Massachusetts Bay

The colony is thirty six years old and it was never meant to be a colony. It was meant to be a demonstration.

The people who came in 1630 believed the English church was corrupt past reform, and rather than break with it openly they crossed an ocean to build the corrected version where nobody could interfere. Winthrop told them on the way over that they would be watched like a city on a hill, and he did not mean it as encouragement. He meant that failure would be public.

Twenty thousand came in the decade that followed. Then the civil war broke out at home, Parliament won, and the migration stopped almost overnight, because the reason to leave had gone.

Everyone in Coldharbour over forty came from England. Everyone under twenty was born here and has never seen it. That gap is the central fact of 1666 and most things grow out of it.

The covenant and the children

The founders built the church around conversion. You stood before the congregation, described the moment God took hold of you, and the congregation judged whether it was real. Pass and you were a member, your children could be baptised, and you could vote in town affairs. Fail and you sat in the same building every Sunday as an audience.

The founders passed. Their children largely did not.

By the 1650s a generation had grown up in a godly commonwealth without the crisis that made their parents godly, and the churches were running out of members. In 1662 a synod produced what everyone calls the Halfway Covenant, letting the unconverted children of members baptise their own children while withholding full membership.

It satisfied nobody. Congregations split over it and ministers resigned over it. Four years on it will still start a fight at any table in New England, and underneath it sits a question nobody can answer, which is whether the second generation has simply failed.

That is the mood an accusation of witchcraft lands in. A town already convinced it has fallen away from something is a town looking for the reason.

What has already been done to people

Not hypothetical. Procedure, with a record.

The Crown is watching now

The colony spent the civil war years effectively independent and liked the arrangement. It minted its own shilling from 1652, which was illegal, and kept stamping every coin with that same date for years to make it harder to prove how long it had been going on.

Then Charles II was restored in 1660 and began asking questions.

Two of the judges who signed his father's death warrant fled here and were hidden. Whole towns knew where they were and said nothing, which the Crown noticed. In 1664 the King sent commissioners to bring Massachusetts into line. The colony stalled them, argued jurisdiction, and outlasted them, and they went home in 1665 having achieved nothing.

So the Bay Colony has just successfully defied its king and knows there will be a next time. It makes the magistrates twitchy about anything resembling disorder, and a witchcraft trial is exactly the sort of thing London reads about.

This year

Plague took London in 1665 and word came through the summer, ship by ship.

The Dutch war is in its second year. Shipping is at risk, which means the coasting trade is at risk, which means every harbour town on this coast is poorer than it was and looking for somebody to blame.

And the number. The whole English speaking world went into 1666 expecting it to mean something, because of the beast in Revelation. Then London burned in September and a fifth of the city went with it. Word reaches the colonies in October or November by ship, and every pulpit in New England will preach on it, and every congregation will hear that the judgement has started.

The country itself

Not the tamed landscape it becomes. The woods begin where the fields stop and run without meaningful interruption to the north. There are wolves, and the towns pay bounties on them and nail the heads to the meetinghouse. The winters in this stretch of the century are savage, and a bad one kills livestock and sometimes people.

The Native nations are here and powerful. Massachusett and Pawtucket along this coast, Wampanoag to the south under Metacom, whom the English call Philip. Praying towns exist where converts live under English law, Natick being the first in 1651.

The relationship is trade, mistrust, land disputes and lawsuits. It holds for nine more years and then it does not.

Boston

Three thousand people, and the only place in New England that reads as a city.

Built on a hump of land joined to the mainland by a neck so narrow that a fortified gate closes the whole town off. Twisting streets following old cow paths, wharves down the eastern side, a windmill on the hill, and the Town House in the middle where the General Court sits and the merchants gather underneath.

The Court, the gaol, the press, the mint, the customs, the shipping. A witchcraft case out of Coldharbour is tried here, because county courts take the ordinary business and capital cases go to the Court of Assistants.

The Common on the west side is grazing ground and militia field, and it is where they hanged the Quakers. People walk their cattle across it.

Two things matter for writing. Boston is a day and a half from Coldharbour, far enough to feel like leaving and close enough to arrive without warning. And Boston is the only place on this coast where anonymity exists, because three thousand people is enough that a stranger can be nobody.

The North Shore

Salem Town is the county seat and the largest thing nearby, wealthy from fishing and trade, already fractious in a way that will matter enormously twenty six years from now. Nobody in 1666 has any reason to think about Salem twice.

