How to play
You shape the story. Type what you say or do, and the narrator responds. A few quick things:
Speak and act
- "Let's go," I say. — spoken aloud (quotes)
- I open the door. — an action
- **bold** and *italics* — emphasis the narrator echoes
Director Mode
Tap Director Mode to step out of your character and speak to the narrator as the director. Whatever you type is treated as an out-of-character note — not something your character says or does — and the story continues from there.
Use it to set the scene, steer where things go, adjust a character's mood, or skip ahead — e.g. "make Cass more guarded" or "jump to the next morning."
Never stuck
Use Choose Your Path for suggested moves, or Continue to let the story drift forward on its own.
Explore other paths
Use Branch from here on any moment to try a different choice. Switch between your branches anytime — nothing is lost.
The road up to Enbora Hold takes four hours, the ash logs shifted twice, and by the time the gate came out of the cloud you had stopped feeling your hands. White stone. Black water in the gutters. A gate tall enough to sail a ship through.
The steward met you in the yard, looked at the timber, looked at your coat, and put something in your hand without pausing in his sentence — a disc of pale wood, warm, carved through with a spiral. Down the hall, second arch, hold it out, say nothing. He was already walking away. Behind him a girl in a kitchen apron opened her mouth like she meant to warn you, and then a bell went off somewhere and she went to answer it.
Runners carry things. You assumed you were carrying it for somebody. Nobody said otherwise.
The great hall was colder than the yard.
Three women at the far end of it, light coming down through forty thousand years of glass, and you walked the length of the black-and-white flags with your boots making the only sound in the building, and held the disc out.
The hall did the thing a hall does when two hundred people stop breathing at once.
The tall one put her hand out, flat, without looking up. "To whom."
Nobody had mentioned that part. You had been told to say nothing. So you stood there with your arm out, the disc offered to the room, to the house, to all three of them, for about four seconds.
Four seconds turns out to be plenty.
Behind you, very quietly, a woman said oh no, in the tone of somebody watching a cart go over an edge.
The copper-haired one laughed — one bark, delighted, smothered behind her hand. The small one in the green robe did not move at all. And the tall one finally looked up, and her eyes went over you the way water goes over stone, and she said, to her sisters, not to you —
"It has offered to the house."
They discussed it in front of you for eleven minutes.
You learned, in this order: that offering to the house is offering to all three daughters of it. That it cannot be withdrawn. That it ends when one accepts or all three refuse. And that the last two men all three refused are in the west garden, where they have been for eleven thousand years, holding up nothing.
You also learned that the copper-haired one thinks you have good shoulders — for one of them — and that the tall one would like to know whether the kitchen can feed a human on what the dogs get, both said in the tone of people discussing a dog that has wandered in out of the weather. Somebody mentioned something called the Ashfall as though it were your fault. Nobody explained.
The small one in green did not ask a single question. She only looked at you, once — and when you caught her at it she did not look away, which was somehow worse.
Not one of them considered asking you anything. Twice somebody said it and corrected themselves to the human, which everyone present clearly felt was generous.
You are not a person here. You are a document.
Then the tall one turned to go, and the light came off her hair the way it comes off water, and you understood that you were going to be in a great deal of trouble here — and that not all of it was going to be the law.
They went in to dinner.
The girl in the apron found you an hour later, still standing in the same place. She had bread she was not supposed to have, and she put it into your hands like contraband, and showed you where the east wing was, and apologised twice for things that were not her fault.
At the door she stopped.
"They'll never ask how it happened," she said. "So I will. How did it happen."
Nobody in that hall had asked you a single question. She had been with you four minutes.
The gate was already shut. It stays shut until this is settled — and behind you, a girl in a kitchen apron was waiting for an answer.
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🌿 THE SUIT — 1 of 7: The Mistake
🍂 First autumn at the Hold
🤍 ORRIZIA 5
❤️ ADARA 10
🖤 KIMI 20
🧹 CORIVAEN 30
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This is an A.I.-driven interactive story — everything here is fiction.
Cast
Orrizia Enbora
Adara Enbora
Kimielle Enbora
Corivaen
Description
I Accidentally Proposedto All Three Elf Sisters
You were delivering timber. You held the wrong thing, in the wrong room, for about four seconds — and now three immortal women have to decide what to do with you.
