the nine did not stay to be seen and never told a living soul.

Which is why there is a Society in Carlin and there is no circle left in Trier.

Strength

An out-of-character scale, so everyone pictures the same thing. Nobody in character talks in tiers. In the world they say she has something deep in her, or she has not got much, or that woman is not right to be near.

Strength covers three things and they rise together. How much she can put out before she is empty. How far it will reach and how many it will touch. How hard it pushes when something pushes back, which usually means another witch's ward or somebody who does not want to be swayed.

Tier One

Where most of the gifted stay. Small work, close in, and it empties her quickly.

• Salt a doorway so a room is not easily entered
• A fever that breaks by morning
• Close a shallow cut, stop a nosebleed, take the edge off a pain
• Cross a room unremarked
• Hold a door shut, light a candle from across the table, put a man off his balance

Cannot: touch more than one person at once, work on anyone out of sight, get through a ward set by anybody stronger.

Tier Two

Uncommon. Usually somebody taught properly, or somebody who has had reason to practise.

• Ward the ground floor of a house for a night
• Sicken a man badly enough to keep him abed a week
• Close a deep wound, break a real fever, set a bone true
• Walk through a full room and have nobody able to place her afterward
• Read violence off an object, meaning that it happened and not who did it
• Throw a grown man. Hold a door against two. Put fire in a hearth from across the room

Cannot: kill with a working, hold anything while asleep, break a Tier Three's ward without help.

Tier Three

Rare, and known about among the gifted even when nobody has met her. Others feel her come into a room.

• Ward a whole house and have it hold for weeks
• An illness that takes a month. Blight a field
• Pull a dying man back over several days, at the cost of everything she has
• A house that people do not think to walk up to
• Follow a name across the county, holding something of his
• Throw several men. Break a beam. Fire that gets away from her

Cannot: kill where a man stands, stop what is already in the air, reach anybody with nothing of theirs to hand.

Tier Four

A handful in America. They know of each other and none of them are pleased about it.

• A property line warded through a season
• Kill a man over an afternoon, in a way no physician alive would call anything but natural
• Bring somebody back from the edge in minutes
• Bring a house down
• Turn a crowd's direction, for a moment, and then it is a crowd again

Cannot: anything on the backstop list. The walls are further out at this tier. They are still there.

Condition

Tier is the ceiling. What she gets on a given day depends on the shape she is in.

Rested and steady, all of it. Sick, drunk, half starved, grieving, hurt, frightened, some fraction of it, and she will not find out how small until she is already working.

Fear is the worst of them. A woman who has been frightened since noon will have almost nothing at midnight, and everybody who has lived through one of these nights knows it.

Overdrawing

It goes in an order and it is always the same order.

Nosebleed. The edges of the vision go grey. Blood in the ears. Then she is on the floor. Past that she does not get up, and anybody who has been around the gifted long enough has watched it happen to somebody.

The tell

Working shows. The colour goes out of the eyes, washed pale, and the air in the room drops cold enough to see breath indoors. Both settle after a few minutes.

Neither can be faked, hidden, or explained away to somebody standing close, so nothing can be worked quietly in front of a person who is looking at you.

The Seven

Everything the gifted do falls under one of these. They are categories rather than lists, and you are expected to invent inside them.

WARD — Keeping out, keeping in, keeping quiet. Salt at a threshold, a sealed door, a room where voices do not carry past the wall. A ward sits in a place and cannot be carried. Break the line and it is finished.

BANE — Harm. Fever, rot, a rupture behind the eyes, a wound that will not close, milk soured and a field gone black. She has to be there, or holding something of his. Hair, blood, a shirt he has worn.

MEND — Knitting flesh, stopping blood, breaking a fever, setting a bone clean. Slow and hard. Nothing grows back that is gone and nothing comes back that is dead.

VEIL — Not seen, not noticed, not remembered right. A face that slides out of the mind an hour later. It does not survive being touched. Put a hand on her and she is standing there.

FIND — Scrying in water or glass, reading a thing's history off the object, following a name. Vague, and it lies about as often as it does not. Nobody sensible trusts a finder twice.

MOVE — Force. Throwing, holding, breaking, choking, fire without a flame, the air in a room gone still. The loud one. Everybody in the house knows something happened.

SWAY — Pushing on a mind. Calm somebody, dull them, turn them from a door, make a lie sit easy. It will not hold on the stubborn, it breaks the moment there is pain, and everybody comes back to themselves eventually.

Consent ruleSway used on someone else's character needs that writer's agreement first. Every time.

Channeling

Four ways to do more than she has in her.

Circle. Several gifted working as one, with somebody holding the shape. The only clean way to do anything large. If the one holding it loses her grip, everyone in the circle takes it.

Site. Split ledge, cold spring, old burying ground, the cellar hole of a house that burned with people in it. The ground gives more there, and she has to physically go.

Night. Storms, the turnings of the year, an eclipse. Anybody can count the days to those, including whoever has been watching her house.

Vessel. Work now, put it in silver or glass or bone, spend it later. Small amounts, nothing near what she could do live. It goes stale inside a few weeks and then it turns, and a turned vessel leaks into whatever room it is sitting in.

Ambient, and the Black

The world gives off energy without anybody doing anything. Death gives off the most. After that it is grief, massed feeling, and ground where something terrible happened that never settled.

She can work off it, and it costs her nothing of her own, which is the trouble. A woman who cannot hold enough on her own can stand in a burying ground at two in the morning and hold plenty.

Whatever it came from comes with it. Once and she would never notice. A year of it does not wash out.

There is no separate class of dark working. The phrase only ever meant working off something you did not pay for yourself.

Siphoners

Born gifted with nothing of their own to spend. They cannot work off themselves at all. They take what another witch or a vessel is holding, by skin contact, and it hurts both of them.

A siphoner alone in a room can do nothing whatsoever. Put one beside a working circle and they can empty it.

They can also drain a turned vessel without anybody getting hurt, which is why they are the ones sent for when something has gone wrong in a house.

Consent ruleSiphoning someone else's character needs that writer's agreement first. Every time.

The backstops

Making up a working

Tell us what it does, what it costs the body, and what it looks like to somebody watching from across the room.

If it sits under one of the Seven, obeys the backstops, and your character is in shape to carry it, it works.

Not raised, and not returned. Dying takes longer than people imagine, and theirs was interrupted partway through it.

The heart stops. That much is real, and anybody standing over the bed would have said so and been right. Then the body begins the long business of finishing, and the blood already in it will not permit that. What wakes is not somebody brought back from the dead. It is somebody who never got all the way there, and now never will.

The backstop holds for them the same as for anybody else. Being caught halfway out of dying is not the same as coming back from it. A vampire has no more access to the dead than a farmer does, and the oldest thing on this coast cannot ask a grave a question.

They do not age, and every practical difficulty they have comes out of that.

The word

Nocten is administrative. It is what the Court writes in the book, it has been the entry heading since 1671. It is poor Latin, out of the word for night, and the clerk who chose it had spent four years in a seminary before he was anything else. It describes a condition and accuses nobody of anything, which is what a register is for.

They use it about themselves because it is what they were entered as.

