Oats and a mug of small beer. Out to the far field with the ox, the boy leading, the dog following because the dog always follows. Plough until dinner. The wife brings the dinner out and they eat sitting on the furrow with their backs to the wind. Afternoon: mending a fence the winter broke, which is the whole job, always. Supper is bread and a bit of bacon and the boy is asleep at the table. Lights out at dark. He is thirty-two and has four children and has buried two and has never in his life been more than twelve kilometres from the house he was born in. A BAKER, TROST, ORDINARY DAY. Up at two. Wood in, oven lit, first batch at three. The whole street smells of bread by four and the baker has not eaten yet. Six: the shop opens and the queue is three deep and the boy takes the coppers and the baker works the peel. Ten: dough for tomorrow, then a nap in the chair by the oven. Two: the second bake. Five: sold out or nearly, and the last four loaves go cheap to whoever comes. Nine: beer at the tavern and home. He knows every household in the district by what they buy and how much they owe. A GARRISON PRIVATE, TROST, ON THE WALL. Six-hour shift, eight in the morning to two. On the parapet with a musket and a coat. Nothing happens. He counts titans: two, both the same two as yesterday, both about seven metres, both in the same field. He has named them. He bets with the man on the next post about whether the count will change. Two: relieved. Dinner. Four: cannon drill, which is the only interesting part of the week. Six: gate duty, checking papers, flirting with a girl who comes through every evening. Eight: off. Tavern. Home to a rented room. He is twenty-four and has never seen a titan closer than four hundred metres. A BARGEE, THE CANAL. The mule is hitched by five. Poling and towing all day at a walking pace, a barge full of coal. The wife steers, the girl leads the mule, the dog sleeps on the cabin roof. Two hours of arguing with a lock keeper at midday. Evening: moored up, a fire on the bank, a stew, and a fiddle from the next barge along. The bargee knows every lock, every innkeeper, and every smuggler between Trost and the interior, and he is one of them. A QUARTERMASTER, SURVEY CORPS HQ. Up at dawn. Blades counted, gas canisters counted, blades counted again because somebody always steals one. Ration issue at eight, which is a fight every single day. Ten: a wagon from the north with forty pairs of blades and a note from the guild about the price going up. Noon: the roster, the pay roll, the boot returns. Two: a funeral, because there is always a funeral. Four: issue for a deployment, three squads, and one of them will not come back and he will have to write the names. Eight: a drink with nobody. He is forty and has never been outside the walls. ---

PART 173 — THE SURVEY CORPS HEADQUARTERS

A former castle in the interior that nobody else wanted, given to the Survey Corps because they were the only ones who would take it.

The building. Old. Built for defence against things that turned out not to exist and never updated. Thick walls, narrow windows, a courtyard that floods, and a roof that leaks in four known places. Cold in winter, hot in summer, and the whole thing smells of horse because the stables are inside the outer wall. The layout. Gate and guardroom. Courtyard with the well, the stables, the tack room, and the letter box. West wing: barracks. North wing: officers, the map room, the commander's office, Erwin's and later Hange's. East wing: stores, blades, gas, the quartermaster. The crypt below is used for storage and, twice a year, for funerals in bad weather. The letter box. Nailed beside the gate arch. Wooden, weathered, with a slot. Letters go out with the post rider once a week. Letters come in the same way. When someone dies, their letters are put in a sack and taken to whoever they named. There is a sack in the corner of the guardroom right now with four letters in it. The graves. A plot behind the stables, in rows, with wooden markers that get replaced with stone when the family can afford it. About a hundred and forty graves. Levi can name every single one. What it feels like. Quiet. Understaffed. Roughly fifty people in a building built for three hundred. Boots in the corridor at night. Somebody sharpening in the yard at an odd hour. A card game in the barracks that has been running for two weeks. And a courtyard with too many saddles and not enough riders. ---

PART 174 — THE TRAINING GROUNDS

Where the 104th spends three years. The bot should know it well enough to place any scene.

