And then the crowd dissolves. Someone bends down to gather you and the other young ones to the side, but you stand there like posts in the mud, numb and staring. The mass of people howl and sweep around you, and the killer is hidden behind a wall of his friends' struggling bodies. Everyone pulls apart, seeks out their own haf, and argues in screams about what they should do.\n\nOnly a handful of moments from the next minutes remain in your memory. You see the killer's club cast down on the ground. You see two from your caravan bending over your hatch-sister, one wailing. Screaming hoarse curses, Kehat seizes the club and breaks it over his knee. You see him taking the girl’s corpse in his arms and carrying it away.\n\n<<choice "Nothing to say." "My grief is silent.">>\n<<choice "The sobbing children." "My grief is loud.">>
<<set $destruction = $destruction + 1>>"For a long time our god lived in the Citadel as ruler, and the other god as consort," Paha says. "But then our god cast the other out, and ruled alone in the Citadel."\n\n"A great war began," Paha says. "The other god fought our armies, and killed them. It swam through our crops and destroyed them. It chased our children and ate them, and smashed our villages beneath its belly. And when the gods met in battle, the water was thick with their blood. The other god drove ours to the edge of the world, where the sea curls up to meet the sky. Our god wanders in the stars. Our god bleeds pale blood across the sky."\n\nFingers bumping against other children's hands, you scrape more sediment away. Curling lines wander across the face of the stone.\n\n<<choice "How our god may return." "They show the blood-trail of stars in the sky.">>\n<<choice "How our people were driven from the Delta." "They show woodsmoke rising from our ruined cities.">>\n<<if $religion>><<choice "How our god watches over us." "They show the sound of prayers seeking our god in the sky.">><<endif>><<if $haf>><<choice "How the haf keeps us strong." "They show songs rising from ardent throats.">><<endif>>\n<<choice "The things we make." "They show flotsam in the water.">>
One time, the caravan sets down in a very large village. Shevah gets there earliest, performs the visitor’s prayer first, and sets their stall in a proud corner of the square. Because your caravan is so well-placed, you get the most attention, and much sell more than anyone else. You and your hatchmates run through the crowd, gathering curious customers easily and leading them back to buy.\n\nAfter a time, other caravans at the market realize they've lost the day to your village. They stew and complain. “Shevah’s jokers don’t even sell particularly fine goods,” they say to one another. “It’s all in the way they present themselves to the public. Kehat is outmatching us, but just with style.”\n\n<<choice "The drunkards." "I encourage my friends to sing even louder.">>\n<<choice "The drunkards." "I sing more softly. There is an uneasiness in the market square.">>
<<set $destruction = $destruction + 1>>"Long ago," Paha says, "when our god ruled, all good things were ours. But then we were driven out to these dryer lands, where the lakes are small and the soil is grey." The silt clinging to your palms is indeed grey and sour. <<if $caravaners>>You remember seeing healthier soil on your trips with the caravaners: brown dirt thatched over with thick green grasses.<<else>>But never before did you think this might not be right, that it might be less than perfect.<<endif>> Though it wrinkles your nose, there is nevertheless a comfort in this sharp grey soil, in the stench it gives off in the summer sun. You might miss it, if you left for too long.\n\n"One day," Paha says, "We will return to the heart of the Delta, and drive our enemies out. And they will pay our people tribute. And they will live in the same squalor we've suffered."\n\n<<if $religion>>It seems good that some day your god should be ascendant again. <<else>>You wonder what those other people who drove your ancestors out have written on their foundation stones. <<endif>>You press your hands against the stone, searching for more. You find a dense trip of hatches and holes, like the lines eels carve in bloated sharkbeast corpses.\n\n<<if $spear>><<choice "How small our lives are." "It a churning crowd, full of people shouting and striking blows.">><<endif>>\n<<choice "Who walks without the haf." "It is a line of solitary footprints in the sand.">>\n<<choice "Who writes our histories." "It is written script.">>\n<<choice "Why we are here." "It is a row of post-holes set in a muddy bank.">>\n<<choice "When all things rot away." "Perhaps it is that-- a trail of hungry mouths, eels in the water.">>
You wriggle out of the boy's grasp and kick as hard as you can toward the surface. You think you might hear him sob.\n\nHalfway to the surface, someone catches you from below and speeds upward. You twist yourself around-- it's Paha.\n\n"Turn around," you gasp. "Someone's down there!"\n\nAt first she doesn't understand. But then you make it clear-- someone's down there, someone's //down// there //suffocating// in the muck-- and her eyes widen. She shoves you away, tucks, and dives into the darkness.\n\n[[I struggle to the air.|Resuscitation.]]\n
<<set $builders = true>>The builders keep the village upright in the lake. They hang the waterlights, they weave the reed-mat walls that make the rooms, and they anchor the rafts that float the dry-town. They know the rituals for keeping the village safe, and for preserving the foundation-stones in the suffocating dark below, where the drifting debris of village life obscures the sun.\n\nPaha leads the builders. She is bent and withered, among the oldest in the haf, but she knows every beam and floorboard in the village.\n\nIn the evening shadow of the builders' hut, her eyes are unreadable. She sits in silence, weaving reed mats with the other older builders, and they watch the young ones searching for places to sleep around the walls. Long after you have laid yourselves down, their hands still make the same folding, turning motions. The reeds crackle and whisper in the dark.\n\n[[The morning comes.|The ancient builder.]]
You float just below the surface of the water, blinded by the refracted sunlight. Someone supports your back.\n\nA hand reaches out to pat you on the cheek. "There, there," Paha's voice says.\n\nDizzy and sick, you right yourself in the water. Besides you floats the boy whom you tried to save, looking sheepish and confused. Paha pats you on the head again with a look of gentle disapproval. "You are still only a little minnow, children. Go slowly."\n\nAround you, other children tread water, wiping grime from their faces. Some cling weakly to the nearest walls and walkways. It's been a harsh first lesson.\n\n[[The day ends.|That night.]]
<<set $creation + 1>>"No one knows the names of those who write the records on the foundation-stones," Paha says. "Poets may leave their names with a song," She explains. <<if $poet>>You feel a swell of pride in your chest, and imagine your name sung a hundred times, in many villages. <<endif>>"But the stones are not one person's work. They are the whole haf. When you work with the builders, you must remember this. Pride requires recognition; the builder is above such things."\n\n<<if $poet>>You feel a moment of guilt, a sense that you are somehow wrong for wanting fame. But the moment passes, and you remember that when you write a poem to set the whole world singing, the haf will write it on these stones. And though you have no authorship over the words themselves, you have authorship over your deeds, do you not?<<else>>You suffer a momentary feeling of loss that you cannot sing or write, but it passes. The stones beneath you are heavy, but pressing your arms against them you feel a kind of mastery over them-- muscle over cold stone. One day, you think you might be strong enough to shift them.<<endif>>\n\nThe cold in the water is beginning to draw the quickness from your hands and arms: it grows harder to feel the stones or to guess at the meaning of the carvings. You find an empty area, lines etched across it at seemingly random angles. It defies your understanding.\n\n<<choice "The waterlight." "The lines are too tightly woven for my fingers to interpret in the dark.">>\n<<choice "The waterlight." "My fingers are too young and inexperienced to find the meaning here.">>\n<<choice "The waterlight." "There is nothing here. Paha might be making all this up as she goes. The lines mean nothing.">>
One by one, the other children begin to choke and cough, and Paha nudges them upward toward the surface. Eventually you, too, find yourself coughing, moving with dizzy, uncoordinated gestures. Paha finds you at your stone and takes you by the wrist. "Go up," she says. "Up!"\n\nThough your head throbs, you pace yourself, economize your movements. You can hear and feel other children moving past you.\n\nBut then you are betrayed. Someone at your side puts their hand on your shoulder, then pushes themselves upward. You panic for a moment as you sink, limbs flailing.\n\nBut above you, the other child is also struggling to continue, and soon he falls past you again. You turn and see his frantic face vanishing into the gloom below.\n\n<<choice "The weight." "I help him.">>\n<<choice "Just desserts." "I leave him.">>
<<set $destruction + 1>>In the darkness, the hissing sound of Paha's sigh is like shifting sand. "In the north, they have a saying. 'Time eats all things' The lakes change, and with them the fortunes of a haf. The tides smooth away the history on the foundation-stones. Without the builders, histories would be lost."\n\nYou pull your hands back, imagining in fear that your careless hadns are scraping away the flesh of the haf. But Paha's voice continues calmly. "In time, everything will wear away-- but the haf does not erode. Of all the things in the world, the haf is the only thing that can truly survive. And so we fix the carvings, so that they will last as long as we do."\n\nThe cold in the water is beginning to draw the quickness from your hands and arms: it grows harder to feel the stones or to guess at the meaning of the carvings. You find an empty area, lines etched across it at seemingly random angles. It defies your understanding.\n\n<<choice "The waterlight." "The lines are too tightly woven for my fingers to interpret in the dark.">>\n<<choice "The waterlight." "My fingers are too young and inexperienced to find the meaning here.">>\n<<choice "The waterlight." "There is nothing here. Paha might be making all this up as she goes. The lines mean nothing.">>
<<if $destruction gt $creation>>It seems wrong that the gods' stories should be carved as if they bleed. It seems wrong that they should bite so ravenously at one another.\n\nBut haven't they always been violent? You remember stories about your god laying waste to armies, leaving a wake of blood. You do not have the words to say why this now feels so wrong to you, but there *is* a wrongness here. A squirming at the back of your mind, like a hagfish coiling and gnawing at a lump of meat.<<else>>These do not seem like the gods you have learned about. The deities your haf knows are fierce, locked in an eternal struggle. They are grander and more important than hafs or people. They direct your battles. Why else should you spend so much time fighting other ordinary people here in the Delta?\n\nBut this carving does not seem to recognize this struggle. While the light shone, you saw builders reaching out toward silent, impassive gods. You saw deities twisted about one another like mates. Where is the battle? Where is the glory? <<endif>>\n\nPaha moves about now, telling more tales. But as she speaks you hear a buzzing in your ears and sense a numbness in your head. You think you see shapes looming where none were before, and the yawning darkness around you seems suddenly filled with movement.\n\nYou have been in the choking cloud of lakefloor silt for well over an hour, and breath now comes difficult.\n\n[[I should return to clear waters soon.|The journey up.]]