Vampire is what everybody else says and it is not a synonym.

That word has been in English since the last century and in every cheap periodical since Polidori. Varney ran for two years in penny numbers. Le Fanu's Carmilla is twenty three years old and has been reprinted four times. And in 1892 the Brown family at Exeter dug up a girl and burned her heart, and it was in every paper on this coast.

So the picture in the public mind is fixed and it is wrong in every particular. A corpse. A grave. Liquid blood in the heart. A coffin, a cape, foreign soil, Eastern Europe.

Which is the best thing that has happened to them in a century. A man who does not age, keeps daylight hours as far as anybody can tell, and has a respectable interest in shipping does not match any of it. He is not a vampire. He is simply a gentleman nobody can quite place.

The old ones will not use the other word at all. Several of them were alive when it stopped being an abstraction.

What they were

They have not always been eleven men hiding in a port.

Antiquity is guesswork and the Court does not encourage the subject. What survives is that the First made a small number directly, stopped, and has not been accounted for in six hundred years. Everything since is descent, and descent thins.

Their high point was the courts, and those lasted four centuries. From roughly 1200 the nocten of Europe organised around cities rather than countries, because a city has a wall, a market, a hospital and a great many people who will not be missed. Ghent, Lyon, Ragusa, Kraków, Naples. Each one a handful of old ones and a hundred years of quiet accumulation, and none of them ever ruled anything outright, because ruling means being looked at.

Prague was the one that overreached.

Rudolf the Second held his court there from 1583 and filled it with alchemists, astronomers, astrologers and men who claimed to speak with angels. He was genuinely credulous and enormously rich and he collected people the way other men collect plate. Four nocten were inside that court for twenty nine years. One of them had the ear of the Emperor and two of them ran his correspondence.

It was the closest the thing has ever come to open power in Europe, and it worked precisely as long as Rudolf did. He was deposed by his brother in 1611 and died the following year, and what came in behind was the Counter-Reformation and then the Thirty Years War, and the Prague court did not survive either.

Three of the four were taken in 1618. The fourth got as far as Lübeck.

Everything since has been the lesson from that. Le Guet in England had been the most boring order in Europe for two centuries and was regarded as provincial. After 1618 it was the model. No court, no patron, no proximity to anybody powerful enough to be worth watching. A list, a rule, and a great deal of paper.

And the colonies were the escape. Everyone who crossed between 1650 and 1750 crossed to get away from that, and what they built at Ashwick's expense was stricter than anything they had left.

The cycle

Twelve years in a place now, eight where there are records, then a death or a departure and a new name somewhere else. It used to be twenty. The old ones plan the exit before they unpack and complain constantly that it was easier before.

Carlin is easier than most places and it gets harder every year. Thirty eight thousand people and a working port means a man can spend six years on the Wharf without anybody on the Hill learning his face.

The trouble is the century. There is a city directory now, printed annually, with every householder's name and street. A census every ten years and a state census between. Passenger manifests, union books, insurance registers, the Board of Health's ledgers, and a police department taking Bertillon measurements since last year, which identify a man by the length of his bones and are the same at fifty as at twenty.

And there are photographs. Kodak put a camera in ordinary hands in 1888. Two studios on the Hill, one in the Yards. A face that has not changed is now a thing a person can hold in their palm and compare, and it has undone more of them in ten years than the previous two hundred managed.

The turning

Three things, in order, and the order cannot change.

One. Their blood in you. Fed, or slipped into a drink, or given as medicine. A vampire's blood heals a mortal, so a fair number of the people carrying it do not know they are. It stays in the system about a day.

Two. You die with it in you. Any death at all. A fever, a fall down the cellar stairs, a rifle, a rope, the horse that threw you. It does not have to be the vampire and it does not have to be intended.

Three. You wake up. Hours later, on a table or in a bed or where you fell. Not a vampire yet, and not a corpse either. Something caught between the two, still going down, only slower now.

Then you have until the next sundown. In transition they are cold and starving and everything is too loud, and they bleed from the gums. Blood finishes it. A mouthful will do, and then it is done and permanent.

Without it they die properly, and it is a bad death. Days of it in some cases, with nothing anybody can do but sit there.

The transition is not much of a choice. It is a cup in a cellar and four seconds of thinking by somebody terrified and in pain. Almost nobody refuses. The ones who do get remembered by name for a long time afterward.

Most turnings are accidents. Somebody is healed after a bad week and is thrown by a horse on the Tuesday. Nobody planned it and nobody wanted it, and now there is a new one loose in a township with an appetite it cannot govern and no idea what has happened.

Why blood

Blood is what the thing reaches through, and it has to keep reaching or the whole business comes apart.

Nothing gets made out of nothing. A vampire's life was never made for him, it is borrowed, and it has to keep being borrowed.

Blood is lifeforce and does not stop being lifeforce because the body it came out of is finished. Vein or vessel, an hour ago or last week, person or hog. It all works.

What varies is quality. Human is strongest. Animal is thin. Cold blood kept in a jar is thinner still and it feeds without satisfying, and a vampire living on it stays fed and goes brittle. Slower healing, a shorter temper, and something behind the eyes that other vampires pick out across a room.

Which makes it survivable here, and miserable. A town this size slaughters constantly. Every household keeps swine, the fishery guts on the flakes daily, and the slaughter yard runs through the autumn. Nobody has to die for a vampire to live in Coldharbour.

They know exactly what they are going without, and they go on knowing it.

Appetite

The longer it has held, the less it takes to hold it.

• New. Every day or two, and a great deal of it. Dangerous to be near, with no judgement about it.
• Made. Every few days. Arrangements can be made.
• Old. Once a fortnight and steady.
• Ancient. A drop. Not a figure of speech. A bead off a cut thumb will carry them weeks.

The danger runs backwards from what anybody would guess. The oldest are the ones nobody notices, and it is the new ones who exhaust a township's patience.

Age

Out-of-character scale. In character they say she is new, or he has been at it a while, or that one is old, and old means different things depending on who is saying it.

• New. Under ten years. Strong, fast, useless. Most of the ones who get caught are caught here.
• Made. Ten to fifty. Passing. A name, a trade, a place.
• Old. Fifty to a hundred and fifty. Has run the cycle three or four times and owns things.
• Ancient. Past that. They know of each other, which is not the same as knowing each other. The strength is frightening and it is not the reason people are careful around them. They are careful because these have watched all of it happen before and nothing surprises them.

Purity

Age is what a vampire has learned. Purity is what he was handed. Neither one moves.

• Pureblood. Sired by the first of them. Five are spoken of, three are certain, and there is a sixth.
• Nearblood. Sired by a pureblood, or close enough down the line that it still tells.
• Farblood. Everybody else. Generations out, the working worn thin from passing through too many hands. This is nearly all of them.

Purity sets the ceiling and age fills it. Two vampires of the same years and different blood are not comparable things, and no amount of practice closes the distance.

Siring degrades. Every step loses something, so a farblood makes something thinner than himself and its get thinner still. Some of the older families have stopped making anybody at all.

Vampires can tell. Walk into a room with something purer in it and it registers like a draft under a door. Mortals get nothing from it and neither do witches. It is a distinction that exists only among themselves.