Ipswich is older, richer in land, and looks down on the fishing towns.

Marblehead is fishermen and nothing else. Rough, poor, and only nominally under anyone's control.

The inland towns are new. Anything more than fifteen miles from the coast was settled within living memory and is full of people who arrived last decade.

Coldharbour sits between the fishing towns and the farming towns and is a little of both, which is why it has never been important and has never quite failed.

The name

Granted in 1631 to a company of men out of Norfolk and Suffolk, in the second wave, after the good harbours were taken.

They named it Coldharbour, which is a real name from home and appears all over England. Nobody agrees what it originally meant. The likeliest reading is a shelter with no fire in it, a place a traveller could stop and get out of the weather and nothing else.

The founders would have known that. They chose it anyway, and the town has been explaining the name to visitors ever since.

The site has a serviceable harbour that ices at the edges in hard winters, thin soil to the north that turned out better than expected, and marsh to the west that turned out worse.

What has happened here

The two men

The minister. Second holder of the office, appointed 1656 after the four year argument, and the compromise candidate rather than anyone's first choice. He knows it. He preaches the Halfway Covenant because the synod endorsed it and he does not sound convinced. Northfield thinks him weak. The Hollow thinks he is the only man in town who has ever taken their side.

The magistrate. Northfield born, holds the local commission, and decides whether a complaint gets written down and sent on to Salem or Boston. He does not want a witchcraft case, because a case brings attention and attention in 1666 means the Crown.

That reluctance is the one thing standing between an accusation and a rope. It is not principle. It is politics, and politics can change.

When those two disagree the town has a crisis. When they agree, somebody hangs.

Northfield

Good soil in the north, taken first by the men who organised the grant, and still held by their grandchildren.

Full church members, most of the town offices, and the militia's officers. Northfield pays a larger share of the minister's salary than anyone else and reminds people of it.

Accusations rarely begin in Northfield. They frequently end there, because these are the families who sign the complaint.

Bray Hollow

Inland and downhill, and both are meant literally and otherwise.

Thin acid ground that needs twice the work for half the yield. The Hollow families arrived a few years late and took what was left, and four generations of that arithmetic have produced a district that owes money to Northfield, buys grain from Northfield in bad years, and is resented for both.

Hit hardest in 1664 and hardest again in 1665. Half the district's children under ten are dead in the last two years.

Two abandoned holdings, one burnt farm nobody rebuilt, and root cellars barred from the outside on nearly every property, because a root cellar barred from the outside is not remarkable here. Everyone has one.

This is where an accusation starts.

The Neck and Shore

The coast road, the flats, the beacon, the cove.

Fishermen, and they are their own thing. Not full members, not much interested in becoming members, at sea when the congregation is seated. Tolerated because the fishery is a third of the town's income and disliked for exactly the reason that makes them useful, which is that they leave and come back and see other places.

The beacon on the headland is lit for raids and for ships in trouble. Lighting it without cause is a crime.

Harrow Woods

Begins where the fields stop and does not end.

The town has cut into the edges for timber and charcoal and abandoned the deeper parts. Wolf pits are dug along the boundary and the bounty is paid on presentation of the head.

Two places in there are older than the town and everyone avoids them without being able to say why. A split ledge with a face of stone that stays cold in August. A spring that has never frozen in thirty six winters, including 1664, when the harbour did.

The Cedar Swamp

West. Wet, trackless, and avoided by everybody including the Native villages, which the town finds reassuring and should not.

Eel weirs at the edge that somebody maintains. The town has never established who.

The twelve families

Why any of them are here

The Old World has institutions. This one does not.

There is an order in London. It is old, and it has spent centuries making the English cities survivable by keeping everyone in them accounted for. Names on a list. Permissions to move. A tribunal that meets and decides things. It works, more or less, and the price is that nothing hidden in England has been genuinely free in three hundred years.

It has never crossed the water. Not from lack of interest. An ocean is eight weeks each way in good conditions, a letter and its reply is a season, and an institution that governs by summons cannot govern what takes four months to reach.

Twice in forty years the order has sent someone. The first did not come back and nobody knows why. The second came back and reported that there was nothing out there worth the crossing, which was a lie, and he had his reasons.

So everyone hidden in New England came here to be out of reach, and got exactly that.