Long after the crowd has broken up, their voices are still in your ears, jeering and shrieking. There is not much room to think. You feel only a flickering, sideways kind of fear, as if a thunderstorm has crackled in the distance.\n\nOlder ones from your caravan lead you and the other children back to the booth, where they wrap you in blankets and lay you between the sledges one by one, like logs. They wash your heads and bring food, but no one will eat. Some are silent, as you are. Most cry quietly.\n\n[[The haf must meet.|The blame.]]
<<set $destruction + 1>>Paha's voice feels cold and sharp, like a gravel beach on a winter morning. "Not all people live inside the haf," Paha says. You feel the muscles in your back tighten, feel your shoulders rise. "Some people commit a crime against the haf, and they are cast out. Their lives are forfeit. They are like animals."\n\nYou have never seen a wanderer, but you have heard of them-- <<if $caravaners>>the caravaners always told stories about wanderers they had found on their journeys,<<else>>around the fire at night, people sometimes told stories <<endif>> about wild, half-dressed men and women limping wounded through the swamps, makeshift weapons in their hands, mud on their faces. "A wanderer is a pathetic thing," Paha says. "Even the other god's people deserve more sympathy than does a wanderer."\n\nThe cold in the water is beginning to draw the quickness from your hands and arms: it grows harder to feel the stones or to guess at the meaning of the carvings. You find an empty area, lines etched across it at seemingly random angles. It defies your understanding.\n\n<<choice "The waterlight." "The lines are too tightly woven for my fingers to interpret in the dark.">>\n<<choice "The waterlight." "My fingers are too young and inexperienced to find the meaning here.">>\n<<choice "The waterlight." "There is nothing here. Paha might be making all this up as she goes. The lines mean nothing.">>
Behind the caravaners, your hatch-sister is getting to her feet, trying to push forward toward Kehat and the others. But one angry caravaner pushes her back and steps forward to face Kehat, a crude club in his hand. He swings it around and struts. In the crowd, they are calling for him to step down, but he will not. Kehat even turns his side, vulnerable, to show he will not attack.\n\nBut the armed caravaner advances. And when he prepares his first swing-- drawing his club back to strike Kehat across the shoulders-- he cracks your hatch-sister across the head.\n\nShe collapses like a bundle of broken sticks.\n\n[[The crowd roars.|It was a murder.]]
role: whether the player is a "$warrior" or a "$poet".\n\ncalling: whether the player is called to uphold the "$religion" or uphold the social group of the "$haf".\n\nfirst work: whether the player first worked with the "$caravaners" or the "$builders".\n\nfight in the market: whether or not the player is "$bold" and stays to help their friend, and whether or not the player is foolish and brings a "$spear" for Kehat to fight with\n\nmorning in the village: whether the player played the gong boldly ("$gongbold") or not\n\ntales at the foundation-stones: whether the player favored stories of $destruction or $creation
You sweep your arms forward and thrash down through the darkness after Paha. On land language and sound are all different. <<if $caravaners>>You spent too long living on the land with the caravaners; now the true sounds underwater are strange to you. Paha's swimming sounds are too hard to tell from the sounds of the young ones hurrying behind you.\n\nYou are lost in breathless dark. The piles are a vast shadow to your left: the only direction left in the world is down, down, down.\n\n[[I hurry there, blind.|The dark at the end of the tunnel.]]<<else>>But you are young, you have spent nearly all your life underwater, and this soundscape is your home.\n\nYou remember the nursery-caves. You clustered with your hatchmates in that warm lightless womb and you pawed each other blindly, learning by touch, learning to listen, to judge distances in the dark.\n\nYou close your eyes. Paha's sounds below separate from the rest: precise, strong limbs moving with confidence through the water.\n\n[[I follow.|The dark at the end of the tunnel.]]<<endif>>
<<set $destruction = $destruction + 1>>"When our god lived in the Citadel, we had rulers with great majesty," Paha says. "They reflected the majesty of our god, and they did our god's will." You sweep your hand across the stone and feel tangled lines which may be armies, cities, and great standing-stones set in the wild seabed, wrapped in bands of iron and studded with pearls. Clouds of dirt fly in your face, like the dust kicked beneath the feet of marching warriors. The dirt tastes rich and bitter.\n\nPaha says, "If we had our armies again, if we could fight for our god again, then //we// would be the ones in the cities. But those old monarchs are dead now, and their tombs are lost deep beneath the wild ocean. Their names are smoothed away and their bones are ground to dust."\n\nFingers bumping against other children's hands, you scrape more sediment aside. Curling lines wander across the face of the stone.\n\n<<choice "How our god may return." "They show the blood-trail of stars in the sky.">>\n<<choice "How our people were driven from the Delta." "They show woodsmoke rising from our ruined cities.">>\n<<if $religion>><<choice "How our god watches over us." "They show the sound of prayers seeking our god in the sky.">><<endif>><<if $haf>><<choice "How the haf keeps us strong." "They show songs rising from ardent throats.">><<endif>>\n<<choice "The things we make." "They show flotsam in the water.">>
<<set $abandoned = true>><<if $warrior>>If you were on land, you would have struck him, or challenged him to a warrior's shaking of spears.<<else>>If you had breath, you would curse him until he sobbed from shame.<<endif>> To turn on someone from the haf is a crime, an unforgiveable crime<<if $haf>> against the only thing in the world that matters. And it <<else>> that <<endif>>turns those who commit it into disgusting wretches and wanderers<<if $haf>>, unfit to live at all<<endif>><<if $religion>>, undeserving of the mercy of your god<<endif>>! \n\nBut as the mere thought of his casual betrayal fills you with rage, you forget that each moment you let him sink is a moment of your own betrayal, equal to or worse than his.<<if $haf>> No, certainly worse-- because you were the one who might have offered help.<<endif>>\n\nA few feet below the surface, you see adults lancing past you into the darkness, trails of bubbles in their wake. And when your head breaks the surface at last and you bob there among the other children, scooping sludge from their gills and cough, The full weight of your deed settles on your heart.\n\n[[The adults bring him to the surface.|Resuscitation.]]