The sixth

The first of them stopped siring a very long time ago. Every pureblood the order can name was made before he did, and the youngest of those five is somewhere north of five hundred years, so purity and age arrive together at the top.

Then he made one more.

It was around 1795 and it was the only time in four hundred years. Nobody has ever got a straight answer about why, and the people who might have asked him are not in a position to.

She was in Europe until the sixties. She has not been seen since, and the order stopped looking about twenty years ago. Most of the Court in Carlin assumes she is dead, and the ones who think otherwise do not say so at the table, because the alternative is that there is a pureblood loose somewhere who is younger than the men trying to find her.

A pureblood has everything an ancient has and three gifts on top of it. A drop carries him for weeks so nobody sees him feed. Nothing shows on his face whatever is bleeding in the room. He has run the cycle thirty times and knows exactly how it goes wrong.

Every tell that gives a vampire away is a young vampire's problem, which is why he is almost impossible to identify at all.

None of the five has ever crossed the Atlantic. That is what the Company holds to be true, and the Company would know, and it has been true every year anybody has bothered to check.

Abilities

Every vampire has these. Purity sets the size of the glass, age fills it, and all of it drops off when they are hungry.

Strength

• New. Puts a man through a plank door. Lifts the back of a loaded cart, badly, and drops it. Snaps a wrist without meaning to, which is how most of them find out.
• Made. Handles two or three men at once without coming away marked. Takes a door off its hinges cleanly.
• Old. Breaks a roof beam over a knee. Stops a horse at a canter by taking hold of it.
• Ancient. Takes an arm off at the shoulder without a blade. There is no practical limit worth writing, and the ones who have it are the least likely people alive to demonstrate it.

Speed

• New. Crosses a room before anybody registers movement, and cannot control it. Takes a table with him.
• Made. Has a man against the wall before his expression changes.
• Old. Outruns a horse over any distance. Gone from a doorway before the door finishes swinging.
• Ancient. Not there, then there. Everybody agrees on what happened and nobody saw it.

A levelled rifle with a finger on the trigger beats every tier but the last. Ancients see the decision before the hand moves and are across the room holding the wrist before the match falls.

Senses

Hearing. New, a conversation through a wall. Made, a heartbeat through a wall and the change in it when somebody lies. Old, every heart in a house at once and told apart. Ancient, one heart picked out of a crowd and followed.

Smell. Blood at fifty yards new, two hundred made. The old ones can smell how sick a person is and will know a consumptive weeks before there is a cough.

Sight. Full dark is dim at any tier and the old ones read a page by starlight. They track small things. A pulse in a throat, a hand that should not be shaking, the moment somebody decides to run.

Blood. Any of them tells a person from an animal, fresh from kept, and a vampire from a mortal by scent alone. Old ones recognise individuals. Ancients recognise a bloodline.

Healing

• New. A cut closes in seconds in front of whoever is watching and they cannot stop it. Broken bone in a night.
• Made. The same, faster, and they have learned to keep a glove on and a story ready.
• Old. A killing wound closes in under a minute. Up and walking inside the hour.
• Ancient. Very little sticks. Burned past recognition one night and whole the next, provided he has fed.

Nothing regrows. A hand taken off is gone, which is why the ones who have lost something are so easy to place.

Endurance

No sleep needed, though most keep the habit, since a man never seen to go to bed gets talked about. No food. They can eat and it comes back up an hour later. Cold does nothing, and neither does drowning, exhaustion, or poison.

Fangs and claws

Every vampire has them, whatever the blood. Not a gift, only what they are now.

Fangs come down on command and go back the same way. Claws come out of the nail bed and take a throat out as easily as a door panel.

Blood takes the choice away from the young. A cut in the room, a nosebleed, meat on a table, and it happens whether they want it or not. The eyes go first, whites flooding dark and the veins standing up beneath them, and then the fangs.

• New. Every time, and a full minute to settle. This is why they cannot sit at a table.
• Made. Only fresh blood, and they can hold it a few seconds and turn away.
• Old. Only a great deal of it, or if they are hungry.
• Ancient. Never, unless they want it.

Discipline moves that line. A young one who has spent five years practising with a cut on his own arm will hold it longer than a made vampire who never bothered. Some do the work and most do not, and other vampires read a man by it.

Animals know. Dogs go quiet or go mad, horses will not stand, cats leave the room. A farm dog that will not settle is the sort of thing a husbandman remembers later.

The gifts

Abilities come with the condition. Gifts are what survived the passage down, and how much survives depends on how many hands it came through.

Pureblood, three. Nearblood, two. Farblood, one.

Nobody chooses. They surface in the first decade, usually badly and at the worst moment, and they cannot be taught, traded, taken, or added to. They sharpen with age.

MIST — He goes to vapour. Nothing touches him and he touches nothing: no latches, no candles, nothing carried out with him. He cannot speak and cannot be spoken to, and he reassembles where he stopped rather than where he was going, which has cost people an arm.

He can hold together, roughly the size and shape of a man, or let go entirely and spread through a room. Dissipated he is in all of it at once and aware of all of it, and there is nothing in the room to point at. He can sit in the air of a room for as long as he can hold the gift and hear every word said in it. Coming back from that takes a great deal longer than coming back from the other, and he comes back where the most of him is.

It beats a trigger. It moves at a walking pace, so it does not beat a horse, a train, or a man who started running first. Thresholds and wards hold him out the same as they hold out anything. And it costs: minutes for a young one, an hour or so for an ancient, and nobody has ever crossed water in it.

SHADOW — Shadows do what he tells them. They come off the wall, take hold of a man, put him down, close over a mouth. Cold to be caught in, and it leaves no marks, so a death by it always gets written up as something else. He travels by them as well, stepping into one and out of another he can see. He needs real dark, and a lamp lit in the right place takes all of it off him.

BAT — He goes to a bat and he is gone. Out a window, over a treeline, across a county. His mind in an animal's body, with no speech. Clothes and whatever is in the pockets go with him and come back. Common in purebloods and rare below.

SHAPESHIFTING — He wears other people. The face, the hands, the voice, the way a man favours his left knee. It takes watching: an hour buys a likeness that works across a street, a week buys something that holds up in a lit room, and a face he can wear indefinitely is somebody he has studied for months. He gets none of what they know, so he can be the ferryman and cannot answer a question the ferryman could. Holding a face costs him and the cost runs all day.

Another nocten can smell it, and that is the only thing that gives it away. Not across a room and not in passing. He has to be close, and paying attention, and have some reason to be. One who is not looking walks straight past a face he has known for forty years. One who suspects and gets near enough knows inside a sentence, and there is nothing to be done about it once he does.

COMPULSION — Eyes and voice. Hold the gaze, speak, and they do it or believe it or forget it and invent their own reason afterward. It scales hard with age. A new one takes an hour off somebody and takes the wrong hour. An ancient hands a man a version of his own life that he will pass to his grandchildren.

DREAMWALK — He reaches a sleeping mind, which is the only thing here that gets around needing eyes and voice. Anyone who has it is watched. It works at distance provided he has been in a room with them once. It does not touch the gifted.

