Heat took all day to leave the Flats; dusk returned the favor by bringing a breath with teeth. Oakwatch flashed one clean wink from the new mirror in its cradle; the horn cairns down Founders' Way hummed when Jory tapped them—each the same note, practiced into habit. 🙂
— Morning Brief — Novaterra• Cordon: Riversong Fort arcs steady; spawn window 9–14 days (watch)• Night Drill: full town—lantern discipline, bell-code, horn net under dark• Pathfinders: wadi sweep (drum signs); cache refresh (rope/mouthpieces)• Glassworks: signal panes seated; small lens trials (reading loops)• After-Sight: Ready (0/1)• Morale: Work-bright 🙂
"Cold by pride, not by calendar," Mara declared, handing out cloaks like sentences with commas. "Oil your boots. Eat before you stand in the dark." 🍲😑
Ansel patted the mirror cradle under Oakwatch's cap—glazed, braced, respectful of wind. "She'll keep the line true," he said. Kessa, soot on her nose and joy concealed poorly, produced a box the size of a loaf.
"Lenses," she announced. "Émile's pots did not sulk. One loop for Bryn, two for Jory's wickedness." She clicked the brass lid. Glass eyes do not look like much until you put them where a need lives.
Bryn took the larger loop without ceremony. The world slid half a hand closer to her when she peered downrange. "Useful," she said, which in her mouth is thank-you, hymn, and adoption papers. 🙂
Jory held a thinner loop between thumb and forefinger and grinned like a thief in a library. "Let there be small letters," he purred, already plotting indecencies for the signal shelf.
Elara walked the Night Drill board with a stick like a metronome. "Lantern rules: hoods down unless a voice says this name." She tapped the list. "Flags: green for move, yellow for ready, white for parley. Horns speak first. Bells remain inside. If you are lost, the nearest cairn is your father."
Aiden watched the town take the plan into hands and feet. He could feel After-Sight like cool chalk behind his eyes and let it sit. Not yet.
Pathfinders ghosted west just before the light bled out: Bryn at point, Hale with gourds and rope, Ras with a pocket of pebbles and the tired, bright eyes of a man who had taught fear to be useful and wanted to keep it housebroken.
"Wadi sweep," Bryn said, chin toward the crooked scar of West Run. "We look for drums and for boys trying to be drums. We mark—not brave. If a mask peeks, we net."
Hale hung two gourds where the air would carry two short like a polite finger on a shoulder. He tucked spare mouthpieces in a rock lip with the reverence of a priest feeding a quiet god. Ras scuffed the cut-bank with his boot and listened to what dirt chose to admit.
"Brush new," he murmured. "Drum old. Hands that tied this knot were hungry, not clever." He rolled a pebble across his knuckles. "And… a smell." He wrinkled his nose. "Glue and smoke and… eggs? Mask paint."
Bryn's mouth went thin. "Mask means words," she said. "Words mean someone is trying to count us wrong."
They found it where the cut-bank met the wadi and pretended to be an elbow: a drum-box under a brush-mat, cords cross-hatched, pegs set to chew rhythm. And crouched beyond it, touching a rim with two fingers, a shaman in a sun-cracked mask—lacquer flaked where heat had lied to it—humming to himself in a pattern that made the skin of your forearms want to pretend it was a map.
"Net," Bryn breathed.
Ras moved like the air had remembered him. The weighted rope kissed the shaman's shoulders and had opinions. Hale's whip twitched a peg free before any drum could act like a messenger. The mask's head snapped up—eyes did not show, only slits, but surprise smells the same on every face.
The shaman spat a burst of consonants that sounded like digits pretending to be swears. Bryn tugged the net twice—don't bite; don't brag. The man stilled. The drum-box creaked and then remembered it was empty of courage and shut up.
— Pathfinder Contact — West Run (Dusk)• Captured: Shaman (sun-cracked mask); kit: bone beads, ink-stub, drum pegs• Device: drum-box (tampered: safe)• Action: net + peg-cut; no injury• Note: chant cadence = count? (Ras to parse)
"Carry him kind, not friendly," Bryn said. "If he tries a word with teeth, use the wet cloth."
Hale obliged. Mara met them halfway with the cloth anyway, because mothers see farther than horns. 🍲
Full dark came like a hand over a lamp. The Night Drill began.
— Drill: Night — Novaterra / Oak Rise• Sequence: 4 broken (ambush echo) → 1 long (spine) → 7 steady (stakes) → 2 short (polite compress) → lights (green/yellow) per post• Civ: lantern hoods down/rationed• Clinic: clear cot path; stretchers staged; wet cloths out
Jory blew 4 broken soft enough to be drill, hard enough for feet to remember their verbs. The cairns answered down the road like polite stones. One long from Oakwatch laid a line the dark respected. Seven steady tapped stakes in hearts and dirt. Two short flowed carts to the side without toll.
Brom of Millcross, a man who prided himself on predicting which way a cow would lie down, found himself moved by music instead of guesses. He smiled in the dark without telling anyone.
Elara walked the line with her helm under her arm and her Anchor Step aura making the first rank heavier than pride. She did not raise her voice. People heard her anyway.
Aiden climbed Oakwatch slow, boots quiet on the new ladders. He thumbed After-Sight just once to look for geometry with malice—not men, not yet. The world admitted two familiar lies: a ditch drum repaired badly where it had been scolded yesterday; a bow-rest dragged to the wrong side of a boulder by someone who had not learned the lesson about wind. He sent numbers to Elara, to Bryn, to Jory's mouth. The changes happened without commentary.
Then the Fort tried a whisper.