<<set $creation = $creation + 1>>"In earliest times, we lived in the Citadel with our god," Paha says. "But we outgrew the Citadel, so we built a new city." You sweep your hands across the stone and feel long, strong lines that might be the brave piles of some massive village-- or perhaps a field of standing reeds, or a forest of proud spears. Is this a city?\n\n"Greylake holds five hafs. Thier bazaar holds a thousand merchants. The Pearl Chamber is there, with its ceiling that mirrors the stars. And the gods' governor is there, too, in a great palace made from iron and evergreen wood. It is magnificent," Paha says. "But I grieve that it is full of our enemies. I shall never see it up close." She is quiet for a time. You search the stone with your fingers but find only a thicket of tangled lines without order or meaning.\n\n<<choice "How our god may return." "They show the blood-trail of stars in the sky.">>\n<<choice "How our people were driven from the Delta." "They show woodsmoke rising from our ruined cities.">>\n<<if $religion>><<choice "How our god watches over us." "They show the sound of prayers seeking our god in the sky.">><<endif>><<if $haf>><<choice "How the haf keeps us strong." "They show songs rising from ardent throats.">><<endif>>\n<<choice "The things we make." "They show flotsam in the water.">>
Yours is a spring hatch, and a big one, too: the village opens almost thirty eggs. The foundation-stones say that this hatch’s greatest forebear was...\n\n<<choice "I am a Poet." "a poet.">>\n<<choice "I am a Warrior." "a warrior.">>
Behind you, Paha rustles through her satchel. You hear sloshing, like water in a skin, and then a sharp snap that makes you jump like a startled minnow. And now a dull glow comes from behind you.\n\nYou turn and see that Paha has lit a small waterlight. Her fingers wrapped around the globe cut the light into strange slashes that play across her face and body. It seems that she is not one person, but a cloud of darting, shining fish in the shape of a person. Her face and arms shift like reflections on the surface of a lake-- distorted, disjointed.\n\nHer voice draws closer, and you see that she approaches the foundation-stones, stretching her arm out. "Look," she says. "Look at what you have uncovered."\n\n<<if $destruction gt $creation>>[[I turn to see.|The gods rampant.]]<<else>>[[I turn to see.|The gods abundant.]]<<endif>>
You walk out the gate with Kehat. The caravan stands around the sledges, heads down, waiting for Kehat to come and start the march home.\n\nYou tap him on the leg, and he stops. “What would you do if I died?” you ask. “If a wanderer stabbed me or a crocodile ate me?”\n\n“Nothing,” Kehat says, “except remember you. And is that not enough? You would go on the foundation stones, and others would learn, and live longer, because of you.” Then he bends down and hugs you close. “But we must not let that happen,” he says. “Because you are part of the haf, and you are young, and I owe you everything, even my life.”\n\nHe bears you crying on his back all the way back to Shevah.\n\n[[Seasons change. Time goes on.|The next year.]]
<<set $builders = true>>The builders keep the village upright in the lake. They hang the waterlights and the frames for growing oysters. They weave the reed-mat walls that make the rooms and anchor the rafts that make the town above the lake. They know the rituals for keeping the village safe, and for preserving the foundation-stones in the suffocating dark below, where the drifting debris of village life obscures the sun.\n\nPaha leads the builders. She is bent and withered, among the oldest in the haf, but she knows every beam and floorboard in the village.\n\nIn the evening shadow of the builders' hut, her eyes are unreadable. She sits in silence, weaving reed mats with the other older builders, and they watch the young ones searching for places to sleep around the walls. Long after you have laid yourselves down, their hands still make the same folding, turning motions. The reeds crackle and whisper in the dark.\n\n[[The morning comes.|The ancient builder.]]
Your shame keeps you awake. Your heart beats loud, and with every thump you see the club swinging back again. Did you hold the spear, or did you hold the club itself? Would the fight have always gone to blows? Were you the one who tipped it? You do not know your full guilt, so it swells up like a sponge, fills every available space. The body is a silent proof. The children lying beside you, too, are proof, and the adults' anxious murmurs. Everything is a word against you.\n\nYour nightmare is no different from your waking guilt. You see Kehat's face twisting in disgust. You see his horrified grimace. The spear leaves your hands; the caravaner runs to hide it. But the crowd is turning, and the drunk is turning, and his club is flying back. Your hatch-sister falls, and your hands sting.\n\nShe falls, and it begins again. And though you crouch and hug the ground, you are borne up again by your guilt. It presses on your back, bends you over the sledge. Your hands find the spear. You are walking back toward the fight, crying, but there is no way to stop it. It is done.\n\n[[The sun is rising.|The haf's justice.]]
Kehat leads the caravan, sometimes going ahead with his spear, sometimes wrapping the harness around his shoulders to pull the sledges himself. All the older caravaners take turns. The sledges are piled high with packets wrapped in skins and grass twine.\n\nThe caravan is both peaceful and strange. You have never seen this land before, and do not know what might be hiding just off the side of the way, in the tangled grey bushes or the shallow pools of the Delta's swampland. But though it is strange to you, you have your haf to hold you up. There is little to fear when they walk beside you.\n\n[[I am a part of the caravan.|The market.]]
Kehat frightens you at first.\n\nBut at sunset, when the older caravaners pull the sledges in a circle around the fire and tell tales and songs over the evening meal, you feel that you are now in a place you know. As the next dawn rises and you take your place along the march, bringing water to the sledge-pullers, you compose a small song in your head about the fresh wind, the swollen, low-hanging clouds, and the grey sandbars with their strangled little trees.\n\nYou sing it that night, at the fire. Everyone nods and smiles, reaches out to pat you on the back or pass you scraps of mussel for a treat. And Kehat cheers for you, too, and asks you how you wrote it.\n\n[[I am a part of the caravan.|The market.]]
<<set $fought = false>>You turn and run, following your hatchmates back across the square to your booth. Already the caravan members have put down their parcels and are turning to watch the shouting crowd. They cannot see what has caused the noise.\n\nYou tell what has happened in a chorus of terrified shouts, and your haf leaps up and runs. Kehat leaves his spear behind, lying forgotten across an empty sledge.\n\n<<choice "Kehat arrives." "I run with the haf.">>\n<<choice "I bring the weapon." "I bring the spear and follow.">>
You do not see the way back to the booth. You are blinded by tears, and someone from the caravan leads you, then carries you. The world shrinks down to the size of your head and the fists you press against your swollen eyes.\n\nOlder ones from your caravan bring you and the other children back to the booth, where they wrap you in blankets and lay you between the sledges one by one, like logs. They wash your heads and bring you food, but no one will eat. Some cry, as you do. Others lie silent, as if dead themselves.\n\n[[The haf must meet.|The blame.]]
[[lauramichet.com|http://www.lauramichet.com/]]
You take the spear up and heave it over your shoulder. It haft is heavy, twice your height, and its tip is a wooden blade set with the teeth of sharks, meant to catch flesh and tear it. \n\nThe spear slows you down, and when you arrive Kehat is already in the center of the crowd, shouting face to face with another caravaner. Behind the stranger your hatch-sister struggles to her feet, one arm clutched across her chest. \n\nThere are people in the crowd with clubs and staves.\n\n[[I bring Kehat his spear.|The weapon in the ring.]]
<<set $fought = false>>The caravaners follow down the street. You cannot tell who started the fight and who is now merely watching: together they form a shuddering forest, like the trees atop the hills behind Shevah when the great storms hit them.\n\nYou can still hear your hatch-sister crying, but you are still so small, your head barely reaches halfway up a grown person's thigh, and you cannot see her. Your voice is trapped in your throat. You step back, then back again, as the crowd swells and moves.\n\n[[I hear a sound behind me.|Kehat arrives.]]
In time the water becomes thick and cold and bitter, like a bowl of broth left overnight by the ashes of a fire. Heavy clumps of grit and slime scrape across your face and shoulders.\n\nBut soon the group of children fights its way into a space structured by shadows. The piles stand clear-- no rooms or walkways are built between them. Broad dark shapes are heaped at their feet, tumbling down into further darkness, where mud and water mix in equal parts. These are the foundation-stones.\n\nHovering by the nearest pile is a group of shadow-people, shivering in the cold. "Gather here," Paha says.\n\n[[We gather.|Duties in the dark.]]
[[About the Author]]
As Paha passes her dim waterlight across the stones, the carvings blossom into sudden clarity between your hands.\n\nYou see the two gods, consorts, mates, stretched like banners across columns of deep-grooved script. Below the words you see marching rows of ancient people in elaborate dress, building and exulting. Their cities stretch far above and below the water, and their caravans line the horizon. Great works rise and crumble beneath the gods' scaly bellies, and they watch, their gazes alien and unknowable.\n\nIn the short lit moments when you can still clearly see the gods' hanging barracuda jaws and rippling scales, you feel an electric inspiration. You draw your hand back, as if the carvings themselves held something of their power. But then the light moves on, down the row of stones, and the words and pictures blur. You catch no more than a few disconnected phrases-- you see the glyph for 'haf', and for the city Greylake. Paha and your hatchmates move as silhouettes across the light. Then Paha's body eclipses it, and the carvings return once more to obscurity.\n\n[[The light has given me a map to this knowledge.|Hands and stone.]]
<<set $warrior = true>>The geneologies carved on the village's foundation stones say that your hatch's greatest forebear was a warrior of great renown, whose foray against the city of Greylake killed many of your religious enemies. Your hatch is expected to produce great warriors, too.\n\nAt the end of the summer, when you have your second birth and came out of the nursery-caves to join the haf, The village names you after famous warriors. You are encouraged to wrestle and sing songs of challenge, and your bodies are trained for running and fighting from a younger age than most.\n\n[[I must live up to this honor.|My first year.]]