What they did not understand until they arrived is what they traded for it. In London you are watched by something that wants you concealed and alive, because your exposure is its exposure. In Coldharbour there is nothing above you at all. No protection, no papers, no cleanup, nobody to appeal to. The only law here is the one that hangs you.

The freedom is real. It is simply not the kind anyone wanted.

The ground was here first

The split ledge and the cold spring predate the town by a long way, and they predate the Wampanoag and the Massachusett as places anybody chose. They are where the world is thin, and they have been avoided by everyone who ever lived within walking distance, for reasons each group explains differently and none explain well.

The English cut timber to within two hundred yards of the ledge and stopped. The man who ordered the stop gave a reason about the terrain that nobody believed and nobody questioned.

The spring has not frozen in thirty six winters.

What has actually happened

1631, the first winter. Eleven died, which was considered a good result. Nine are accounted for by cold and sickness. The other two were found outdoors at a distance from the houses that nobody has ever explained, and the record lists them with the rest.

1637, Mystic. One of the seven who came back has never taken communion since and will not speak about it. The town reads this as conscience and respects him for it and leaves him alone.

What happened is that he stood at the edge of a fire that killed several hundred people in under an hour and felt something come up through the ground into him. He has spent twenty nine years not telling anyone he has been able to do things ever since. He was fifty one that day. He is eighty now. He has used it four times and regretted three.

1641. A Marbury daughter, sixteen, was sent to relatives in Ipswich in the autumn and came back in the spring changed in a way the family described as illness. She married, had children, died in 1663. Two of her grandchildren are alive in Coldharbour and neither knows why the family has always kept a barred cellar.

1652, the minister. He died quickly of something the physician could not name. It was not natural.

He had begun asking a specific household specific questions and had written some of it down. The papers went missing from the parsonage during the four years the pulpit stood empty. Whoever took them is still alive.

1659, the Quaker. He was whipped at the landing and put out of the bounds, and he was not a Quaker.

He had come up the coast asking after people by description rather than by name, and two households understood immediately what he was and arranged for him to be run out on a charge requiring no explanation. The town congratulated itself on its vigilance. Everyone knows which two households were sympathetic to him. Nobody knows they are the ones who set it up.

1664, the winter. Late in February something got out of a cellar in Bray Hollow and killed forty sheep across three properties in one night without eating any of them. The town called it wolves, paid the bounty on two heads brought in a week later, and moved on, because the alternative was thinking about it.

The family responsible has not slept properly since and has replaced the door twice.

1665, the sickness. Nineteen dead through the summer, mostly children, mostly in the Hollow.

It was ordinary sickness. Nothing was behind it and nobody caused it, and that is the most dangerous fact in Coldharbour, because the town has spent a year looking for a reason and has not found one, and a town that cannot find a reason will settle for a person.

What the town believes

Everything and nothing, which is the useful part.

Witchcraft is real and everyone knows it. It is in scripture, it is in the statute, and it has been proved in court within living memory. Nobody here would call themselves superstitious for believing in it any more than for believing in weather.

Folk protection is universal and unremarkable. Horseshoes over doors. A bottle of pins and hair buried under the threshold when a house is built. Marks scratched on beams near chimneys and doorways to stop anything coming in. The minister disapproves of all of it as popish nonsense and every household in his congregation does it anyway.

Some of it works. Not because the practice is correct, but because a witch put a ward there once and the neighbours copied the shape without knowing why.

Wolves are ordinary and the town pays for heads. Nobody looks twice at a large animal in the fields.

Vampires are not a category here. There is no word for it in 1666 New England and no story to reach for. A pale man who keeps odd hours is thought consumptive, or melancholic, or Catholic.

How the silence holds

There is no order here, no tenets, no tribunal, and nobody to disavow you. What there is instead is a functioning court, a capital statute, and a colony that has already hanged people for this and remembers doing it.

The English order enforces silence with a threat it has to carry out itself. Coldharbour does not need one. The silence enforces itself, because everybody hidden here understands exactly what the alternative looks like and has probably watched it once.

Which produces a strange arrangement between them.

They know about each other, mostly. A town of seven hundred cannot hide three things from each other indefinitely and they have all had years. There is no formal contact and there are no meetings. What exists is an understanding arrived at separately by each of them, which is that any one of them could end the others in an afternoon by walking to the magistrate, and would go down with them.