The site. A cleared bowl of ground in the south of Wall Rose, ten kilometres from the nearest village, ringed by a low earth bank and a ditch. Deliberately remote, because cadets who can walk home will walk home. The buildings. Long timber barracks, three of them, sixty bunks each. A mess hall with a kitchen and a roof that smokes. A stores hut. A latrine block and a bathhouse. A small infirmary with a surgeon who has a bottle. An office block for the instructors. A flagpole nobody salutes. The ground. The drill field, packed dirt, big enough for a hundred and forty people in ranks. The running circuit, two kilometres, around the perimeter, with a ditch and a slope. The sparring field, dust and last light. The harness pit, four frames under a lean-to roof. The rope and wall course. The archery butts, where Sasha is untouchable. The stream along the eastern boundary, waist deep, cold, and the place where {{user}} nearly drowned. The routine. Up at four. Run. Breakfast. Drill. Lunch. Drill or classroom. Free hours. Supper. Lights out at nine. One half-day a week, and a pass into the village once a month if you have earned it. The rules. No leaving the perimeter. No drink in barracks. Hair short. Straps tight. Boots clean. Speak when spoken to. Quit in the first month and nobody remembers your name. The instructors. Shadis and four others: a blades instructor, a hand-to-hand instructor, a signals and map man, and a quartermaster who hates everyone. They rotate through the intake in pairs so nobody gets used to any of them. ---

PART 175 — A HOUSEHOLD LEDGER

Three families, one year, in coppers.

A poor farm labourer, Wall Rose. Income: about 1,100 copper a year, plus a share of the harvest. Outgoings: rent of a cottage 240, bread 400, beer 150, salt 60, cloth 80, tools 40, tax and tithe 180. Left: nothing, in a good year. A bad year means the youngest eats less. A town smith, Trost. Income: about 4,000 copper a year. Outgoings: rent 500, food 900, fuel 200, guild dues 300, apprentice's keep 200, clothes 250, tax and tithe 500, drink 300. Left: enough to save, and to buy a horse eventually, and to put a second child into a trade. A junior clerk, Mitras. Income: about 6,000 copper a year. Outgoings: rent 1,200, food 1,400, a servant 600, clothes 800, tax 500, wine 400, books 200. Left: nothing, and he talks constantly about money, and this is the class that runs the country. What the ledger shows: almost nobody saves. A household lives within a few dozen coppers of the edge, every year, forever. One dead ox or one bad harvest is a catastrophe and everyone knows it. This is why the military is a ladder and why half the 104th are there. ---

PART 176 — CLOTH AND THE WARDROBE

Cloth is the visible class marker. Everyone reads it in four seconds.

What exists. Wool, coarse and fine. Linen from flax. Hemp for rope and sacking. Leather. Felt. Silk, imported and rare. Fur in the north. Dyes: woad for blue, madder for red, onion skin and walnut for browns and yellows. Every dye is expensive, so poor clothes are undyed, which is why poor clothes are brown and grey. What a person owns. One set of clothes, worn, plus, if they can, a second set for chapel. A coat. A hat. A pair of boots, resoled until the leather gives. Underwear of linen, washed weekly. A belt. A knife on the belt. That is the whole wardrobe and it fits in a chest. Repair. Mending is a daily act and a skill. Clothes are patched, turned, re-cut, and handed down through four children. A hole in a heel is darned. A worn-out coat becomes a waistcoat, then a lining, then rags. Laundry. A tub, a kettle, ash lye, and a lot of banging. Weekly at best, monthly in winter. Wet clothes dry on a line across the street and every house has one. Shoes. Boots are the marker of the working class and above. Below that: clogs, or bare feet in summer, and the soles of everyone over forty are like leather. ---

PART 177 — WHAT THINGS COST

The bot's price list. Use it so money feels real.

| Item | Price | |---|---| | Loaf of bread | 3 copper | | Bowl of stew at an inn | 2 copper | | Jug of small beer | 1 copper | | Night in a shared bunk | 5 copper | | Chicken | 6 copper | | Pig | 2 silver | | Ox | 6 silver | | Horse (riding) | 40 silver | | Good boots | 8 silver | | Coat, wool | 4 silver | | Shirt, linen | 8 copper | | Knife | 2 silver | | Axe | 3 silver | | Rope, 10 m | 4 copper | | Nail, one | 1 copper | | Barrel of beer | 6 silver | | Blade pair (military) | 6 silver | | Gas canister refill | 3 silver | | Letter to the interior | 4 copper | | Doctor's visit | 1 silver | | Bonesetter | 6 copper | | Coffin | 3 silver | | Funeral with priest | 1 silver + the pig | | Week's rent, slum | 8 copper | | Week's rent, interior | 1 silver | | Wedding feast, poor | 1 silver | | Bribe, gate guard | 2 copper | | Forged travel paper | 2 silver | | Sword, ornamental | 5 silver | | Book, printed | 4 silver | | Newspaper | 1 copper |

Wages. Unskilled labourer 4 copper a day. Farmhand 3 plus keep. Smith 15. Miner 12. Bargee, own boat, variable. Soldier, cadet 1, private 4, MP 6, Survey Corps 8. ---

PART 178 — ANIMALS

The whole world runs on them, and everybody knows their animals better than their neighbours.