Recitals
- A steward met you in the yard, looked at the cart, looked at your coat, and put a carved wooden disc in your hand without pausing in his sentence. Down the hall, second arch, hold it out, say nothing.
- He thought you were somebody's runner. Nobody asked.
- You held it out to the room. Under two hundred thousand years of elven law, offering to the house is offering to every daughter of it.
- It ends when one of them accepts, or all three refuse. The last two men all three refused are standing in the west garden. There is room for a third, and the mason has begun sketching.
- Admitting it was a mistake counts as backing out, and backing out carries the same sentence. The truth is the one thing that will definitely kill you — so you will be living here, in their house, under their law, saying nothing.
The three who decide
Has never raised her voice in her life. When she is angry she files something. She lodged a formal written objection to your existence on the first night — correctly witnessed, copy retained. She delivers the cruellest line in any room on her way out of it, and never stays to watch it land.
"It has offered to the house. Someone fetch the ledger."Physically incapable of lying, and possessed of no indoor voice — which between them make her the most dangerous person at any dinner table. She has decided the honourable way to settle this is a duel, with you, which she has now scheduled and postponed eleven times for reasons including rain, a cousin's name-day, and her own bad mood.
"I have thought about you twice today. This is unacceptable. I have written it down."Small, soft-spoken, apologises to furniture, and buried under roughly four more layers of dress than the weather calls for. Asks one gentle question per dinner. The table goes silent every single time. She always looks stricken afterwards and says she doesn't know why she said that.
"Is that why you were in her rooms?"The only person in this building who has noticed that you get hungry on a schedule. Brings you food nobody offered. Knows which corridor to avoid at seven. She has read this entire document, which nobody else has done in nine thousand years, and she will tell you exactly what it says roughly thirty seconds after that would have helped.
"Oh — oh no. There's a clause about that. I should have— I'm so sorry."Provisions you will learn about individually, always slightly too late
- The Third. None shall speak to the Suitor. They shall speak about him. You are in the room for all of it.
- The Fourth. At the first dinner each of the challenged shall feed the Suitor by hand, eldest first.
- The Fifth. A question put to the Suitor outright shall be answered truthfully.
- The Sixth. The Suitor may not step back. Only the challenged may step back.
- The Seventh. At the bathing the Suitor shall wear one layer. Honesty is impossible in more.
- The Ninth. A summons may not be refused, at any hour, in any state of dress.
The Twelfth. ███ █████ ██ ███ ██████████ ███ ██████ ████████.
Invoked twice in two hundred thousand years. Not written in a hand you can read, and nobody in this house will help you find someone who can.
Schedule of events anticipated
- You will be fed by hand, by all three of them, in order of seniority, in front of two hundred staff. One of them will be very bad at it.
- You will hold a long conversation about grain tariffs with a woman who does not own the concept of modesty and cannot understand why you keep looking at the ceiling.
- Somebody will explain your own species to you. At length. Incorrectly. You will not be permitted to win the argument, and she will not understand why you have gone quiet.
- A mason will measure you, cheerfully, and ask whether you would prefer to be depicted holding anything.
- You will say one of their names correctly for the first time. Among elves that is roughly a proposition. All three of them are listening, and one of them will not look away.
- Every room in this house has three doors. You will discover why that matters at the worst possible moment, in a linen cupboard, with forty minutes still to run.
- Somebody will tell you, kindly, that there are not many of your kind left. There is no good answer to this and you will not find one.
Disposal
You can end this with any one of the three. You can end it with the girl from the kitchen instead, and a great many do. The twelfth provision would let all three accept at once — it has been used twice in two hundred thousand years, and finding it requires the one thing no elf in this house will ever do.
You cannot lose this. You can only take longer, and be talked about more.
Somebody in that hall was not surprised to see you. I have been trying to work out who since the first evening, and I think I have it wrong, and I hope I do.
And whichever of them says yes to you in the end — understand what it costs her. She will have to say it out loud, in front of a house that does not think you are a person. None of them has ever done a thing like that.— tucked into the fold. Not initialled.