It is mutual hostage-taking rather than fellowship. They are not allies. They are people who cannot afford each other's mistakes.

The rules are unwritten and everyone follows them. Do not be seen. Do not be useful, because a woman whose remedies work too well is the first name anybody says. Do not be resented, because the accusation is always really about the fence line or the will or the rejected suitor. Do not be new, and do not be old, which cannot both be obeyed forever.

And the enforcement, when it comes, is the town. Nothing hidden in Coldharbour has ever been punished by anything hidden. The Quaker in 1659 was handled by getting the town to do it, and that is the model. You do not silence a problem. You give the town a reason to remove it, and you stand in the crowd while they do.

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. What takes years is learning to control the thing you already have.

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 the colonies. 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.

What comes with it is whatever it came from. 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. What they can do is 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 dead. Nobody comes back. A living body is changed and comes out the other side altered.

The backstop holds for them as it does for everybody. 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 cycle

Fifteen years in a place, ten if the place is small, and then a death or a departure and a new name somewhere else. The old ones plan the exit before they unpack.

Coldharbour is at the punishing end of this. Seven hundred people who have known each other for thirty six years, a town record that writes down every baptism and marriage and death and land transfer, and a congregation that sits in assigned seats and looks at the same faces every Sunday of its life.

Which leaves them caught between the two things that both end badly. Stay long enough for somebody to count, or arrive from nowhere in a place where everyone has kin.

The harbour is the only answer. A man who arrives by ship has a reason to be new, and a man who leaves by ship is simply gone.

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 musket, 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. Something in between, and dying again in a slower way.

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 parish with an appetite it cannot govern and no idea what has happened.

Why blood

Blood is what the thing reaches through. Stop the reaching and the whole arrangement 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 simply know exactly what they are going without, every day, forever.

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 parish'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 and three are certain.
• 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.

There are no young purebloods

The first of them stopped siring a very long time ago and every pureblood alive was made before he did. Purity and age therefore arrive together at the top, and the youngest of the five is somewhere north of five hundred years.

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.

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 musket 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 and stays himself inside it. He can move where he likes, drift up, hang in the corner of a room, pass under a door. He can speak, and it sounds like a voice with a draft behind it. Nothing touches him. He can still handle the world, badly: a candle snuffed, a latch lifted, a page turned. Anything heavier is beyond him. Wind moves him where it wants, and thresholds and wards hold him out as they hold out anything.

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. Not a disguise, but the face, the hands, the voice, the way a man favours his left knee. He has to have seen them, and the longer he has watched the better it sits. He does not get their memories. He can look like the ferryman and cannot answer a question the ferryman would know. Other vampires smell through it every time.

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 not to ash in an instant. It is more like scalding, worse the longer it runs, and it will not heal until he is 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.

Which is why the trades they can hold here all run at night. Sexton. Watchman. Ferryman at the late crossing. Ordinary keeper. Miller, when the water serves. Ship's master, and the fisheries that work the night tides.

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. The meetinghouse, the ordinary, warehouses and empty houses are open. A witch's ward over a doorway holds them as it holds anything, and better.

A ball to the brain. Puts him down for minutes, or an hour, depending on age and how recently he has fed. Then he gets up, and he knows who did it.

A stake through the heart. The same, and it has to stay in. Pull it and he wakes sooner.

Fire. Stops them. While it is burning they are finished. Put it out and he heals, and the worse the burn the longer it takes and the more blood it costs. A fire nobody puts out goes on burning, and long enough takes the heart.

So the distinction is whether somebody stands there. A house fire is survivable and they crawl out of it. A tended fire is not.

Removal of the head or the heart. The only thing that kills outright.

Starvation. Cutting one off entirely does not kill him. It desiccates him, grey and thin and eventually unable to move, and he is awake throughout. Blood brings him back however long it has been.

The tells

No aging. The one that kills them. Everything else is a bad evening.

The record. There are no likenesses here beyond a limner's portrait, which almost nobody has. What there is instead is the town book, and it is worse. Every baptism, marriage, burial, land transfer, and rate paid, entered and kept and consulted. A man who appears in 1640 and is unchanged now does not need a portrait to convict him. He needs a clerk with a good memory and an afternoon.

Up close. No pulse if you are holding the wrist. No breath unless he remembers. Skin the temperature of the room. He can eat, he hates it, and it comes back up later.