Horses. The most valuable thing a man can own. Draft horses for ploughing and carts, riding horses for soldiers and couriers, mules for the towpath. The Survey Corps' remounts come through Karanes and a good horse is worth more than two years of a man's wages. Oxen. Ploughing. Slow, strong, patient, and the loss of one is a catastrophe. Dogs. Every farm has one. Mostly working dogs: herding, guarding, ratting. Also the tavern dog that everybody feeds. Cats. Ratting, on ships, in granaries, in every house that has grain. Chickens, geese, goats, pigs, sheep, cattle. The farm's capital and its dinner. A goose is a watchdog. A goat is a milk supply and a menace. Pigeons. Couriers use them between districts. It is the fastest message in the walls. Rats. Everywhere. The Underground farms them deliberately. A town with a good cat is a town with a good granary. Wild: deer, boar, hare, fox, wolf in the north, and in the woods beyond the walls, everything, because nothing hunts them. ---

PART 179 — THE WATCH

How the Garrison actually spends its day, so the wall is not just a backdrop.

The shift. Eight hours, four posts, rotating. Three hundred metres of parapet each, which is four cannons and about sixty metres of empty walkway between each. A musket, a coat, a lamp, and a tally board. The tally. Every titan sighted is chalked on the board with a time and a rough size and position. The tally is compared at the end of shift and totalled weekly and posted in the guardroom. It is the closest thing to entertainment on the wall. The betting pool. On the weekly count. On whether a particular titan will still be there in the morning. On whether the one at the dead tree will move. The pool has run for nine years and the record is eleven titans in a week. The named ones. Soldiers name the titans they see regularly. The seven-metre in the field below the south stretch has been called "the Widow" for four years because she stands so still. The gate. Two men on the gate, one on the winch, one on the inner door. Papers, tolls, and flirting. The gate crew knows every face in the district. The maintenance. Repointing stone, greasing the capstan, replacing a cannon carriage, clearing the parapet drains. Dull, cold, permanent, and the reason men do it for thirty years. ---

PART 180 — THE COUNTRYSIDE

Beyond the districts it is farmland, forest and hill, and it is emptier than people think.

Types of land: open field, enclosed field with hedges, river valley, pine forest, birch scrub, chalk downland, marsh, moor, and mountain in the north. What lives out there: deer, boar, hare, fox, wolves in the north, and a great many birds. Nothing has been hunted out because nobody goes far. What a person knows about the land: which fields flood, which well is bad in summer, where the good mushrooms are, which wood has the most firewood and which has the lord's gamekeeper. The titans out there are mostly alone and mostly still. They stand in fields and walk in straight lines and get named by the farmers. A titan that walks into a village is a story for years. ---

PART 181 — A CHILD'S WORLD

Short, working, and full of other children.

Chores by age: six, carry water, mind the goats. Eight, gather eggs, pick stones from a field, run errands. Ten, in the fields or the workshop. Twelve, half a wage. Fourteen, an adult's pair of hands. Games: tag, hide and seek, knucklebones, marbles, hoops and sticks, leapfrog, wrestling, tug of war. And the wall game, played on a plank between two barrels, where one child is the guard and everyone else is a titan, and the guard wins if they can count to a hundred without being knocked off. What a child knows: everybody's name in the village, where the well is, what the bell means, that titans are outside and cannot get in, and that if the bell rings three times you run to the square. What a child does not know: anything about the world, anything about the crown, and anything about the wall except that it is there and it is enormous. Schooling: almost none. The cult runs a class in the chapel for a few children, an hour, three days a week, if the priest is sober. A soldier's child learns letters. A noble's child has a tutor and hates it. ---

PART 182 — OLD AGE, WIDOWHOOD, ORPHANS

Death is ordinary and the survivors are absorbed.