<<set $gongbold = false>>The beat you mark on the hand-gong floats behind the prayers <<if $poet>>like a mere suggestion of sound.<<else>>like a voice heard calling from another island.<<endif>> The song is a gentle welcome for a quiet day. <<if $haf>>As the haf wakes, the people come out of their quarters and nod gratefully as you pass.<<else>>Prayers are more powerful when they are sung beautifully.<<endif>> \n\nOnce they are finished bringing order to the morning, the builders stand together squinting in the new sun, satisfied.\n\n<<if $haf>><<choice "The ancient builder." "I have done my duty to the haf.">><<else>><<choice "The ancient builder." "I have done my duty to our god.">><<endif>>
Kehat frightens you at first.\n\nBut at sunset, when the older caravaners pull the sledges in a circle around the fire and tell tales and songs over the evening meal, you feel that you might have something in common with him and the others. As the next dawn rises, the adults tell you about your duties. You take your place along the march, bringing water to the sledge-pullers, pulling branches from the path, and singing songs.\n\nThe next night, at the fire, you already know some of the words to the caravaners' songs. When the song comes around the fire, Kehat gives you a good verse, and cheers for your performance. And you remember that the caravan is still the haf, out here in the open among the strangled little trees and the grey sandbars. It is small, but it is the haf, and it loves you as the haf does.\n\n[[I am a part of the caravan.|The market.]]
<<set $gongbold = true>>The gong echoes <<if $warrior>>bravely<<else>>proudly<<endif>> across the surface of the lake. Under the water, its sound has a quieter resonance. <<if $poet>>It reminds you of eager poetry,<<else>>It reminds you of proud celebrations,<<endif>> of the village's vital moments together <<if $haf>>around the fire.<<else>>in the chapel under the lake.<<endif>> The singers follow your mark, and their song is also eager. You step quickly down the floating drytown and swim with quick purpose among the rooms below, rousting out sleepers, giving them something to mark time to as they begin the day.\n\nWhen your circuit is done, the adults in the group do not congratulate you or comment on your performance, but merely nod, satisfied.\n\n<<if $haf>><<choice "The ancient builder." "I have done my duty to the haf.">><<else>><<choice "The ancient builder." "I have done my duty to our god.">><<endif>>
<<set $caravaners = true>>The caravaners go from place to place, selling Shevah’s craftwork: mats and blankets and twine rolls and knotted necklaces made from the long weeds growing on the dry hillsides above the town.\n\nYou and your hatchmates are the youngest in the group, but you are already surefooted and quick. You cannot carry bushels or crates or pole the boats or drag the sledges, so you help by keeping the sledges tidy, and collecting plants to eat from along the sides of the way, and leading songs for the older ones to sing as they travel.\n\n[[These are my first teachers.|The caravan leaders.]]
You descend headfirst. Below your feet the water's spoiled surface is in blinding silver turmoil. Ahead of you, the village falls or rises into darkness: a tower of tangled rooms, glowing in new sunlight.\n\nThe piles which hold up the village are the largest things that you know: pillars of smoothed wood tall as a hundred people or more standing on each other's shoulders. The young ones push themselves along the piles, grabbing ropes and walls and strings of waterlights, flicking down along the side of the village like minnows seeking the shade.\n\nBut in that shade, the water becomes stale and muddy. Here and there a scale or a fragment of bone from someone's dinner turns in the water, slowly seeking the lakefloor. You find it harder to breathe. The young ones hesitate. But Paha drops past you, long and straight in the water. "Come!" she calls, before shrinking into a blot of shadow.\n\n<<choice "Chasing shadows." "I chase close after Paha.">>\n<<choice "Searching in the dark." "I stay close to my friends.">>
<<set $religion = true>>You are still almost an infant, too young to learn the songs or prayers yourself, but the soft quavering of the haf's voice as it sings over the fire strikes your heart, makes your eyes smart, and makes your breath rise from low in your chest like a deep bubble from the bottom of the sea.\n\nWhen you murmur along with the melody, you feel a greater purpose. And when the haf sings most passionately about its god, you sigh to yourself with both great belonging and great anxiety, for you are too young to understand what is happening, or why it moves you so.\n\n[[My calling will guide me.|My first work.]]
Conclusion story placeholder
The water becomes thick and cold and bitter, like a bowl of broth left overnight by the ashes of a fire. You choke on it.\n\nAnd you emerge choking and blinded (dust in your eyes, trash in your gills) into a space structured by shadows. The piles now stand clear. Broad dark shapes are heaped at their feet, tumbling down into further darkness, where mud and water mix in equal parts. They are the foundation-stones.\n\nHovering by the nearest pile is a slight shape with arms and legs and a head. A stencil of black on further black. "Gather here," Paha says.\n\n[[We gather.|Duties in the dark.]]
Kahet splits the mass of onlookers like a mad shark forging up a river. He knocks drunkards aside and seizes the one closest to your hatch-sister. They grapple for a moment, then fall apart.\n\nKehat is bent forward like a fighter, hands out, but his voice is calm. “You cannot treat a child like this,” he says. "Hand her back to my haf. We can talk about my caravan after."\n\nBut the drunkards will not listen. They shout and shove Kehat. Still, he does not retaliate: he is watching your hatch-sister. She holds her arm against her chest and sobs, but no one near her turns to help.\n\n[[It will come to fighting.|Blows fall.]]
Your hatch spends its first year outside the nursery-caves in simply growing.\n\nCertain adults are assigned to watch you and teach you. Carrying you out of the lake, they show you how to hold moisture in your gills. Holding your hands, they show you how to walk on land. You are less than twelve months old, but already you are quick enough to chase shadows in the water; they bring you to the shallows at the far end of the village, beyond the fisheries, and teach you how to snatch wild minnows and break thier spines between your teeth.\n\nEvery evening, you and your hatchmates are brought out of the lake, above the village, to the fire. The other members of the haf trade songs and stories. You are most enchanted by...\n\n<<choice "Religion draws me." "songs of praise and awe for your god.">>\n<<choice "The haf draws me." "the older villagers' boasts and jokes.">>
You curse yourself harder than you curse the killer. A warrior stands strong between danger and the haf, <<if $fought>>but though you struck out boldly, you were too small and weak to save her.<<else>>but you did not even fight.<<endif>> And Kehat could not save her, either. Could not? He //would// not! He turned his side to the enemy, and //invited// the strike which killed the girl on its backswing.\n\nKehat's cowardice galls you. For the first time since the market, something is louder than your grief: it is anger, fury at Kehat and at yourself. Alone in the dark with nothing but hate, your frustrated rage grows so immense that you lose track of yourself, of your outer edges, and become a whole world of anger.\n\nA world of anger mixing into nightmare. You do not remember the worst of it, but sometime before dawn you resolve again into a child and find yourself alone on a sandbar in the middle of a wild ocean, with all your hate and nothing to spend it on.\n\nNothing, no one, not even someone to fight. You have never been so lonely.\n\n[[The sun is rising.|The haf's justice.]]
Most of your other hatchmates shrink away, but one of your hatch-sisters matches your defiance-- even exceeds it. She continues her song as she hurries onward, weaving to dodge an arm cast suddenly in her direction.\n\nBut before you can move to follow, the drunken caravaners run her down and seize her by the arm. She tries to twist away, but they throw her to the ground beneath a booth, hard.\n\nThe day turns dark in your eyes. Behind you, the other children turn away in a panic. Your hatch-sister cries out and cowers while the crowd presses close, shouting and and grabbing at her with unsure hands.\n\n<<choice "I fight back." "I strike her captors with my fists.">>\n<<choice "I get help." "I run to get Kehat and the others.">>
You were born at the edge of the Delta, where the land begins to grow higher, hillier, and dryer. \n\nThe village is so remote that some years, the collectors do not even bother to come and ask for tax. The people here worship a different god than their neighbors. Despite this, the village sees very little of the trouble that visits the rest of the Delta, and in isolation, it grows strong and prosperous. \n\nThe settlement is called Shevah, after the haf that lives there.\n\n[[This is where I was born.|My birth.]]
When you grow up, perhaps you, too, will have an iron jaw and a spear barbed with teeth you've taken from sharks yourself.\n\nWhen the older caravaners pull the heavy sledges through the swampy, grey muck of the way, you march beside Kehat, matching your footsteps to his. When he loosens the sledge-harness and raises his head to notice you there, he calls you brave, and sends you to fetch him a splash of water from the jug hanging by the yoke of the sledge.\n\n[[I am part of the caravan.|The market.]]