Healing in front of a witness. The most common way a new one is exposed.

The holes. Not a tell on the vampire but on everybody around him. A man who has lost three evenings this year is standing near one.

How they get caught

Not by anyone knowing what they are. There is no such category here.

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.

The Devil is the only explanation available in 1666 for anything that cannot be explained, which means the trial he gets is the trial she gets, and the statute is the same statute.

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.

Which is why they are not a society. They are relatives.

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 parish 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 parishes 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 parish. 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 that is the shape a lycan's life takes. 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.

There is nobody in there. 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.

They remember all of it from the inside, in pieces.

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. Sitting the door falls to 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 the wolves in Harrow Woods, which is saying something, because there are real ones out there and the town pays two shillings a head for them.

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, they go in the cellar every month for fifty years, and that is the entirety of 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 parish 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 muskets 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.

Wolves are ordinary here

This is the single greatest protection a lycan family has, and it will hold exactly as long as nothing is ever seen upright.

There are real wolves in Harrow Woods. The town has dug pits along the boundary and pays a bounty on presentation of the head, and the heads get nailed to the meetinghouse where everyone can see them. Livestock is killed most years and nobody investigates a dead ewe beyond deciding whose loss it was.

So the four legged form is committing an ordinary crime in an ordinary landscape. A large animal in the fields at night is a nuisance and a bill.

The beast cannot be explained by anything. Seven feet, upright, hands, and a door off its hinges from the inside. There is no category for that here, so a witness either says nothing for the rest of his life or says something and is not believed.

Which reverses the danger. The thing lycans do voluntarily and in control is the survivable one. The thing done to them against their will is the one that ends parishes.

And the word exists. The colonists brought it with them. Peter Stubbe was executed in the German lands in 1589 and Jean Grenier tried in France in 1603, both inside the memory of older people's parents, and the pamphlets crossed. A town that will hang a woman for souring milk has a precedent ready for the other thing, and it is tried under the same statute and ends the same way.

What stops them

Silver. It burns going in and the wound does not close. A silver ball out of a fowling piece 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 silver run into a mould is a thing a certain kind of old man in Bray Hollow keeps in a box and does not explain.

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 and nobody in the colonies is looking, there being nobody here to organise it.

And nobody can aim it. The 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 parish, 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 parish.

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.

The code

Not rules anybody voted on. Things families do because the families that did not are gone.

Where you go. Every family has a place. A root cellar barred from the outside, a stone smokehouse, a pit in the woods with a grate over it. Built before it is needed and kept up like a roof.

Who sits. Somebody stays outside the door until dawn and does not open it for anything, including a voice they recognise, because it will use one.

What is owed after. Whoever sat is owed. Nobody has written down what. Everybody knows.

If you get out. The family goes and finds what you did before anybody else does. Stock gets paid for quietly. A person gets decided about, and those decisions have ended families.

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.

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.

Every vampire who has tried has found this out. Some of them more than once.

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.

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 Coldharbour 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 covenant argument, the trade failing, the ships that did not come. 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 meetinghouse. 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. Puritan 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 standing. Full member, halfway, or neither. Full members had a conversion the congregation accepted and can vote in town affairs. Halfway members are the baptised children of members who never converted, and under the 1662 compromise their own children may be baptised while they themselves cannot vote. Neither means you attend, because attendance is compulsory, and you sit there as an audience.

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 doubt about the covenant, a grudge left over from 1652.

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 Puritan 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 this town 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 is mostly not coin. Pounds, shillings and pence exist, but trade runs on goods, credit and labour. The town operates on debt between neighbours, and that debt is what most accusations are actually about.

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.

Nobody has a word for vampire. The category does not exist in 1666 New England. A pale man keeping odd hours is consumptive, or melancholic, or a Catholic.

Wolves are ordinary and the town pays a bounty on the heads.

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 happening. There is no dead season here and no waiting for a mod to be in the mood. A larger arc runs at all times, it has a beginning and an end, and when it ends the next one has already started underneath it.

Everyone gets a way in. This is the part we take seriously. An arc that only works for the supernatural cast is a bad arc and gets rewritten. Every storyline is built so that an ordinary husbandman in Northfield, a fisherman off the Neck, and a witch hiding in the Hollow all have a different reason to care and a different thing they can do about it.