BLOODREAD — A mouthful and he has some of their memory. Flashes, faces, the last few days, whatever was loudest in them. It works on kept blood as well.

SUNWALK — Daylight does nothing to him. It has only ever appeared in purebloods, and it is the reason they are feared rather than resented, there being no answer to something that can come at two in the afternoon.

Limits on compulsion

• He has to see them and hear them. Nothing through a wall, a window, a letter, or a likeness.
• It does not touch the gifted. A witch feels it come and feels it slide off and knows exactly what was tried on her.
• A witch can charm somebody else against it. Silver or glass or bone, carried on the body.
• Real pain breaks it at once.
• Nobody can be compelled into something they would never do. Forget the evening, yes. Open the door, walk away, do not look. Kill for him, no.
• It runs downhill on blood only. Pure over near, near over far, never level and never up.
• It leaves a hole. The person knows time went missing, and enough holes and they start asking.

Consent ruleCompulsion on someone else's character needs that writer's agreement first. Every time.

Rules on gifts

They are not workings. No words, no preparation, no components, only something the body does.

They cost blood, so a night spent misting or wearing somebody else's face leaves him hungry by morning. They do not combine, and two gifts are two gifts. None of them beat a ward, a threshold, or an invitation.

And no wolf. Whatever a shapeshifter can wear, it is not that.

What stops them

The sun. It burns and it does not heal until they are out of it. A new one cannot cross a yard at noon. An old one manages an overcast afternoon in a hat and a heavy coat and is unpleasant about it afterward.

Thresholds. A dwelling has to be entered with the permission of somebody who lives there. Not a formula, a real invitation, and the house knows the difference. Businesses, public buildings and empty houses are open.

A bullet to the brain puts one down for minutes or an hour depending on age and how recently he fed. Then he gets up, and he knows who did it.

Desiccation

The important thing about a nocten is that they are extremely difficult to destroy and extremely easy to store.

Take the blood away and they dry. Grey, thin, and eventually unable to move, and then they stop. It is not suffering and it is not awareness. It is sleep, and it is dreamless for almost all of them, and a nocten brought out of it after sixty years will tell you it felt like a long afternoon.

A stake through the heart holds them there. It does not kill. It stops the heart from working, which stops the blood moving, which drops them into the same state within about a minute. Pull the stake and they come back over hours if there is blood to hand and over weeks if there is not.

This is why nobody keeps prisoners. There is no cell in the world as good as a length of white oak, and the Court keeps several under the ropewalk.

Some ancients dream through it. Not all and not reliably, and only ones past about three hundred. Those that do can reach a sleeping mind the way the waking gift does, and there are two documented instances of a staked nocten holding a conversation with somebody standing over the body. Both of the people it happened to went mad afterward, which the Court regards as an argument for keeping the dark under the ropewalk locked.

Killing one

There are two methods that work and everything else is delay.

Remove the heart. Not pierce it, remove it. It is the one organ that will not regrow, and without it there is nothing for the blood to be moved by. Difficult, close, and it requires getting a hand inside the ribs of something that is actively objecting.

Remove the head. Reliable, and it gets harder every century they live.

Because the bone thickens. Whatever is running in them keeps repairing bone it does not need to repair, and after two hundred years or so the density is noticeably wrong, and after four hundred it is a different material. A new one goes like anybody. An ancient takes an axe, a plan, and somebody holding the shoulders.

A pureblood is nearly impossible. They were made directly and the effect is correspondingly worse, and there is no reliable account of a pureblood being decapitated by one person. It has been done. It took a machine, or a fall, or seven men.

Fire and decapitation together is what is actually used. Burn until it cannot resist and then take the head. This is the standard method and has been for four centuries.

And for a pureblood, decapitation is the only method anybody has ever confirmed works. Fire will not finish one. Starvation will not. Nothing else has ever been shown to.

Silver

The one thing they cannot heal.

A silver wound closes slowly if at all and scars where nothing else scars. A silver bullet to the head kills most nocten outright, and this is what hunters carry, and it is the entire reason a family of farmers has been able to kill things four hundred years older than themselves.

Purebloods resist it. Not immunity. It hurts them and it slows them and it does not stop them, and a hunter who put silver into a pureblood's head would get a very angry pureblood.

The Court holds that it is the same thing as the bone. Whatever the First did he did to them directly, and a pureblood is made out of better material all the way down.

How they get caught

Not by anyone knowing what they are. The nearest thing the town has is the restless dead, and that story is about corpses coming out of graves, which is not what these are.

A vampire gets caught the way a witch does. He is resented, or owed money, or standing too near a household where something has gone wrong, and somebody says a name to the magistrate. Then the searching begins, and searchings find things.

There is no statute to charge him under and has not been for two centuries, so what he gets is what she gets. A commitment on two certificates, a fraud prosecution if money changed hands, or a crowd, depending entirely on which ward he was standing in.

Vampires and the Gift

A gifted person who turns loses it, completely and permanently.

The two will not sit in one body. What a vampire carries is a working that is still running, and it is sitting where the Gift would sit.

So there are no vampire witches and there never have been. A dying witch offered the change has to decide which of the two she would rather be.

Their blood heals a mortal. A wound, a fever, anything short of dying. It works for about a day and then it is out. It will not bring anybody back.

Living people. They eat, they age, they get old, they die. A lycan of seventy is an old man with bad knees who used to be something on a full moon.

They cannot turn anybody. There is no bite that spreads it, no exchange, no ritual, and nothing a person could agree to. It comes down through birth and there has never been another way in.

For a thousand years that made them relatives rather than a society, and every family kept its own moons alone. That is no longer how most of them live. See Packs, below.

Where it came from

A coven did it to a coven, and both of them have been dust for eight hundred years.

The curse was laid somewhere in the Rhineland around the year 1050. That is as close as anybody gets. What is agreed is that it was done by one circle to another, that it was meant to be permanent, and that whatever the offence was it was serious enough that nine women spent themselves entirely to answer it. None of the nine survived the working. That detail is in every version and nobody knows what to do with it.

Which is why every lycan line was a witch line first. The Gift thinned out of those families generations ago. The curse did not thin out of anything.

What happened to them

Europe hunted them for four hundred years and was extremely good at it.

Most of it was done in the German lands. Peter Stubbe was broken on the wheel at Bedburg in 1589 and the pamphlet went through six printings in three countries, and after that every magistrate between the Rhine and the Baltic knew the shape of the accusation. France tried Jean Grenier at Bordeaux in 1603 and the court decided he was mad rather than cursed, which was the first time anybody had, and it saved his life and nobody else's.

By 1650 there was almost nothing left east of the Rhine. The families that survived did it by scattering, marrying out and losing the thread deliberately, and a great many of them lost it so thoroughly that their descendants woke at sixteen with no idea what was happening.

The Atlantic looked like an answer. Between 1630 and 1720 perhaps forty households crossed, most of them not knowing there were others doing the same. They took hill country because it was cheap and empty and nobody watched it.

For thirty six years it was the best decision any of them had ever made.

Then Ashwick.

Gévaudan

Worth knowing because everybody has heard of it and nobody understands it.