You turn and catch him under the arm. He spasms, pinning your hand against his body, swinging up his other to grab your shoulder. It is hard to swim with such an uneven weight.\n\nBut you struggle upward, kicking with two feet and scooping with your free hand. But you are barely strong enough to move yourself, much less another-- and the surface seems dimmer, and futher away.\n\n<<if $caravaners>>\n\nBut you remember your dead sibling and push away the few thoughts you have of turning back. You clutch your hatch-brother as hard as he clutches you and shout for help.\n\n<<choice "Between breaths." "I must save my brother.">><<else>>\n\n<<choice "A plea." "I must leave him and find us help.">>\n<<choice "Between breaths." "Only I can help him now.">><<endif>>
On market-days, the caravan arrives at a town before dawn and Kehat performs the visitor's prayer with the local elders. The children help to set up the booth and lay out the wares. Other caravans arrive. At dawn the town wakes. The caravans and the locals buy and sell.<<if $builders>>\n\nIn each village you inspect the gates and floating rafts and jump down into the water to look at the piles and the weave on the walls. The builders taught you to read messages hidden in the way things are built. You search for statements of strength in barred gateways. The twine knots on a stranger's door-hinge are boasts of endurance. Every village is a conversation with wood. You remember the builders and the comfort of your own well-shaped village, and sigh.<<endif>>\n\n<<if $builders>>There is not much time to spend in reminiscence. <<endif>>While the older ones manage the booth, you and your hatch-brothers and sisters run through the crowd, naming your wares and cajoling buyers along with rhymes.\n\n<<if $poet>>\n[[I and my hatchmates tell the best rhymes.|The memory.]]\n<<else>>\n[[It is a good challenge.|The memory.]]\n<<endif>>
You stop, keeping close to the other children. These caravaners move unsteadily and talk too loudly. You remember accidents you have seen around the fire in your village, when the wine was too strong.\n\nBut one of your hatch-sisters is defiant. She continues her song as she hurries onward. Your hatchmates call out to her, urging her back, but she does not seem to hear.\n\nThe drunken caravaners surge foward to follow her, and block her from your sight. You hear a cry, and rough shouts, and see a booth shake as something hits it.\n\n<<choice "I get help." "I must get help.">>\n<<choice "I stay and watch." "I cannot leave her here.">>
Every morning, the builders wake together before dawn, while the fog is still on the lake. They walk and swim about the town to say the morning prayers.\n\nThe first morning of the new year, they shake you awake and lead you to the door. The adults are gathered in the entryway, whispering. The youngest children do not know any of the rituals. You huddle together, afraid to break the calm with a question.\n\nSomeone puts a hand on your shoulder. They give you a hand-gong, then turn their back without a word. Tuning themselves with a deep hum, the party swims out the door into the lake, and you follow, unsure what to do.\n\n<<choice "The gong's brassy sound." "I strike the gong eagerly.">>\n<<choice "A cautious sound." "I look to the others for direction.">>
In the village they taught you that though the people make the haf, it is greater than they are, longer-lived, more powerful. The foundation-stones are older than language. The haf's blood is older even than that. Kahet said the haf could call for war, that it spoke with a hundred voices.\n\nBut the knot of passion you once felt in your throat has gone. You have swallowed it. The haf is old and strong and proud but it cannot keep a child alive-- and what is pride, or strength, or honored age, if it cannot do such a simple thing? She was as big as you are. She was your hatchmate. She put her faith in the haf. She fell like a bundle of broken sticks.\n\nYour mind falls, too, into dream. The haf surrounds you, but it cannot hear or see you. When they light their fire, you find that you cannot approach, and a great dread anchors you to the darkness.\n\nThe haf can sing around the fire. It can sing around her grave.\n\n[[The sun is rising.|The haf's justice.]]
You watch, numb with horror<<if $abandoned>> and guilt<<if $religion>> and the weight of sinm<<endif>><<endif>>, as Paha and two other builders heave your limp hatchmate from the water and tend to him on the floating walkway. Paha pinches his esophogas between her thumb and forefinger whie the others pour buckets into his open mouth, sweep the sludge from his gills, and thump his chest. You and the other children watch from a distance in silence.\n\nWhen your hatchmate suddenly rolls over and vomits up the water they sloshed into his mouth, you are filled with <<if $abandoned>>equal parts<<endif>> relief<<if $abandoned>> and dread<<endif>>. <<if $abandoned>>The children come closer, and you hang in the back, waiting for the moment when he will point at you as his betrayer.\n\nBut he never does. He seems confused and clutches at his head. Paha assumes a commanding pose, pushes onlookers away, lifts him against her shoulder, and carries him off to rest. The other builders disperse the group and tell you to go play. But you are left alone with your hidden shame.<<else>> As the adults sit him up, wipe his face, and check him for other injuries, no one remembers to thank you. In passing, one adult puts her hand absently on your shoulder, but you cannot tell if it is in recognition of your role in all this.\n\nAnd though you know you should not demand anyone's attention now, you do feel a strange little regret about it all.<<endif>>\n\n[[The day ends.|That night.]]
The caravaners go from place to place, selling Shevah’s craftwork: mats and blankets and twine rolls and knotted necklaces made from the long weeds growing on the dry hillsides above the town.\n\nYou and your hatchmates are the youngest in the group, but you are already surefooted and quick. You cannot carry bushels or crates or pole the boats or drag the sledges, so you help by keeping the sledges tidy, and collecting plants to eat from along the sides of the way, and leading songs for the older ones to sing as they travel.\n\n[[These are my first teachers.|The caravan leaders.]]
Under the Village
<<set $destruction = $destruction + 1>>"Our god is not dead," Paha says. "There are those who say this, but they are wrong."\n\nShe talks about the ocean. "Beyond what anyone can see from the shore, or from the furthest fishing-boat, the water curls up to meet the sky. The sky is water, too, and the stars are drops of our god's blood, floating there." <<if $spear>>You remember the evening cold the night of you hatchmate's death in that strange town-- the way the sky seemed like a sheet of dark ice. You wonder why anyone's god would want to swim up there.<<else>>You cannot remember having ever examined the sky closely. Do the people up there hang upside-down? Do they live in fear of falling? And if they fell, would the clouds catch them?<<endif>>\n\n"One day, our god will swim in the Delta again. Our enemies' cities will sit in lakes of blood," Paha says. "We will have our revenge." You press your hands against the foundation-stone, looking for an inverted sky, for a vengeful god dropping like a bolt of lightning. Instead, you find a dense strip of hatches and holes, like the lines eels carve in bloated sharkbeast corpses.\n\n<<if $spear>><<choice "How small our lives are." "It a churning crowd, full of people shouting and striking blows.">>\n<<endif>><<choice "Who walks without the haf." "It is a line of solitary footprints in the sand.">>\n<<choice "Who writes our histories." "It is written script.">>\n<<choice "Why we are here." "It is a row of post-holes set in a muddy bank.">>\n<<choice "When all things rot away." "Perhaps it is that-- a trail of hungry mouths, eels in the water.">>
History.prototype.originalDisplay = History.prototype.display;\n\nHistory.prototype.display = function (title, link, render)\n{\n\tif ((render != 'quietly') && (render != 'offscreen'))\n\t\tremoveChildren($('passages'));\n\t\t\n\tthis.originalDisplay.apply(this, arguments);\n};
Paha meets the young ones by the toolshed.\n\nShe greets you with folded arms. Though her body is shrinking with age, she still stands as if she as the strength to chisel <<if $religion>>the very name of your god<<else>>a hundred years of the haf's history<<endif>> into the granite beneath the water.\n\n<<if $gongbold>> You and the other young ones arrive eager to move and shout, but Paha's expression quiets you.<<else>>You and the other young ones assemble quietly, waiting for her to speak.<<endif>> She nods toward the water. "All the way down," she says. Without hesitation, many of the children turn and dive.\n\n[[I follow them down.|Below.]]
You try to keep the image of the carving in your mind, but it is fading. And though you scramble to feel and find an anchor-point, your mind retains only fragments: the gods' faces, the raised hands of the people, the jumble of half-phrases. In the blackness in front of your eyes, an inverse shadow of what you've seen, burnt into your vision, dances in triplicate across itself. You cannot see it clearly anymore.\n\n<<choice "The dark eats everything." "I hold tightly to what I saw.">>\n<<choice "Faith unrewarded." "These carvings seem full of wrong teachings.">>
When a killing takes place across two hafs, they must have a careful meeting of elders, and the victim’s haf may make demands. But this killer’s village is almost fifty miles away across the delta. And soon a mediator from the town arrives, bringing worse news: the killers do not worship your god, and cannot deal lawfully with Shevah without earning their preists' wrath. They refuse to meet and negotiate.\n\nThe haf begins to argue. They cannot see a way to get justice. One wants to force the issue before the local elders. One wants to raid the killer’s caravan and kill him, too.\n\nBut Kehat speaks with a shaking voice, and forbids it. “Whatever we do, we do with the voice of our haf. When we speak with the voice of the haf, we speak with the power of hundreds. Our voice grows loud enough to call for war. Would you risk that?”\n\n[[The haf grows quiet, and thinks.|The peaceful way.]]
