Book the third — how the world keeps moving even while the table sleeps.
A scene is what the crew does with their hands. A Work is what they set in motion and must then wait upon. Everything in this book is bought with the one coin the game keeps honest for everyone at once — time.
A Work is any labour too large for a single scene — a bomb built, a treaty struck, a ruin excavated, a wound healed. It is written on a card the whole table can see, and it carries three lines and no more:
Time in Council comes in like a tide, on its own, needing no one's permission. A watch is a unit of fictional time, not a unit of table time. When the keeper turns the watch, every open Work advances one — whether the crew touched it or not. A session may pass one watch, or several; a night's sleep passes a watch, and a long journey may pass more. Spend a whole scene labouring at a Work, and it takes one watch more. The counts are public.
| Tier | Watches |
|---|---|
| Small Work | 1 watch |
| A Work | 3 watches |
| Great Work | 5 watches |
A Work spends more than time; it spends the crew's finite holdings, pledged under three headings:
A stake cannot be pledged twice — and to wound a pledged stake is to stall everything pledged to it. This is how a single blow lands everywhere.
Every Great Work — and, at the keeper's discretion, some lesser Works — is declared with one sealed complication — its squall — set face-down beside the card. It breaks at the halfway watch, or sooner if the weave calls for it.
Once per session, a crew may drive a single Work one extra watch by paying one of two coins:
Note the mark of haste: a forced Work still delivers its squall.
A finished Work stops being a card and becomes a plain fact of the world. Between sessions the crew may send Work Orders — written instructions to the hands who do the labour — and the keeper answers in those hands' own voices next the table sits. Such orders turn no extra watch of their own; they come due as of the next watch the tide brings, so the world moves between sittings without the calendar running wild.
Above the Great Work stands one tier more, reserved for labours that span a whole telling, or a season. A Divine Work is not a card the crew declares; it is a weather the keeper sets moving beneath everything:
A Divine Work ends not on a watch but on a turning. Even here the one law holds: mercy. A Divine Work cannot be seized head-on; it throws off ordinary Works the crew can grasp — its Footholds, each marked on its card with a small cursive ℓ to name the greater tide it serves. Such a work moves by turns the keeper alone counts; now and then the fiction lends the crew a weatherglass — a warning read early — that a turning draws near.
How a storm speaks — a standing house style. Every squall, every beat, every hard turn is delivered as an in-fiction report on the letterhead of whoever bore it. Never an omniscient voice from the clouds. In Council, the bad news always arrives signed — witnessed, not narrated. Testimony is king.