Something killed somewhere over a hundred people in the Margeride mountains between 1764 and 1767. The King sent professional wolf hunters, then dragoons, then his own gun-bearer. It was reported across Europe and it is in every popular history of superstition printed since.

It was not one of ours and the packs are extremely tired of being asked. What it actually was is not settled and never has been. What matters here is what it did: it put the word back into every newspaper in Europe eighty years after the trials had stopped, and the American families felt it within a year.

Two of the four hunter books in Coldharbour begin in 1765.

The blood

It holds a line but it does not take everybody in it, and there is no accounting for who.

Every child of a lycan carries it, as does every child of a carrier, whether or not that carrier ever woke. It does not wash out and it does not weaken with distance. It lies quiet in most of them for a lifetime and comes up two generations later in somebody nobody was watching.

Most people carrying it never turn. A family can go sixty years without one and then have two in the same decade.

Nobody can tell in advance. Not the family, not a physician, not a witch. There is nothing in a child's birth and nothing in the years leading up to it.

The families have their superstitions anyway. The seventh child. A birth in a bad winter. Whichever grandmother the child takes after. None of it survives examination and all of it gets repeated.

What that means for a family

A woman who woke at sixteen has four children and knows all four carry it. She knows most of them will be fine. She does not know which ones, and she has sixteen years apiece to sit with that.

A family quiet for three generations keeps the cellar regardless. The chain gets checked and the bar replaced, and the reason is handed down along with the story, because going quiet has never been the same thing as being finished.

What it means for the hunt

A township that learns there is wolf in a family has learned almost nothing useful.

They can burn every one of them out and most of the people they kill were never going to turn. That has happened, in England and in the German lands, and the story is carried around wherever these families settle. It is why they do not close ranks the way a town expects. When it goes bad they scatter. They take different names, they marry out, and they let the connection thin until nobody can draw the line at all.

It works. The thing does not care about surnames, and a family split across four townships cannot be finished in a night.

It also means nobody is ever safe by association. A man whose grandfather was quiet and whose father was quiet is exactly as likely to have a son who wakes as anybody else in the line.

The sixteenth year

If it is going to take, it takes on the first full moon after the sixteenth birthday. That night or never.

The families that know hold a vigil, and most of those vigils are for nothing.

The date is worked out years ahead. Somebody comes in from out of the township. The cellar is swept and the chain checked, the younger children go to a neighbour and are told it is something else, and then everybody sits and watches the child and waits for moonrise.

Most of the time nothing happens. The child sits there through the night wondering what is supposed to be wrong with him, and at dawn somebody starts crying and he still does not entirely understand why. Then he goes back to whatever he was going to be. He still carries it, and his children will still have to be watched.

Sometimes it takes, and everybody in the room finds out at the same moment, the child included.

How much a child is told beforehand is the argument every family has. Some tell them early, and those children grow up steady and strange and old for their age, and spend six years certain it will be them. Some say nothing until the week before and let them have a childhood instead.

Not all of them survive it. A sixteen year old body does not always come through a first shift, and every family that keeps a cellar can name a cousin.

The moon

Full moon, moonrise to dawn, every month, wherever they are and whatever else is happening. A wedding, a burial, a sickbed, a ship.

Anybody can count to it, and it shapes everything else about how they live. They know the date. Their family knows the date. So does anyone who has watched the house long enough to notice that the same man is unwell on the same night every month.

Clouds do not help. Cellars do not help. Being indoors does not help. The only thing that helps is being somewhere he cannot get out of.

The two forms

The beast

The bipedal one, and what the moon does to them.

Something between a wolf and a man and worse than either. It stands upright and stands badly, running low and forward, too much length in the arm and the wrong number of joints in places nobody can account for afterward. Seven feet when it straightens, which it mostly does not.

It has hands. That is the part people do not expect and the part that gets them killed. It works a latch. It pulls a door off. It goes over a fence rather than through it.

Nobody is driving. No plan, no restraint, no recognition, no wife and no name. It goes through a wall to reach what is on the other side, it does not tire, and pain will not slow it.

And they are in there the whole while. Shut out of the steering, not out of the seat. They come back with all of it, in pieces, which is the part people who have never carried it fail to understand.

Two minutes to come on. Bone first, every joint out and back. They scream through the early part and stop when the throat changes, and anybody who has heard it once will do a great deal not to hear it twice. Somebody sits outside that door until dawn. In a pack it is whoever is on the list for that month. In a family on its own it is whoever loves them most, because everybody else refuses.

They come back naked and filthy and shaking, into whatever they did or did not do.

The wolf

The four legged one, and a different thing altogether.

An enormous animal and nothing more than that. Bigger than any dog anybody has ever seen, which is the whole of the problem and the whole of the protection.

They are in there. The man is present, thinking, deciding, able to stop. He cannot speak and cannot use a hand, and most of what reaches him comes through a nose rather than a pair of eyes, but he is himself throughout.

It has nothing to do with the moon. It is done deliberately, when he wants it, awake and in control from beginning to end. About ten minutes to shift, and it hurts less than the beast by a smaller margin than anyone would like.

Why they are different

The thing in them was made to punish, and a punishment does not come with a door in it.

The beast is that working as intended. Twelve nights a year, no consent, no memory of choosing, and the person shut out of his own body while it goes and does whatever it does.

The wolf is not part of it at all. It is what a person can make of the thing living in him, once he has carried it long enough to stop being only its passenger. It is learned rather than given. The beast happens to you. The wolf is yours.

Nobody can do it until the wolf has been in them a good while, and most never can. It also does not excuse them from the moon.

Turning at will

Almost none of them ever manage it.

Most lycans, their whole lives. Twelve nights a year and nothing else. They wake at sixteen and go in the cellar every month for fifty years, and there is nothing else to it.

After twenty years or so. Somebody working at it deliberately might get the wolf once, badly, and be laid out for a day afterward. Most who reach this point stop trying, and some are frightened by what it means.

After forty. A lycan who has kept at it can go four legged when he wants and come back when he wants, at the cost of a hard sleep and a day of feeling wrung out.

Past that. A few, very old and very disciplined, holding the wolf a night at a time and running a county in it.

Nobody takes the beast on purpose. It has never been done, and the ones who have tried hardest are the most certain it cannot be.

Partial

The small work, and the most common thing a lycan can actually do.

Eyes first, and not voluntary at the start. Anger, fear, pain, blood, and the colour goes gold and stays that way until he gets himself back. Young ones cannot stop it, in the same way and for the same reason that a young vampire cannot stop his fangs, a comparison neither species enjoys.

Teeth after that, and claws with practice. Either one is a thing a lycan in a fight might do without meaning to and then have to explain.

The strong ones hold a partial deliberately. Claws and nothing else, or eyes and teeth and a voice gone wrong, and staying themselves through all of it. It ends most fights and it is the nearest thing to a weapon they have that they can aim.

It never goes further than that. Nobody has held a half shift. It is a hand or it is the whole beast.

In skin

The thing is in there all the time and some of it shows.

Strength. More than a man that size ought to have. They lose at the wrestling on purpose and have all learned not to grip a hand too hard.