You let the other children swim ahead and keep near the back. Their kicking and flailing does nothing to clear the sewage from the water.<<if $caravaners>>\n\nYou are pining for the road. With the caravaners you marched through mud, knee-deep in grey sludge and the foamy slime of rotten leaves and stalks. But on the road you had songs, at least, and a far horizon to see.<<else>>\n\nThe thick water here stirs something in your memory, and you think of the dark nursery-caves, where you and your hundred simblings clutched each other and dirtied the close, hot soup that passed for water down there.<<endif>>\n\nPerhaps the first child still has eyes on Paha's shadow. Perhaps no one does. The blind pack presses on, clinging to each other, remembering the days in the lightless nursery-caves when you swam by touch and sound alone, pawing and the dark, seeking a whole world of things you couldn't yet understand.\n\n[[We press on.|The lakefloor.]]
The official leader of the caravan is a man named Kehat. He and a few of his hatch-sisters and brothers oversee every part of the caravan and its workers. They lead and teach through example, and the young ones and apprentices in the caravan love them.\n\nKehat is one of the strongest in the haf. He has hard feet with tough soles from all the walking he’s done, and his chest is twice as broad as anyone else’s in the whole village. Kehat can go almost half a day without wetting his gills, and he wears a necklace strung with the teeth of crocodiles and shark-beasts he’s killed himself. The haf admires him for his bravery and his hardiness.\n\n<<choice "The caravaners' sledges." "I admire Kehat too.">>\n<<if $poet>><<choice "The caravaners' songs." "Kehat and I are not alike.">><<endif>><<if $warrior>><<choice "The caravaners' strength." "Kehat is like the kind of warrior I hope to become.">><<endif>>\n<<choice "The caravaners' rituals." "I don't like Kehat that much.">>
You wonder: will someone in town write a poem about this? A song about injustice? Will they write her name on the foundation-stones? Will she have a minor role as a passing name in another's song?\n\nOr will her killer be the one to find immortality in a ballad? You imagine the killer's village, his twisted haf with its strange god, and imagine that in this place they celebrate those who kill children. You imagine or dream that they are hunting you, too, with clubs. Your thoughts turn into nightmare, and in your nightmare someone chants a poem about your own death at some future date, so sure and strong that you know it must be true. But when you wake in the morning, dizzy, with sore eyes and a dry neck, the dream is gone, and with it the poem.\n\nThe girl will be forgotten too, someday.\n\n[[The sun is rising.|The haf's justice.]]
<<set $destruction = $destruction + 1>>Paha speaks, but you do not hear. You remember instead the crowd you saw in the strange town, and see again your hatchmate dead on the ground. You remember lying bundled on the ground in the cold night, like a corpse yourself.\n\nYou wonder whether the killer was ever punished. Did anyone say, "we must cast you out and make you a wanderer?" You cannot imagine that they did. He has his haf, and his haf loves him unquestioningly, the way they love you and loved your hatchmate. There was no negotiation; they had no reason to offer him up. You think that there must have been something wrong with him: Kehat would never have done such a thing. But you can imagine that if Kehat had, the haf would have defended him, and there would have been a dead stranger your own age lying on the ground somewhere, some other haf crying over the corpse. The idea of it hurts your heart.\n\nThe cold in the water is beginning to draw the quickness from your hands and arms: it grows harder to feel the stones or to guess at the meaning of the carvings. You find an empty area, lines etched across it at seemingly random angles. It defies your understanding.\n\n<<choice "The waterlight." "The lines are too tightly woven for my fingers to interpret in the dark.">>\n<<choice "The waterlight." "My fingers are too young and inexperienced to find the meaning here.">>\n<<choice "The waterlight." "There is nothing here. Paha might be making all this up as she goes. The lines mean nothing.">>
<<set $spear = true>>You step toward Kehat. The crowd sees you, gasps, and parts. The drunken caravaner sees you next and steps back, hand held out toward his armed friends, beckoning for aid. And then Kehat turns and sees you, too.\n\nHis face twists in disgust. "Take that away," he bellows. One of the others from your caravan rushes forward and rips the spear from your hands. While he sprints away across the square to hide it at the booth, you stand there with stinging palms and an open mouth. Kehat stares back, teeth bared, confused, horrified.\n\nAnd behind him stands the caravaner, with a club now in his hand.\n\n<<choice "The heart of the moment." "I shout to warn Kehat.">>\n<<choice "The heart of the moment." "I choke on shame.">>
<<set $poet = true>>The geneologies carved on the foundation stones of the village say that your hatch's greatest forebear was a great poet, so your hatch is expected to produce great poets, too.\n\nAt the end of the summer, when you have your second birth and came out of the nursery-caves to join the haf, The village names you after poets. You are encouraged to sing and tell stories, and are schooled in writing and reading from a younger age than most.\n\n[[I must live up to this honor.|My first year.]]
<<set $creation = $creation + 1>>"When we were with our god in the heart of the Citadel, our god told us all the secrets of the past. When we were driven out of the Citadel, we searched for a way to preserve that history. So we wrote it on the stones beneath each village," Paha says. You sweep your hands across the stone and feel the history yourself.\n\n"If you take away the foundation-stones, the whole village will fall to the lakefloor. Just so, if you took away out history, the haf would collapse," she says. "We would not know how to name the hatches. We would not know to which hafs we owe alliance. We would not know who we are, or where we are going."\n\nPaha is silent for a moment. Your hands slide across the surface of the stone, but they feel only a messy tangle of carvings, a curling thicket of lines without order or meaning.\n\n<<choice "How our god may return." "They show the blood-trail of stars in the sky.">>\n<<choice "How our people were driven from the Delta." "They show woodsmoke rising from our ruined cities.">>\n<<if $religion>><<choice "How our god watches over us." "They show the sound of prayers seeking our god in the sky.">><<endif>><<if $haf>><<choice "How the haf keeps us strong." "They show songs rising from ardent throats.">><<endif>>\n<<choice "The things we make." "They show flotsam in the water.">>
One of the villages is selling great kegs of fermented weed-heart wine, and the sullen caravaners drink quite a lot of it while complaining about your haf. Eventually someone says, “Part of it is these singing children, coming to our booths and drawing the crowd away. They think they’re singers, but they’re just like screaming birds; the same thing, over and over.” The others agree, and together they grow angrier and angrier.\n\nWhen you and the other young ones come by singing again, the drunkards come out from behind your booth and step in front of you. They order you to move away, so you will not draw customers from their booth.\n\n<<choice "I move away." "They are frightening. I step back and quiet myself.">>\n<<if $warrior>><<choice "I am bold." "A warrior is courageous. I will not step back.">><<else>><<if $haf>><<choice "I am bold." "My haf is proud. I will not step back for these people.">><<else>><<choice "I am bold." "I find a sudden courage. I will not step back.">><<endif>><<endif>>
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The caravan members gather near the ends of the sledges and sit on the ground, leaning in, whispering, turning glances to the body lying wrapped in skins beneath the booth itself. Kehat paces beside it, staring at the sky. He cut his hand on the splintered club; blood still runs down his fingers.\n\nNo one likes it, but the haf must cease grieving for a time. They must make a businesslike discussion of retribution.\n\n[[They discuss the law.|The voice of the haf.]]
Behind the caravaners, your hatch-sister tries to push forward toward Kehat and the others. The armed caravaner steps in front of her, swinging his crude club, strutting. In the crowd they are urging him on, saying, "Even Shevah's hatchlings threaten us with violence, eh?" Instead of preparing his fists, Kehat turns his side to the club, vulnerable, to show he will not attack. But the crowd only pushes closer, and jeers louder.\n\nSo the caravaner advances. And when he prepares his first swing-- drawing his club back to strike Kehat across the shoulders-- he cracks your hatch-sister across the head.\n\nShe collapses like a bundle of broken sticks.\n\n[[The crowd roars.|It was a murder.]]