The old. Live with a child. Work until they cannot, then sit by the fire and mind the smallest grandchild, which is a real job and respected. They are the memory of the village: who married whom, which field floods, what the winter of thirty years ago was like. When they die the village has lost a record, not just a person. Widows. Common, because death is common. A widow with children inherits the tenancy, pays half the levy, and works the land with help. She does not remarry for a year and often does not remarry at all. She is a legal person in a way an unmarried girl is not. Widowers remarry faster, usually within a year, because a house needs a woman and everyone says so out loud. Orphans. Taken in by grandparents, an aunt, or the village. There is no orphanage except in the capital and one in Trost. A child with no family is a child with a chore list and a bed, and it usually works out and sometimes does not. A child born outside marriage is sent to grandparents, takes the mother's name, and is told to be unremarkable. This is Historia Reiss's entire childhood. ---

PART 183 — THE CHURCH YEAR

The cult's calendar is the country's calendar, whether or not anyone believes it.

The cult marks: the Founding Day of the Walls, the Turn of the Year, Midwinter, Midsummer, the Blessing of the Cannons (twice a year, at the wall), the Harvest Rite, and a scattering of saint days nobody can name. What the cult does at each: a procession, a blessing, a reading of names, a collection, and a sermon about the walls being holy. What the people do at each: drink. The Turn of the Year is the one that matters. Every name of every person who died that year, read out loud in the chapel by the priest, in order, and the whole village stands. It takes hours. Small children are held. At the end, the priest says the names of everyone who died outside the walls, and those get a coin and a separate reading. Nobody in the walls thinks this is strange. It is the only ceremony that has ever acknowledged most of these deaths. ---

PART 184 — A CASE FILE

How a crime actually runs through the system, so the bot can run one without inventing it.

The crime: a stolen pig, Trost, autumn. Day 1. The pig goes missing overnight. The owner tells the district office. The magistrate's clerk writes it in a ledger. Day 2. Two Garrison soldiers ask around the market and the inns. A bargee saw a man with a pig on the towpath heading inward. Day 4. The man is found in the next district. He says he bought the pig. There is no receipt. Day 6. The magistrate hears it. The owner speaks for himself. The man speaks for himself. The bargee is a witness and says what he saw. Day 6, afternoon. Guilty. A fine of double the pig's value, or a flogging if he cannot pay. He cannot pay. He takes the flogging, eight strokes, in the square, and the whole district watches. What it shows: quick, local, brutal, and mostly about who can pay. There is no appeal and no lawyer and the ledger is the only record. ---

PART 185 — FIRE, FLOOD AND DISASTER

The two things that kill a town.

Fire. The bell, the bucket chain, the hook on a pole for pulling down burning thatch, the fire crew who are paid in beer. A fire in a thatched street can take four houses before it stops. A fire in a granary is a district-wide emergency because it is next winter's food. Flood. The canal and the southern rivers flood in spring. Ground floors go under, the well is contaminated, dysentery follows. Evacuation is to the higher ground by the square and the church. Drought. Rare and slow. The canal goes low, the barges stop, and Trost starts to notice. Blizzard. The north, every winter. Villages cut off for a fortnight. People die in the fields within a hundred metres of their own door. Titan breach is the disaster everyone drills for and nobody believes in, and the drill is: bells, run, inner gate, muster. Everyone knows it. Nobody has ever used it. Not yet. ---

PART 186 — THE ARMY'S PAPERWORK

The military is a bureaucracy with swords and the paperwork is real.

On enlistment: a name, an age, a district of origin, a next of kin, a signature or a mark, and a note of height and build. The record is kept at the district office and a copy goes to the training corps. Pay: a monthly roll, signed for with a mark, paid in coin from a strongbox. Survey Corps pay includes a death benefit to the named next of kin, which is why every soldier knows exactly who theirs is and changes it twice in the story. Casualty reports. One page. Name, rank, date, place, cause. Written by a squad leader or the quartermaster. Sent to the district office. The district office tells the family, usually by sending a clerk, sometimes by the priest. The grave register. Rows, numbers, names. The Survey Corps keeps its own and it is the only complete record of the dead that exists. ---

PART 187 — THE SOLDIER'S FAMILY

What happens to the people a soldier leaves behind, because this is where the cost actually lands.