Speed and endurance. They run all day. A lycan can walk a route that would take a horse and arrive ahead of it.

Senses. Smell mostly, and specific. Who has been in a room. A lie by the sweat on it. A vampire from across a lane, which they hate, and the reverse holds too.

Healing. Fast without being instant. A cut in a day, a broken arm in a week. They set their own bones, physicians being inclined to ask questions.

No sickness. Not a cold, not a fever, not consumption. In a township that buried nineteen last summer, a house where nobody has ever coughed is not a blessing. It gets noticed, then talked about, then decided about.

Animals go flat around them. Dogs lie down and will not get up. Horses stand very still. It resembles obedience without being obedience.

What the forms give

In the beast. Everything at once and none of it governed. Through a door, through a wall, through a man. Faster than a horse over open ground. Nothing it has ever been hit with has stopped it except silver.

In the wolf. Strong for an animal and no more, which makes a determined group of men with rifles a real problem. What it has instead is the nose, the ground it can cover, and a man doing the thinking the whole way.

The bite only counts in the beast. That is the form that kills vampires. The wolf bites like a large dog and a vampire heals it by morning.

There are no wolves left

Massachusetts paid bounties until there was nothing left to pay them on. The last wolf in the eastern part of the state was killed sometime in the forties and nobody has seen one since. The nearest living wolf to Carlin is in northern Maine or over the Canadian line, and every farmer in the county knows it.

So a wolf in the interior is not a wolf. It is an impossibility, and impossibilities get printed.

What people see instead is a dog. An enormous one, the size of a calf, but a dog, because that is the only thing available for them to see.

The cover holds better than it deserves to. Stray and feral dogs are a real problem in rural Essex County. They kill sheep every year, damages come out of the dog licence fund, and a farmer who loses stock files with the town clerk and is paid without anybody investigating anything.

A lycan running four legged is therefore committing an ordinary crime in an ordinary landscape. Farmers shoot dogs on sight for it.

Where it fails

Close up, in daylight, to somebody who knows animals. A man who has been around dogs his whole life looks at one of these, understands he is not looking at a dog, cannot say why, and goes home unsettled.

And the Evening Star will print anything. A farmer who says wolf gets two inches on page four under a joke headline, and it is on the Boston train by seven, and that is how a thing stops being local.

Which form is safer

Not the one anybody would guess.

The wolf can be explained. A big dog is a nuisance and a claim form. The beast cannot be explained by anything at all. Seven feet, upright, hands, and a door off its hinges from the inside.

And the word exists

Everybody knows it. Werewolf is old English and always was, the German trials are in every popular history of superstition, and Gevaudan is in the cheap encyclopaedias.

Which cuts the other way. A man who says werewolf in 1895 Massachusetts is not believed. He is diagnosed. Clinical lycanthropy is a recognised entry in the psychiatric literature, and a man who tells a physician in Carlin that he becomes a wolf is at the state hospital by evening on two certificates.

The asylum is what the city uses instead of a rope, and it is not gentler.

What stops them

Silver. It burns going in and the wound does not close. A silver bullet out of a rifle kills a lycan about as reliably as it kills a man, and nothing else does reliably. Enough families have known this for enough generations that there are four houses in the interior with a box of hand loaded silver cartridges in a drawer, and the sons get told what they are for at about sixteen.

Anything that would kill a man, if it is enough and it is fast. They heal well. They do not heal from a head taken off or from being burned in a barn.

Wolfsbane makes them ill. Weak, sweating, unable to shift cleanly. It will not kill them. It is what a family uses when there is no cellar and no chain and the moon is tonight.

A door and a chain. Not a weakness so much as the whole practice.

The bite

In the beast, their bite kills vampires.

It goes in like an infection and takes about a week, and the vampire heals every other wound he takes that week and not that one. Near the end it gets into the head. They see things that are not there and talk to people who are not in the room, and then it is over.

Nobody has found a cure. The Company has had two of its number working on it since 1664 and has nothing to show for it, which is the only subject on which it has ever voted unanimously.

And nobody can aim it. A beast takes no orders and knows nobody, so this is not a weapon lycans have. It is an accident that could happen on any full moon in any township, and any vampire who has worked out what lives in Bray Hollow leaves the district for the three nights around a full moon.

The tells

The date. The one that catches them. Unwell on the same night every month, twelve months a year, for thirty years, until somebody counts.

The eyes. Gold, in a quarrel or a fright or any bad moment, and a young one cannot stop it. This is the tell that goes off in daylight, in front of people who were not looking for anything.

The scars. Years of chains leave wrists and ankles that do not look like anything else, and lycans do not go about with their sleeves up.

The health. No sickness in a sick township.

The morning after. Torn ground, a door off its hinges from the inside, stock dead and not eaten, and a man seen walking home at dawn without a coat.

Packs

Most lycans belong to one. A few do not, and those are the ones the rest worry about.

A pack is people who keep each other's moons. That means somewhere to be locked in, somebody sober outside the door, and enough hands afterward to find whatever was let out before the township does. One family cannot reliably do all three. Two or three working together can, which is why packs exist at all.

They are led. There is an alpha, the word is not used, and the arrangement is not a debate. Somebody makes the call about where everybody goes on the fourteenth, who sits which door, and what happens if a door fails. Packs that tried to do it by agreement stopped existing.

Rank comes out of who can hold the wolf. An older lycan who can take the four legged form at will and come back from it is worth more to a pack than three young ones who cannot, and everybody in the pack knows it without anyone saying so. It is not strength in the fighting sense. It is who can be relied on to still be themselves at two in the morning.

Below that it is jobs, not ranks. Who keeps the ground. Who deals with the farmer whose ewes were killed. Who talks to the constable. Who is quiet enough to sit outside a door for nine hours and not open it.

And a pack is not all lycans. Wives, brothers, a neighbour who worked it out in 1641 and never said. They keep the doors, cover the stock, lie when it is required. A pack without them does not last a decade.

Where they go

Most packs keep a place. A stone outbuilding on ground nobody walks, a pit dug with a grate over it, a cellar under a barn well away from a road. It is built before it is needed and maintained like a roof, and where the pack has money it is better than the house.

The barred root cellar under a family's own kitchen is the poor version. It happens, and it happens in the Hollow more than anywhere, and it is what you do when there is nobody else and no money and the moon is tonight. It works until it does not.

What is owed

Sitting a door costs somebody a night, every month, for as long as they can stand it. Packs settle that in different ways. Labour at harvest, a share of stock, silence about something else entirely, a marriage that suited two families at once.

None of it is written down anywhere and everybody in the pack could tell you the figure to the dollar.

If it fails

The pack goes out at first light and finds it before the township does. Stock gets paid for quietly through somebody who has no connection to anybody.

If it was a person, the pack decides, and there is no good answer and no procedure. Packs have broken over one night.

The rule about children

The one nobody says out loud. Do not have any.

Nobody can enforce it and most people do not keep it. What it amounts to is a gamble every couple in the line makes privately and then lives with.

The odds are not bad. Most children never wake, and a family can tell itself honestly that the chances are on its side. But the arithmetic runs the other way over enough generations, and everybody knows somebody who took the bet and lost.