<<set $creation = $creation + 1>>"Out beyond the deepest part of the sea," Paha says, "the water curls up to meet the sky. Once our god lived in the Citadel; now our god swims in the sky and watches down from the stars."\n\nYou push your hands across the stone and feel lines and dots which may be sea-currents, stars, comets, spinning together in a mad blend of earth and ocean and heavens.\n\n"Our god lives and bleeds for us in the sky. Our god remembers our past and keeps hope for our future. Our god's hide is rent with wounds, but our god's eyes are whole, and they see us well enough down here." \n\nYou press your hands against the stone. You find a dense trip of hatches and holes, like the lines eels carve in bloated sharkbeast corpses.\n\n<<if $spear>><<choice "How small our lives are." "It a churning crowd, full of people shouting and striking blows.">><<endif>>\n<<choice "Who walks without the haf." "It is a line of solitary footprints in the sand.">>\n<<choice "Who writes our histories." "It is written script.">>\n<<choice "Why we are here." "It is a row of post-holes set in a muddy bank.">>\n<<choice "When all things rot away." "Perhaps it is that-- a trail of hungry mouths, eels in the water.">>
The weight of your clinging hatchmate pulls you further from the light.\n\nThere's a long couple moments in which you continue to beat your free limbs hopelessly against gravity. Then your vision darkens, and things become quite confused.\n\nNothing seems quite real. You either //notice// or //decide// that the water is filled with danger, with disembodied teeth and eyes, chasing and biting. A great rubbery eye like the top of a massive jellyfish buffets against you and scrapes you with its slippery lids. You have been shrunk to the size of a nematode. A deep voice shouts relentlessy inside your very skull.\n\nAnd suddenly Paha is speaking.\n\n[[I wake.|Resuscitated.]]
<<if $spear>>While the others repack the sledges, you hide beside the booth, pressing your eyes shut. Whenever you see the body, your heart makes a breathless flop.\n\nThere are steps beside you. Kehat's voice speaks your name. "You understand why I left it behind," he says. "When you bring out your weapon, there is no way to put it away again." Guilt crushes you again, and you sob. "Hush," he says, "Stop crying." He sits beside you and talks about peace.\n\nHe is a great warrior, a mountain. He cracked the club across his knee, but he wanted only peace. "Forgive me," you say.\n\n"I already have," he says.\n\nThe sledges pull past you, out the gates. You and Kehat turn your eyes aside when the final sledge passes. Your hatch-sister is riding it, bundled in blankets, tied down with twine.<<else>>While the others repack the sledges, you hide beside the booth, pressing your eyes shut. Whenever you see the body, your heart makes a breathless flop.\n\nThere are steps beside you. Kehat's voice speaks your name, but you cannot find a way to answer.\n\nHe sits beside you. "<<if $fought>>We cannot always save the ones we love with fighting," he says. "<<endif>><<if $warrior>>Not even the bravest warrior can do anything against the tide." <<endif>><<if $poet>>No song can explain it. There is no poetry here." <<endif>> <<if $haf>>He shakes his head. "The haf is our refuge, for when nothing else is right." <<endif>><<if $religion>>He shakes his head. "God brings us no justice. We bring it ourselves, and only sometimes."<<endif>>\n\nThe sledges pull past you, out the gates and onto the way. You and Kehat turn your eyes aside when the final sledge passes. Your hatch-sister is riding it, bundled in blankets, tied down with twine.<<endif>>\n\n[[We, too, must leave.|The way home.]]
<<set $haf = true>>When the crowd laughs and calls for more, you laugh too, and clap your hands, and lean against your brothers and sisters, and sing with them. It does not matter if you impress anyone; everyone will care for you.\n\nEach member of the haf has a place here, and each member of the haf makes room inside their hearts for the others. You do not know who laid your egg, or who first carried you out of the shell, but you know that Shevah haf will always accept you, and give you a seat here by the fire with the others.\n\nAnd though you are too young to remember the songs, too young to pronounce the elders' names, there is a knot of passion at the base of your throat that burns and itches and sets your eyes watering as you turn to see the others gathered about you. You might die for the haf, if you knew what death was.\n\n[[My passion will guide me.|My first work.]]
Reason returns to the caravan, and they see that the voice of the haf is too loud to wield in passion. The adults decide to wait for the next dawn, and hope that the killer and his caravan will pack their things and leave behind a blood-price gift before returning home.\n\nThe children have been left alone this time between the sledges, crying together. But as night begins to fall, some of the haf lean over to rub your heads or whisper assurances. And then they are gone to be quiet and watchful around the fire, while your hatchmates sleep around you.\n\nThe sky above is a moonless black, and the celestial cold reaches down from the stars to touch your face.\n\n<<if $religion>><<choice "Prayers for the dead." "I grieve: why hasn't anyone prayed for my hatch-sister?">><<endif>><<if $haf>><<choice "Faith in the haf." "I worry: the haf cannot protect us.">><<endif>>\n<<if $warrior>><<choice "The warrior's failure." "I mourn: I could not protect her, as a warrior should.">><<endif>><<if $poet>><<choice "The poet's duty." "I wonder: who will remember her, now that she is gone?">><<endif>>\n<<if $spear>><<choice "My guilt." "I am guilty. I brought the spear.">><<endif>>\n<<if $builders>><<choice "The lakefloor. "I remember: the hands that pulled me up.">><<endif>>
The floods come. New grass grows. The fisheries cull their stock. Another year has passed.\n\n<<if $caravaners and $builders>><<choice "Greylake's turmoil." "Dark news comes from the city.">><<else>><<if $caravaners>>[[My next year, I must learn with the Builders.|Among the Builders.]]<<endif>><<if $builders>>[[My next year, I must learn with the Caravaners.|Among the Caravaners.]]<<endif>><<endif>>
<<set $creation = 0>><<set $destruction = 0>>The haf says that Paha has cleaned and carved the foundation-stones so many times that she knows them all by touch. When she recites the stories aloud, her fingers trace lines in the air, as if she feels them beneath her hands again. This is Paha's natural language.\n\n"Brush the stones," she tells you. Shoulder to shoulder with a child you cannot recognize, you blindly push back trailing weeds and feel the carvings beneath your fingertips. They are cushioned by a soft carpet of silt.\n\nPaha floats motionless, her voice the very voice of shadow, and recites the tales aloud as the children scour sediment from the stones. "Long ago," she says, "our god lived in the Citadel beyond the delta."\n\nYou feel grooves and channels beneath the silt. Long lines stretch left and right. Other lines intersect them at sharp angles.\n\n<<choice "How the gods made us." "It is a carving of a fish.">>\n<<choice "How the gods fought each other." "It is a carving of a spear.">>\n<<choice "How the city was built." "It is a carving of a city wall.">>\n<<if $poet>><<choice "How the legends were written." "It is a scroll of papyrus-paper.">><<endif>><<if $warrior>><<choice "How the land was won." "It is a sea-coffin for a fallen monarch.">><<endif>>
While the fire starts, Kehat and some others leave the camp and walk across the square. You sit up, and rub crusts from your eyes. The other children are rising, too, but no one has anything to say. You do not lean together. There is no point in it.\n\nThe killer's haf fled in the night, and left behind as a blood-price. The adults come walking back across the square through the morning fog, bearing cases, kegs, and baskets full of oiled cloth and jellied meats.\n\n<<choice "Out the gates." "I am outraged.">>\n<<choice "Out the gates." "I expected nothing better.">>
<<set $creation = $creation + 1>>"The haf is everything. Think of a bundle of reeds tied together," Paha says. "Each reed is weak. Each reed is nothing. Once it is plucked, it dies and rots. But a bundle of reeds is strong. It can become a wall or a floor."\n\n<<if $haf>>Paha's words give shape to something you feel as if you already know. When you sit among the people of the haf, you feel stronger and braver. <<if $caravaners>> Other hafs are strange and dangerous; yours is kind and just.<<else>>You wonder if all hafs are like this, or if your haf has something precious and special, to make it greater than others.<<endif>> You feel that it would be good to make your haf great, to build great things for it, <<if $poet>>to write songs about it,<<else>>to fight for it,<<endif>> to see it grow larger and mightier.<<else>>You wonder for a moment if the haf is greater than the gods. Which is greatest? Paha never says. You must serve both worlds. Perhaps both worlds are the same. Perhaps there is a greater haf, and perhaps the gods are in it? Or just the one, your god? <<if $gongbold>>You resolve to ask Paha later.<<else>>You hope Paha will bring it up.<<endif>><<endif>>\n\nYou press your hands against the stone and find a dense strip of hatches and holes, like the lines eels carve in bloated sharkbeast corpses.\n\n<<choice "Who walks without the haf." "It is a line of solitary footprints in the sand.">>\n<<choice "Who writes our histories." "It is written script.">>\n<<choice "Why we are here." "It is a row of post-holes set in a muddy bank.">>\n<<choice "When all things rot away." "Perhaps it is that-- a trail of hungry mouths, eels in the water.">>\n<<if $spear>><<choice "How small our lives are." "It a churning crowd, full of people shouting and striking blows.">><<endif>>
As Paha passes her dim waterlight across the stones, the carvings blossom into sudden clarity between your hands.\n\nYou see the two gods, consorts, mates, stretched like banners across columns of deep-grooved script. Below the words you see marching rows of ancient people in elaborate dress, sometimes cowering, sometimes exulting. Their cities burn and their armies march. Great works rise and crumble beneath the gods' scaly bellies. Their eyes are dark holes bored into the stone. Their jaws are locked on each other's flanks.\n\nIn the short lit moments when you can still clearly see the gods' hooked barracuda jaws and bulging eyes, you feel a slight electric panic. You draw your hand back, as if the carvings themselves held something of their malevolence. But then the light moves on, down the row of stones, and the words and pictures blur. You catch no more than a few disconnected phrases-- you see the glyph for 'haf', and for the city Greylake. Paha and your hatchmates move as silhouettes across the light. Then Paha's body eclipses it, and the carvings return once more to obscurity.\n\n[[The light has given me a map to this knowledge.|Hands and stone.]]
