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The Ledger Cannot Lie
Candleford keeps ninety leafless plantations alive by flying nine thousand clockwork moths over them every dusk, and every one of those nights is written down to the last moth, in a ledger that is exact, complete, unalterable, and forty thousand lines deep.
- ~188 min (estimated)
- 41366 words
- 30 scenes
- 16 branch points (script estimate)
- 6 endings (script estimate)
28 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · art review pending · listing metadata: importer · counts: script-heuristic
About
In the autumn of a record harvest, the assay, a sap-cutter, a clerk and a factor discover that the ledger has never once recorded what came back, and that nobody can make it record it, because a line's question is fixed when the line is written. The Pale Hundreds are ninety numbered plantations east and north of Candleford, planted in hard lines so a clerk can walk them, made of a species that has not carried a leaf in living memory. The city keeps them fruiting by releasing nine thousand two hundred and forty filament moths a night from the Releasing Loft at Crib Tower, wound on silk spun from moth-ash and sap bled from the feeder-groves four miles north. Every night is written down. The guild is honest, the arithmetic is right, and the forest is dying, and the two facts are not connected anywhere in the building. The novel is set over eleven days in late autumn, from Aldersday to the n
Content notice3 topics · tap to review
- No gore, no violence that lands, no injury, and no permanent harm to any character.
- Nobody is a villain: the antagonist is a ledger format that is exact, complete, and answering a question nobody asked.
- Depiction of bureaucratic routine and commercial pressure only; no instructions for harmful activity.
Cast
- A Ansel Reyne no portrait yet
- O Orla Vessey no portrait yet
- F Fennim Sallowe no portrait yet
- H Halvard Tace no portrait yet
- I Ivet Loam no portrait yet
- F Fen Brackwood no portrait yet
- S Sunbeam Rook no portrait yet
- C Corporal Vell no portrait yet