If an arc has been running a fortnight and your character has not been touched by it, say so. That is a fault on our end and we will fix it.

Events happen on a schedule. Not when somebody remembers. There is always a next one and you will know roughly when it lands.

Releases come through story. New species, new lore, and new regions arrive inside events rather than through an announcement. When something opens up, it opens because something happened in the fiction to open it, and you will have been there.

You may be approached. If a role in a coming event suits your character, we will contact you privately beforehand. That is an offer and never an obligation, and turning it down costs you nothing.

Major roles go to characters who fit, not to whoever is loudest or oldest. A three week old Inhabitant with the right character will get the call over a Freeman who does not fit the part.

The standing threat

Every arc sits on top of one permanent condition.

The silence here is not enforced by an institution. There is no order in the New World, no tenets, no tribunal, nobody to appeal to and nobody to clean up after you. What holds it together is that a functioning court sits a day and a half away in Boston, witchcraft is a capital felony, and this colony has already hanged people for it within living memory.

So exposure is not a setback. It is the end of a character, and often the end of several, because nobody who hangs hangs alone. The accusations come in threes and fours. They always have.

And it is always close, not as a threat the staff hold over you but structurally. A town of seven hundred where everyone is watched, where attendance is compulsory and monitored, where a woman's remedies working too well is itself evidence, and where a year of dead children has left everybody wanting a reason.

The pressure does not come from a villain. It comes from the place.

Which means the question underneath every storyline is the same one. Not whether the hidden survive the arc. Whether they survive it without being seen.

The bigger world

Coldharbour is small and the world is not.

Boston is a day and a half away and has three thousand people, a court, a gaol, and a press. It is where a case is actually tried and where anyone can be nobody.

The colonies run south and west and disagree with each other violently. Connecticut hanged four at Hartford four years ago. Rhode Island legally cannot touch you, which makes eighty miles the difference between a rope and a life.

England is eight weeks across the water, and there is an order there that has kept the hidden accounted for in its cities for three centuries. It has never crossed. Twice in forty years it has sent someone, and neither crossing went the way it was meant to.

The nations are still here and still powerful, and the land disputes that will start a war in nine years are already being argued.

And the sea brings whatever it brings. Two expected ships did not come this year.

Storylines will reach into all of it. Not all at once, and not before your characters have a reason to look.

Running now

Coming

Sketched, not spoiled.

Papers that went missing in 1652. The first minister died quickly of something the physician could not name, and he had begun writing things down. The pages left the parsonage during the four years the pulpit stood empty. Whoever took them still has them, and the current minister has started asking why the town records have a gap.

A crossing. The order in London has never bothered with the colonies. That is a decision, and decisions get revisited. If anyone comes, they will not arrive announced, and what they want will not be what they say.

Something out of the water. This is a harbour town and the sea has its own arrangements. The fishermen off the Neck have known things for years that they do not bring to the meetinghouse, because who would they tell and what would happen to them.

Something under the ledge. The English stopped cutting timber two hundred yards short of the split ledge and the man who gave the order gave a reason nobody believed. Whatever is there predates everybody and belongs to nobody.

And the war. Coldharbour has nine years. Nobody in 1666 knows that, and everybody can feel the land disputes and the trade grievances causing it. When it arrives it will use everything and everyone at once.

The turning year

Some things happen because the calendar says so and need no arc behind them.

Winter shuts the roads and empties the harbour. The Hollow gets hungry. Anything that goes wrong between December and March goes wrong with nobody able to reach anybody.

The sailing season brings strangers, news and money, and it is the only time of year a person can arrive or vanish without it being remarkable.

Court days send people to Salem and Boston and bring them back with information.

Harvest and the town meeting settle the year's arguments, or fail to.

And the Sabbath, every week. Compulsory, monitored, seated by rank. Whatever is happening in Coldharbour, everyone in it will be in the same unheated room on Sunday, looking at each other.

What we ask

Take the hook. If an arc reaches your character, engage with it. You are not obliged to do what it wants, and refusing is often the better scene, but do something.

Let it cost you. Arcs where nobody loses anything are not worth running. A character who comes through every storyline untouched stops being interesting to write against.

Bring your own. Personal plots run alongside the main arc and frequently feed it. A grudge you started in month one is exactly the sort of thing an accusation attaches itself to later.

And tell us if you are stranded. Nobody should be reading events they are not in.