<<set $creation = $creation + 1>>"Our god saw that animals cannot give praise or build wondrous things in the water or on the earth. Our god took the animals from the ocean and took the best parts from each."\n\n"From the ocean things our god took gills. From the apes in the forest came hands and fingers. From the frogs and newts came our swimming feet. Our teeth it took from sharks. But our god gave us the eyes of gods, so that we may see and judge the world with thought and wisdom."\n\nFingers bumping against other children's hands, you scrape more sediment away. Curling lines wander across the face of the stone.\n\n<<choice "How our god may return." "They show the blood-trail of stars in the sky.">>\n<<choice "How our people were driven from the Delta." "They show woodsmoke rising from our ruined cities.">>\n<<if $religion>><<choice "How our god watches over us." "They show the sound of prayers seeking our god in the sky.">><<endif>><<if $haf>><<choice "How the haf keeps us strong." "They show songs rising from ardent throats.">><<endif>>\n<<choice "The things we make." "They show flotsam in the water.">>
As Paha's voice fades into the distance, you try to settle accounts with the cold, unyeilding stone. What story is written here? What space does it give you, in the haf and with your god? <<if $religion>>Can it tell you how to serve your deity well?<<endif>> Why will Paha not simply read to you you exactly what is written here?\n\nPaha moves about now, telling more tales. But as she speaks you hear a buzzing in your ears and sense a numbness in your head. You think you see shapes looming where none were before, and the yawning darkness around you seems suddenly filled with movement. You have been in the choking cloud for well over an hour, and breath now comes difficult.\n\n[[I should return to clear waters soon.|The journey up.]]
Around the fire at night,<<if $abandoned>> you are sick with fear and shame. <<else>> you are almost too exhausted to even eat. <<endif>>Dropping your half-emptied bowl into a friend's eager hands, you turn away from the light and stumble back to the builders' house.\n\nNo one is inside. You find a woven weed blanket and curl up beside a pile of netting. As you drift in and out of exhausted wakefulness, you wonder<<if $abandoned>> when the boy will tell the adults what you've done, when they'll come and tell you to wander. <<if $religion>>You wonder if your god will still protect you, when you're alone outside the haf.<<else>>You wonder if it would be better to kill yourself than leave the haf-- but you can't think of a way to kill yourself.<<endif>><<else>> how close you came to death, down at the bottom of the lake. You try to imagine yourself wrapped for death<<if $caravaners>>, like your hatchmate in the strange village<<endif>><<endif>>. Lying there under the net, you wonder what it would feel like to be dead.\n\nSoon, you feel a hand on your shoulder. The oldest builders have returned, and one is pulling your blanket aside. But when he sees you startle and raise your hands to cover your face he moves away, satisfied.<<if $abandoned>> You sit there, waiting for him to turn and curse you, but he doesn't.<<endif>>\n\nYou rub your eyes and look about the room. At the far end, Paha floats, gathering her reeds together for weaving. Now is your chance to speak with her.\n\n<<choice "The student and the teacher." "I ask about the stones.">>\n<<choice "Accidents." "I ask about the boy.">>\n<<if $abandoned>><<choice "The truth." "I ask for her forgiveness.">><<endif>>
<<set $creation + 1>>"Look up," Paha says. "Look at this village we have created. Imagine, how big must a city like Greylake be? And the Citadel in the sea-- how much greater?" You can still make out the vertical gloom of the nearest pile. Now that you've seen the village's mighty foundation, there is room in your mind for bigger things, for taller shadows, deeper pools. You can feel the world growing. The darkness seems to lurch around you, pulling back.\n\n"Our god can do anything," Paha's disembodied voice says. "Our god can make and destroy and travel between the sea and the sky. So what good are we for, then?" She answers her own question. "Feel the rock. Use your hands. We have our hands-- and we can build. With perserverence and good fortune, a haf can build anything. There is nothing better a haf can do for our god than to shape the world."\n\nThe cold in the water is beginning to draw the quickness from your hands and arms: it grows harder to feel the stones or to guess at the meaning of the carvings. You find an empty area, lines etched across it at seemingly random angles. It defies your understanding.\n\n<<choice "The waterlight." "The lines are too tightly woven for my fingers to interpret in the dark.">>\n<<choice "The waterlight." "My fingers are too young and inexperienced to find the meaning here.">>\n<<choice "The waterlight." "There is nothing here. Paha might be making all this up as she goes. The lines mean nothing.">>
As the sun sets, a great murmuring rises up from the fires and camps pitched around the square. Each haf prays-- some to your god, some to the other.\n\nNo one has yet prayed for your fallen sister. They have dressed her body in skins but have done no courtesy to her soul. The gods of the world are still strange to you, but you know the great peace that prayer brings. The chanting. The ear that always listens. You tell yourself to chant for your fallen hatchmate, but when you open your mouth, you find that your voice has gone, and your lips are dry.\n\nIn your nightmare, you search for your voice, but cannot find it, and cannoy pray to have it back. You look for it along a beach at dusk, stepping in the cold surf, alone. A standing-stone looms, like the ones beside the village. But where the name of your god should be carved, there is instead a blank.\n\nYou cough blank sounds into the damp sand and wake before dawn with a sore head and a dry neck. Your god has brought you no answer. Your god has not even turned an eye upon you.\n\n[[The sun is rising.|The haf's justice.]]
<<set $fought = true>>You throw yourself the crowd, but distracted hands push you away. The caravaners form a shuddering forest, like the trees atop the hills behind Shevah when the great storms hit them. You do not even reach halfway up their thighs. Your hands bounce uselessly off thier legs.\n\nWhen next you throw yourself at the crowd, a kick sends you toppling back across the ground. For a moment you lie there, blinking furious tears at the sky, but when the legs dance too close again, you must gather yourself and roll away. You can still hear your hatch-sister crying, but you cannot see her, and when you shout, your voice is drowned by shouts and the sound of stamping feet.\n\n[[I hear a voice behind me.|Kehat arrives.]]
<<set $destruction + 1>>"Do you see the village above us?" Paha asks. "The builders struggle to keep it whole. Each decade we go far out of the Delta and lumber great trees to strengthen it against the tide, and the rain, and rot. But in ordinary time, we search the land for broken wood and reshape it to our uses."\n\nYou think of all the beams and boards in the village. They are twisted and curved, cleverly jointed together in strange ways-- but you have never wondered why. "Our village sustains itself on the wreckage of the ocean," Paha says. "Perhaps what we find is some other haf's roof; perhaps it is some strange caravaners' sledge-rail. Do not scorn it. Every little good we find is a blessing from our god. And with every act of negligence, every scrap we leave behind, we do an injury not simply to the haf."\n\nA feeling of responsibility oppresses you. Seeking support in the foundation-stones, you press your hands against the rock and find a dense trip of hatches and holes, like the lines eels carve in bloated sharkbeast corpses.\n\n<<choice "Who walks without the haf." "It is a line of solitary footprints in the sand.">>\n<<choice "Who writes our histories." "It is written script.">>\n<<choice "Why we are here." "It is a row of post-holes set in a muddy bank.">>\n<<choice "When all things rot away." "Perhaps it is that-- a trail of hungry mouths, eels in the water.">>\n<<if $spear>><<choice "How small our lives are." "It a churning crowd, full of people shouting and striking blows.">><<endif>>
The following spring again, when you are a year old, the members of your hatch can no longer be rightfully called infants. Where first you were barely a handslength long, swimming feeble circles in the shallows, you are now knee-high, and old enough to learn new skills.\n\nYou are sent to learn out at different jobs in the village. Your first job is...\n\n<<choice "My first teachers are Caravaners." "among the caravan-riders, who bring Shevah's trade to neighboring towns.">>\n<<choice "My first teachers are Builders." "among the builders, who keep the village sturdy and safe.">>