Ten explanations failed in a row
I needed one location on the road to be empty, and I spent two days building reasons why it would be. Drawdown. Fault movement. Bad water. Heat. Transport. Ten of them, one after another, and every single one collapsed when I checked it against something real.
The tell was the pattern, not any single failure: a new constraint arrived exactly when the previous one died. That is not research. That is defending a conclusion I had inherited from my own earlier draft and never questioned.
The answer, when it came, was one line long and needed no mechanism at all — and the place is better for it.
Seven stops on the road ahead
Every place in this book is real. Every two weeks you get one of them: what is actually there — the spring, the ruin, the numbers, the coordinates you can open in a map — and the decision the book puts in front of you when you arrive.
What that decision costs, you find out when you play. Seven letters, then silence until there is something to try. Subscribers get the playable opening first.
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