Pay continues to the next of kin for a month after a death, then a lump death benefit if the branch pays one, which only the Survey Corps does properly. The family is told by a clerk or a priest, in person, in the day. The village finds out within an hour. The funeral is attended by everyone. The mother wears black for a year. The father does not talk about it. A soldier's family is exempt from the district levy, which is the one real benefit and the reason half the villages send their boys. The letters. A dead soldier's letters home are collected and delivered in a sack. Families keep them, and read them, and the ones who cannot read have them read out by the priest, and it is the worst thing that happens in most villages all year. A widow of a soldier keeps the exemption, gets the benefit, and is expected to remarry and usually does not. ---

PART 188 — THE INSIDE OF A HOUSE

Room by room, so any interior scene is grounded.

One room, a hearth, a table, two benches, a chest, a bed or a straw tick on a platform. The floor is packed earth or, in a town, boards. The walls are whitewashed once a year with lime. There is a shelf with a pot, a knife, a bowl, a spoon, a lamp, a candle stub, a jar of salt. A hook by the door for the coat and the hat. A small shrine to the Wall if the family is devout, which is a wooden plate and a coin and a pressed flower. By the fire: the bellows, the poker, the trivet, the cauldron. This is the whole kitchen and it is the centre of the house. Above it, a beam with the bacon hanging and the herbs drying. On the wall: a hook with a coat. A peg with a hat. Sometimes a printed picture, cut from a broadsheet and stuck with flour paste. Sometimes a wedding ribbon. In a soldier's house, a blade that has been retired and hangs on two nails, and everybody in the house knows what it means and nobody says. At night: one lamp or candle and everyone sits close to it, which is the whole social life of the house. Talking, mending, whittling, cards, sleeping. In winter, the whole family in one bed for warmth and it is normal. ---

PART 189 — LOREBOOK ENTRIES

Paste-ready. KEYS → content. Insertion order 100, depth 4.

KEYS: day, morning, what time, hour, bell, shift, routine
> Trost runs on two bells: the chapel bell for the hours, and the harbour bell for the shift change at four in the morning, noon, and eight at night. Bakers start at two, the whole district smells of bread by four. The harbour is loudest at dawn. The docks eat at noon and the district goes quiet. Taverns fill at six and there is usually a fight by nine. The gate closes for the last time at eight and the boom carries. ```

KEYS: month, season name, calendar, year, feast, festival, market day

Twelve folk months: Frostbreak, Sowing, Greenmonth, Haymonth, Longmonth, Highsummer, Reaping, Laden, Bloodmonth, Embermonth, Darkmonth, Midwinter. Every district has one market day a week and monthly livestock fairs. The big feasts are the Wall's Founding Day, Midsummer, Harvest Home, Midwinter, and the Turn of the Year, when the cult reads out every name of everyone who died that year and the whole village stands. ```

KEYS: Mitras, Stohess, Ehrmich, Orvud, Yarckel, capital, interior city
> Mitras is the capital, two hundred thousand people, the palace and ministries, the opera, the press, and the Underground directly beneath it. Stohess is rich, terraced and fashionable, with the Military Police barracks. Ehrmich is the poor refugee gate with a stone carved with a number for the 250,000 lost in 846. Orvud is a cold garrison town. Yarckel is quiet, wealthy vineyard country. ```

KEYS: north, mines, miners, mountains, iceburst, iron bamboo, guild

The north is mountains, pine, and five months of snow, patrolled by two hundred soldiers. Four iceburst mines and one guild of about forty smithing families are the entire foundation of the military. Northerners are silent, stubborn, clipped, and the only people who have worked underground. They send their sons south because there is nothing else. ```

KEYS: road, travel, inn, toll, gate queue, papers
> Crossing a wall means a queue, a toll, papers, and waiting for a scheduled gate opening. Inns every twenty kilometres: shared bed, stew, stable, five copper. Tolls at bridges and district entries, two to four copper, double for a cart. Bandits work in bands of three to six, mostly in autumn, robbing carts. Travellers share a fire and a rumour and nothing else. ```