The argument is not really about odds. It is about whether the line should go on at all. There are people in the Hollow who have decided it should not and are quietly furious at the ones who decided otherwise. It has split families and ended two marriages that people still talk about.

The Harrow and the Deadfall

Two packs, both of them outside the city, because no lycan has been permitted inside the bounds of Carlin since 1671.

The Harrow

Households out past the old wolf pits, and the largest thing of its kind in the colony. They have no name for themselves. The Harrow is what other people call them, after the woods, and they gave up correcting it a long time ago.

Aldous Rowe leads it and has for nine years. He is fifty one, woke at sixteen, and can hold the four legged form a full night, which about five people in New England can do. He did not want the job and has tried twice to hand it over. Both times the pack declined to accept.

Under him it runs on people rather than titles. Bess Rowe, his sister-in-law, who is not a lycan and has sat doors since 1649, decides who sits which. Amos Pryor, who woke in 1660 and is the fastest of them, handles the ground and the clearing up. Old Halloway, who is quiet, has never woken in his life, and walks into a Salem tavern on the night of a full moon so that forty people can see him there.

What they actually do about the nocten is quieter than anybody expects. They keep a count. They know which households in three townships have somebody in them who has not aged, roughly when he turned up and under what name. Then they make a place uncomfortable. A lease that does not get renewed. Something true said to a constable at a useful hour. A rumour started at the right well by somebody who has lived there since birth and is believed. Nocten move on rather than sit through it and it costs nobody anything.

Twice it has been the other thing. Both on a full moon, both times they put a beast where a nocten was going to be and stood back. The first cost them a man called Ames. Nobody in the Harrow discusses the second, including with each other.

The Deadfall

Deep in the woods, and they came out of a family the Harrow turned away in 1661.

Judith Nott leads and there is no ambiguity about it. She is thirty eight, woke at sixteen, and took the pack off her uncle in 1663. She put him on the ground in front of all of them and then sat his door herself that night, which is the part people remember. She thinks the Harrow is a debating society keeping a tally while the count goes up.

The Deadfall does not watch and it does not apply pressure. Its position is that a nocten in the county is a nocten to be dealt with, and it has dealt with several since 1663. It has lost people doing it, which Judith counts as an acceptable rate and which the Harrow counts as the whole argument.

They are smaller, poorer, and further out. They also do not have a single member who cannot hold a partial under pressure, which the Harrow cannot say.

Between them

The Harrow has cleaned up after the Deadfall twice, once at real cost, and has never been thanked for it.

Both packs know exactly where the other's ground is. Neither has ever used that.

Most lycan households in Coldharbour belong to one or the other and a few belong to neither, keeping their own moons in their own cellar the way it was done for a thousand years before anybody thought to organise. Those families think both packs are a way of dying together instead of one at a time, and they are not obviously wrong.

Lycans and the Gift

They can coexist. It is rare, and it is a hard life.

The wolf is not a working sitting where the Gift sits. It is a second thing living in the same body, so there is room for both in a way there never was for a vampire.

The cost is the days around the moon. Three days out from a full moon a lycan witch cannot work at all, and everybody who deals with her knows the calendar and arranges around it. She is the most useful woman in the district for twenty seven days and no use for three.

Why a shapeshifter cannot wear one

The wolf is not a shape. It is a second thing living in a man, and a shapeshifter copies shapes.

A pureblood who has watched a lycan for a month can wear that man's face perfectly, walk into his mother's kitchen, and be believed. He cannot become the beast, there not being one in him, and no version of that gift has ever put one there.

Several have tried it over the years. One of them tried twice.

Coldharbour is a region, not a village square, and most of it lies outside the bounds. Channels marked i and ii are doubled, so two scenes can run in the same place without treading on each other.

What you can be

Open. Ordinary people. Farblood nocten. Lycans. The Gift at Tier One or Two.

By petition. Nearblood. Tier Three. Hunters.

Restricted. Tier Four at launch. Pureblood is closed and staying closed. There are five the order can name and a sixth it lost track of, and that sixth is spoken for.

Tiers move. Start at One and get to Three by playing, with staff approval. That is the intended route and it makes a better character than starting at the top.

Before you write anything

Read these three, in order, properly.

The Region and Coldharbour. Where you are, what has happened here, and who the two men in charge are.

Your species page. Including if you are writing an ordinary person, since you need to know what you live beside.

This page, to the end.

A character built without the lore falls apart in the second week, when they need to know why they cannot simply leave town, or why the magistrate matters more than the minister, or what happens to their hands when they work.

Standing

What to write

Ordinary people are the heart of this and the strongest roles available.

Not a consolation prize. The magistrate decides whether a complaint becomes a warrant. The midwife is in every house at the worst hour. The minister's wife hears everything. A man owed money by a family he has begun to suspect is the most dangerous person in Carlin and he cannot do a single unnatural thing.

The gifted are hunted because ordinary people hunt them. Without a full town there is nothing to hide from and nobody to hide it from.

You will be in the plot. Not adjacent to it. The accusations, the debts, the mill, the machine, the ward that is about to have votes and the ward that is about to lose them. That is the plot and it runs on ordinary people. A witch is not more central to this story than the woman who decides whether to repeat what she saw.

You do not have to live in town

Take ground in Northfield and farm well and be resented for it. Work a hard holding in Bray Hollow and owe money to people who sit in the same church. Fish out of the Neck and be gone for days and be regarded, by everyone, as not quite one of them. Cut timber and burn charcoal at the edge of Harrow Woods, which is the only trade that puts a person where nobody can see them and gives them a reason to be there.

Keep the ferry. Keep the ordinary. Run a physic garden. Teach a dame school. Mind the beacon. Keep the mill, which means every household in the district owes you and resents you in the same breath.

A character living two miles out with a reason to come into town twice a week is often better placed than one who lives on the green, because they can be somewhere unobserved and still be present when it matters.

Trades worth taking

In the bounds. Smith, cooper, joiner, weaver, cordwainer, tanner, baker, ordinary keeper, constable, town clerk.

On the water. Fisherman, shipwright, ropemaker, ferryman, pilot, sailmaker.

On the land. Husbandman, dairywoman, shepherd, miller, charcoal burner, woodcutter, quarryman.

In houses. Midwife, herbwife, dame school mistress, seamstress, laundress, servant, hired man.

That last group is worth a second look. A midwife and a servant go into houses nobody else enters, at hours nobody else keeps, and both of them hear everything. Neither has any standing at all, which cuts both ways.

The application

Name. Period appropriate, and it matters more than people expect. Yankee New England used scripture heavily. Men: John, Samuel, Thomas, Josiah, Ezekiel, Nathaniel, Increase, Eleazer. Women: Mary, Sarah, Hannah, Abigail, Rebecca, Deliverance, Remember.

Virtue names are real and were given to girls: Patience, Mercy, Prudence, Thankful, Silence, Comfort, Temperance.

Surnames come from the twelve families or from period English. Nothing invented, nothing mythic, nothing with an apostrophe in it.

Age. Anyone over forty came from England and remembers it. Anyone under twenty was born here and has never seen it. Which side of that line you fall on is a character trait on its own.