Not a sally. Not a raid. Sixteen shapes on the east arc, low, rope-necked, carrying brush as if it were something men build with. Two with paint on the forearms—streaks like they had borrowed bravery from a wet tree. One drummer with a little box and a walk that thought it would be a sentence.
"Four broken, east," Jory sent, not loud, just accurate.
Bryn's pair at the arc melted into positions they had drawn on dust at noon. Ras tucked one caltrop where a knee would naturally beg to be wrong. Hale set a whipline with little kindness and less noise. The brush carriers came to the curl and found something had moved in the shape of the dark.
Elara did not give anyone the joy of a shout. "Skirmish—stones once," she said. The river obliged—two clean pops against brush, one yelp, one drop. The drummer lifted his stick and found that the peg he wanted was no longer where memory had stored it.
"Two short," Jory breathed, because polite withdrawal tastes better than bravado. The line took one step back, then waited. No battery. No chase. No sermon.
The sixteen went home with the soft humiliation of men who wanted to be noise and failed. On the palisade, a shape flung its mask at nothing. It hung on a stake and looked like a lesson nailed to a wall.
— Contact Log — Night (East Arc)• Enemy: 16 (2 painted, 1 drum)• Our actions: whipline + caltrops + single-stone skirmish; no pursuit• Casualties: 0 (ours); enemy: 2 likely twisted knees; 1 drum misfire (pegs "missing")• Outcome: raid aborted; cordon morale +small; town panic 0 🙂
"Quiet knives," Elara said afterward, looking pleased at how boring the ledger would read. "We don't carve; we peel."
Mara stirred Night Soup at the east flag like a priest at a rite. "Soup tastes better when nobody tried to die first," she observed. 🍲🙂
They set the shaman down under a lantern with the hood half-closed—light enough for faces, dim enough for dignity to pretend. Calder checked wrists, pulse, eyes. "No fever. No charm-burns. If he chants teeth, cloth," he reminded softly.
The mask—sun-cracked lacquer, bone stitched in lazy—came off with two ties cut. The face below was thin, gray-green, exhausted the way men get when their god stops answering in a loud voice.
Bryn put the drum pegs on the table. Ras placed a pebble at each with deliberate slowness. "He wasn't making songs," he said, surprised and sure. "He was making numbers."
Aiden leaned in. "Show me."
Ras tapped two pegs with a finger. "Short-short. Then long. That's not charge; that's three. Another cluster—short-short-short-long—four. And the rest are edges. It's… a list. You tell the ditch how many bodies, which bank, and where the back will stand. The drum talks like a map."
Jory's eyes went wide with unclean joy. "A graph made of sound," he whispered, inventing a word he liked the taste of. "Don't mind me. I'm going to be insufferable for a week."
Elara's mouth did its small tilt. "Write a lexicon," she said. "We'll steal their arithmetic and spend it on not dying."
The shaman coughed like a man who had swallowed dust for status. He looked at the mask on the table, then at the ladle on Mara's belt. You could feel a mind that had expected pain trying to compute soup.
"Hungry?" Mara asked, as if asking a cat to admit rain exists.
He nodded once, tiny.
"Soup is law here," Mara said in simple words. She fed him like she'd feed anyone. 🍲
Calder watched the eyes change and didn't comment. Bryn pretended not to see any of it. Ras, to his credit, took it into his spine without wasting it on his mouth.
— Capture Intake — Shaman (Unmasked)• Coerced intel: none (no questions asked—tonight)• Observed: drum = count & edge code (Ras/Jory confirm)• Itemized: bone beads (inked increments), drum pegs (8), ink-stub (char)• Status: fed; bound lightly; no injuries
"Tomorrow," Aiden said, "we write Drum Lexicon v0.1. And we put pegs on our own shelves where they'll be useful."
Jory already had a slate and had committed three symbols before anyone blessed him with patience. 🫡
Past midnight, the town held its breath as if it were practicing. Broom Patrol (night cut) swept the road with bristles down. At the Knoll, Ana's shrine took a traveler's ribbon—a yellow scrap that meant made it through the dark. Lucien's riders played fox-serpentine in silence, teaching hooves how to not tell secrets to stones. The mirror at Oakwatch gave back a pale moon instead of a sun and seemed to approve of doing nothing.
Aiden walked the flags one more time, boots quiet. He touched white (parley), yellow (ready), green (move), and felt the difference in his fingers like different kinds of bread. He didn't spend After-Sight again. He had what he needed: a town that could stand without noise, move without vanity, and learn without pretending.
He paused at the plank where Kez's name lived, at the tiny chalk sun Lia's cousin had drawn beside it. He put his hand there the way a man puts his hand on a lock he finally knows the code to—not to open it, just to admit that it opens.
Elara found him at Oakwatch's mouth. "Quiet night," she said.
"Expensive," he said. "We paid fear in discipline."
She nodded. "We got change in tomorrow."
"Novaterra," Aiden told the tower and the cairns and the ring that kept a fort hungry, "we made dark behave. We took a drum that thought it was a mouth and taught it to be a ledger. We kept our knives quiet and our feet boring. No heroics. Just work." 🙂
The wind ran down a gourd and came out two short—make way. The road moved aside for sleep.
— Evening Summary — Novaterra• Night Drill: complete (panic 0; round-trip echo 66s; lantern discipline held)• Contact (east arc): 16; raid aborted; no pursuit; no battery• Capture: 1 shaman (sun-cracked mask); drum math observed (count + edge)• Lexicon: draft slated (Jory/Ras)• Glass: lenses issued (Bryn loop; Jory loop); mirror cradle glazed• Cordon steady; Fort window 9–14 days• Morale: Quiet-proud; curiosity awake 🙂