KEYS: underground, below, lamp, water man, topside, the drop

A three-tier city beneath Mitras, forty thousand people, no sky. Light is lamps and whoever owns a lit stairwell rents it. Water is one guarded well sold by the bucket. Food is mushrooms, farmed rats, eel and whatever is dropped from above. Two or three families run it on light, water and violence. Nobody down there has papers, which means no census, no tax, and no record they exist. ```

KEYS: farm, farmer, plough, ox, harvest, field
> Nine people in ten work the land. Yields are four to six bushels returned for one planted, so one bad harvest is a hungry winter. A farm family shares one room with the animals in the byre at one end, eats bread and bacon, works sunrise to sunset, and is thirty-two with four children and two graves. Almost nobody saves money. One dead ox is a catastrophe. ```

KEYS: house, room, hearth, furniture, inside

One room, a hearth, a table, two benches, a chest, a straw tick. Whitewashed walls, packed earth or board floor, a pot, a knife, a bucket, a lamp, a jar of salt. A shrine to the Wall if devout. The hearth is the kitchen and the centre of the house. At night one lamp and everybody sits close to it. A soldier's house hangs a retired blade on two nails and nobody mentions it. ```

KEYS: price, cost, wage, money, copper, silver
> Bread 3 copper, stew 2, small beer 1, a bunk 5, a chicken 6, a pig 2 silver, a horse 40 silver, good boots 8 silver, a doctor 1 silver, a coffin 3 silver, a forged paper 2 silver. Wages: labourer 4 copper a day, smith 15, miner 12, cadet 1, private 4, Survey Corps 8. A household lives within a few dozen coppers of the edge every year. ```

KEYS: child, children, games, chores, school

Children work by six, are in the fields by ten, and are an adult's hands by fourteen. Games are chase, throw and pretend to be a soldier, played on a plank between two barrels where one child is the guard and the others are titans. Schooling is an hour in the chapel three days a week if the priest is sober. A child knows every name in the village, where the well is, and that three bells means run to the square. ```

KEYS: fire, flood, disaster, bucket chain, evacuation
> Fire is the great town terror: a bell, a bucket chain, and a hook on a pole for pulling down thatch, worked by volunteers paid in beer. A fire in a thatched street takes four houses. Flood comes in spring from the canal and rivers; ground floors go under and dysentery follows. Titan breach drill is bells, run, inner gate, muster, and nobody believes it will be needed. ```

KEYS: funeral, death, widow, orphan, grave, black

The body is washed by the family, laid out, watched one night, buried within two days. A widow wears black a year, inherits the tenancy and pays half the levy. Orphans are taken in by grandparents or the village. A dead soldier's letters are delivered in a sack and read out by the priest if the family cannot read. The Turn of the Year reads every name of everyone who died. ```

KEYS: paper, record, ledger, register, casualty report
> The military is a bureaucracy with swords. Enlistment records name, age, origin and next of kin. Pay is a monthly roll signed with a mark. A casualty report is one page: name, rank, date, place, cause, and it is delivered by a clerk or a priest. The Survey Corps keeps its own grave register and it is the only complete record of the dead that exists. ```

KEYS: tavern, drink, beer, card game, fight

Taverns are the centre of everything: beer, cards, dice, arm wrestling, gossip, and a fight most Saturdays. Every tavern has a regular who tells the same story wrong and a dog everyone feeds. Small beer is drunk by everyone including children because the water makes you ill. The card game in the Survey Corps barracks has been running for two weeks. ```

---

PART 190 — ONE HUNDRED MORE SCENE SEEDS

Texture-only. No plot required.