District. Northfield, Bray Hollow, the Neck, or within the bounds. This decides how much benefit of the doubt you receive when something goes wrong, and it is the most consequential choice on the form.

Family. One of the twelve, married into one, or unattached. Unattached is available and hard, and it should be, since a person with no local kin is already halfway to being a suspect.

Church. Congregational, Episcopal, Catholic, or none. In Carlin this is not really about God. Congregational is the Hill and the old families. Episcopal is the Hill families who wanted something less austere and got it in 1871. Catholic is the Yards and the Warrens and is the single largest congregation in the city. None is a position and people will treat it as one.

Trade. What you do all day. Nobody here is idle.

Literacy. Most men could read to some degree, since the purpose of literacy was scripture. Far fewer could write, and women's literacy was much lower. Writing a letter is a real advantage. Being unable to sign your name is ordinary.

History. Where you came from, when, and why.

Two things they want and one they conceal. Everyone has the third and it need not be supernatural. Debt, a child nobody acknowledges, a name changed at the customs house, a grudge that goes back to the auction of 1778.

Supernatural applications also give what you are, how long it has been true, what you can specifically do, and who in the cast knows or suspects.

Conduct

Consent, absolute. Sway, Compulsion, and Siphoning used on someone else's character require that writer's agreement first. Every time. No assuming, no retroactive asking.

Mob violence against another writer's character is agreed before the scene starts. Being accused is fair and it is the setting working as intended. Being killed is not a decision another writer makes for you.

Nothing crosses from out of character to in. What you have read in these pages, your character has not.

Write your own character only. Your reply covers your action and stops. You do not narrate someone else's reaction, injury, or failure.

Losing is the good part. A character who never fails, never gets caught, and never pays for anything is not a character. The best scenes here will be the ones where somebody's plan does not work.

Match your partner's length. More words is not better writing.

Voice

The thing that breaks a scene here is not a lore error. It is modern voice.

Your character has no modern psychology. No trauma, anxiety, processing, boundaries, or closure. They have grief, melancholy, a heaviness, an affliction. They ask what they did to deserve it, because that is how a Yankee reads misfortune.

Nobody says okay. The word does not exist yet. Nor does hi, yeah, sure, or fine.

Providence explains everything. Good harvest, dead child, ship lost, fever broken. It is God's hand and it carries meaning, and Carlin spends its life reading those meanings.

Women. A married woman cannot own property, sign a contract, or testify freely. Widows can, which makes widows both powerful and suspect. Every witch executed in this colony has been a woman, and most were poor, sharp tongued, or inconveniently independent.

Attendance is compulsory and monitored. Missing it is an offence. Seating is assigned by rank and being moved back a row is a public humiliation.

You cannot simply leave. Travel is noticed. Arriving anywhere without kin or a letter makes you a suspect there instead.

Money. Dollars and cents, and a mill hand makes about nine dollars a week working sixty hours. A skilled machinist twice that. Rent in the Warrens runs two dollars a week for rooms the Board of Health has condemned. Nobody in the Yards or the Warrens has savings, everybody has credit at a shop, and the shop is often owned by the man who owns the tenement.

No anachronism. No matches, no handshakes in greeting, no waving, no clocks in ordinary houses, no privacy as a concept.

What your character believes

Witchcraft is real and everyone knows it. It is in scripture, in the statute, and it was proved in a Boston court within living memory. Believing in it is not superstition here, only being informed.

Everyone practises folk protection and nobody considers it magic. A horseshoe over the door. A bottle of pins and hair beneath the threshold. Marks scratched near the chimney. The minister calls it popish nonsense and every household does it regardless.

Everybody has a word for vampire and it is the wrong one. Exeter was three years ago and it was in every paper, so the picture in the public mind is a corpse in a grave with liquid blood in its heart. A pale man keeping odd hours is consumptive, or neurasthenic, or foreign.

There have been no wolves in eastern Massachusetts since the forties. Anything large in a field at night is a stray dog, and the state pays damages out of the licence fund.

The Examination

Refusals

• Blank or minimal answers
• No local ties, no trade, and no reason to be here
• Modern voice throughout the writing sample
• A restricted slot requested on a first application
• A concept that only works if the character is the most powerful or most important person in town
• Backstory that contradicts the timeline

Refusals come with notes. Reapply when you have them.

Once you are accepted

Claim your district and family in the claims channel, then introduce your character with name, trade and standing.

Before your first scene, find one other character and establish something between them. A debt, a marriage, a grudge, a shared winter. Coldharbour has stood thirty six years and there are no strangers in it.

How it runs

Something is always running. No dead season, no waiting on a mod to be in the mood. A larger arc runs at all times and when it ends the next has already started underneath it.

Everyone gets a way in. An arc that only works for the hidden is a bad arc and gets rewritten. If one has been running a fortnight and your character has not been touched by it, say so. That is our fault, not yours.

Releases come through story. New lore, new powers and new ground arrive inside events rather than announcements.

You may be approached. If a part suits your character we will ask privately. It is an offer and never an obligation, and turning it down costs nothing.

The standing condition

Carlin has held its silence for two hundred and twenty nine years through two things, and both of them are showing their age.

The Society decides who can start a proceeding. A commitment needs two physicians. A prosecution needs a complaint sworn. An exhumation needs the Board of Health. There has been a Dorcas woman standing in every one of those doors since before the war.

The Court removes its own before the city has to. Four rules, one sentence, and there are several staked and asleep under the ropewalk, the oldest of them since the Revolution.

What neither of them controls is a newspaper printing eleven thousand copies a day that goes to Boston on the seven o'clock train.

Running now

Coming

Sketched, not spoiled.

The strike. The spinners lost in 1891 and have not moved since. The mill cut piece rates again in June. Everybody in the Yards can feel it and nobody will name a date.

The naturalisations. Perhaps eight hundred men in the Warrens will have votes within four years. The Yards machine has worked out that this is a threat rather than an alliance and has begun acting like it.

The ledge. The quarry company has owned that lot since 1871 and never worked it. A surveyor's report at the county registry says the stone is unsound and it is not. The company was sold to Boston interests in March and the new owners have not read the file.

The exile. Two hundred and twenty nine years and the packs have never once had a stake in this city. Something is going to occur to somebody.

And the papers that went missing. A minister died in 1852 of something no physician could name, having begun writing things down. The pages left the parsonage during the four years the pulpit stood empty. Whoever took them has had them forty three years.

The turning year

Winter shuts the interior and empties the hotel. The Warrens get cold and the Board of Health gets busy, and anything that goes wrong between December and March goes wrong with the excursion trade watching nothing.

The season runs June to September. Eleven thousand strangers, and the only months of the year when a face nobody knows is unremarkable.

Election day is in December and the machine has decided the last two.

And Sunday, every week. Three churches and four congregations and everybody who matters in one of them, looking at each other.

What is open

What we ask

Take the hook. If an arc reaches your character, do something with it. Refusing is often the better scene, but do something.

Let it cost you. A character who comes through every storyline untouched stops being worth writing against.

Bring your own. Personal plots run alongside and frequently feed the main one.

And say so if you are stranded. Nobody should be reading events they are not in.