Book the second — how the game answers, when there is no die to throw.
A die answered a question the table could not: what is true, and what do you learn? Council keeps the question and throws away the die. In its place stand two hands — one that takes, and one that gives. Learn these two and you have learned the game.
When a scene raises a need the table cannot simply declare true, the world answers in one of two ways, and only two. An answer is either seized — bought with something of your own — or it is given, freely, by the hand that made this world. The first is price. The second is grace.
The keeper is the god of this small creation — not a tyrant, but a maker, who set its laws and largely lets them run. Grace is the maker's one free hand: the single thing in the game not bound by the world's own rules. An answer given as grace is unearned and unpriced.
Grace cannot be bought, banked, or demanded. A good-faith struggle invites it, and hope draws it near — but nothing compels it. It may fall on the crew who tried hardest; it may fall, just as well, on the one who tried least and needed it most. It falls where it will. Yet even grace bends only so far as a thing's nature: the maker's free hand may nudge a people, but cannot make them other than what they are.
Grace is not counted. There is no pool, no token, no tally at the table's edge. It has exactly one law that binds it: mercy. If a crew is truly aground, grace comes, because the maker will not let the story drown.
And grace comes quietly. It is a nudge slid across the table, unremarked. The keeper need not announce it, and mostly should not. The crew will feel they were lucky. Let them.
Grace is not the keeper being kind against the rules. It is the one rule that kindness was allowed to keep.
Where grace is given, price is taken — by you, from you. When you must know a thing now and are willing to bleed for it, you may seize the answer and pay in the only coin the game accepts: something of your own self.
The dearest altar of price is the Water — Landis, real only in water, who trades true answers for pieces of the one who asks. But mark this well: the Water is a rare road, not a daily one. When you do go down to the water, the price climbs with each answer of a single visit:
| Asking | The price |
|---|---|
| First | A truth. Confess a secret, or commit a new fact about yourself, aloud. Canon the moment it is spoken. |
| Second | A trouble. The answer is true, and arrives lashed to a fresh complication. |
| Third | The madness bleeds. You glimpse a thing the keeper knows and you should not, and cannot say why. |
| Always | A scene. To sit with Landis costs time; the weave moves on while you do. |
Price and grace do not invent their answers on the spot. Behind any obstacle worth being stuck on lie three clues, set face-down on the table, in order.
They open in order, one at a time. Price opens the next by paying for it. Grace opens the next by giving it — most often the Nudge, for nothing.
A crew that means to pay has more than one road to the next seal — the Water, being dearest, is the one they should walk least:
The rule that binds every road: it opens the next Seal in order — never a later one, never two at once.
Sometimes a crew closes out a whole labour — a Work, a mission, an obstacle worth being stuck on — with its Seals never broken: no price paid, no grace needed. Each Seal left closed is banked as Slack: a due at the Water. The next time the crew comes to Landis, that much of his usual price is simply waived — one price forgiven for every Seal they earned — and he throws in something past the ordinary menu besides, a thing he judges cool enough for the doing, never named in advance. Slack is spent only there, only with him, and does not linger forever unspent.
Solve it yourself, and the madman remembers you the next time you're wet.