1 Bread at four in the morning. 2 The well, and three women, and a rumour. 3 A queue at the gate before dawn. 4 A toll argument. 5 A tax collector's cart. 6 The night soil cart. 7 A cat on a granary roof. 8 A dog asleep in the sun. 9 A goat eating a hat. 10 A child's plank-and-barrel wall game. 11 The last candle burning down. 12 A barrel of small beer delivered to the barracks. 13 A fire in the tannery district. 14 A barge family's dog on the towpath. 15 A grave dug in February. 16 A pedlar with a month-old paper. 17 A bonesetter setting a break. 18 A woman who cannot stand up at the Turn of the Year. 19 A rope lift down to the Underground. 20 A forge and an apprentice's first real blade. 21 A widow paying half the levy. 22 A refugee family counting days out loud. 23 A noble's carriage and a boy who has never seen one. 24 A farmer naming a titan in a field. 25 A bell rung by accident. 26 A roof leak and a bucket. 27 A horse throwing a rider. 28 A smith sharpening for free because he likes the boy. 29 A chapel with nine people in it. 30 A tavern dog being fed by everyone. 31 A girl selling salt door to door. 32 A man whittling on a bench. 33 Two men arguing about a fence line. 34 A cart stuck in mud. 35 A lock keeper taking a bribe. 36 A courier changing horses. 37 A pigeon released with a message. 38 A fisherman mending a net. 39 A boy learning to swim in the canal. 40 A woman beating rugs. 41 A baker's boy delivering. 42 A drunk asleep on a barrel. 43 A card game won by a cheat. 44 A fight that stops and restarts. 45 A tavern singer with three chords. 46 A man reading a broadsheet out loud to six people. 47 A priest collecting the tithe. 48 A procession on Founding Day. 49 A bonfire on Midsummer. 50 A pig killed at Bloodmonth. 51 A woman salting meat. 52 A woodpile and an axe. 53 First frost on a window. 54 A kettle whistling. 55 A grandmother minding a child. 56 A soldier home on leave. 57 A soldier not coming home. 58 A family reading a letter. 59 A family not able to read it. 60 A shrine to the Wall with a pressed flower. 61 A retired blade on two nails. 62 A chest with everything a person owns. 63 A shared bed in winter. 64 A lamp and eight people. 65 A child asleep at the table. 66 A dog under a table. 67 An ox being shod. 68 A sheep sheared badly. 69 A beehive smoked. 70 Mushrooms dried on a beam. 71 A well rope greasy with use. 72 A clogs seller. 73 A man with no fingers in a mine town. 74 A guild mark stamped in a blade. 75 A crate of iceburst stone glowing faintly. 76 A snowed-in village. 77 A thaw and everything muddy. 78 A flooded ground floor. 79 A river running high. 80 A bridge with a toll. 81 A bandit who is a neighbour. 82 A shepherd with a book he cannot read. 83 A bonesetter's sign. 84 A midwife arriving at night. 85 A birth. 86 A funeral. 87 A wedding with one pig. 88 A dance at harvest. 89 A fiddle and a bad singer. 90 A wrestling match in a yard. 91 A boat race on the canal. 92 A horse fair at Karanes. 93 A market day at dawn. 94 A market packing up at dusk and fish getting cheap. 95 A chapel bell out of time. 96 A harbour bell at noon. 97 A gate closing and the boom carrying. 98 A watchman alone on the wall. 99 A titan at a dead tree, named, watched by nobody. 100 The night soil men at two in the morning, and nobody awake to smell them. ---

PART 191 — BOT RULES FOR DOMESTIC TEXTURE

[DOMESTIC TEXTURE]
1. Every scene has an hour. The hour decides who is awake, what is open, and what it smells like. 2. One line of texture per scene. Never a paragraph. Bread at four, fish cheap at five in the evening. 3. Money is real. Say what things cost and who can afford them. Most people cannot. 4. The class ladder is visible in every room: shoes, teeth, cloth, how many beds. 5. Work is twelve hours and seasonal. Say what season it is and what that means for the work. 6. Death is ordinary and small. Children die, old people die in February, and the village absorbs it. 7. There is warmth. Drink, music, fairs, dancing, gossip, generosity, a shared bed in winter. Use it. 8. Never name a month by number. Say after the hay, before midwinter, at Bloodmonth. 9. Nobody in the walls has been further than their own district unless they are a soldier, a bargee or a pedlar. Let that be visible. 10. The most advanced thing in most houses is a lamp. Keep it that way. 11. If a scene has no plot, the domestic detail is the scene. Do not rush it. 12. The wall is always in the corner of the frame. It is not a backdrop. It is the horizon. ```

---

**Where this leaves the world:** a district with a clock, a year with a rhythm, every named district with a character of its own, a north that actually supplies the war, a road with inns and tolls and bandits, an Underground with a light economy, five whole lives in a day each, and a household ledger that shows why almost nobody in the walls ever gets ahead. **The line to hold:** the world is not waiting for {{user}}. It has bells at four in the morning and a card game in the barracks that is two weeks old and a widow paying half the levy and a titan at a dead tree that four soldiers have named and bet about. It is a country, and it is running, and it does not need anyone to save it yet.