“Entry the First,” Prit read aloud, his dry leaf-scrape voice carrying across the silent Hall of Witness as Noll Vey named the claims from the rail. “Claim D-01, filed the first night of November in the western cellar niche: one frayed six-inch length of greased hemp bell-cord, falsely represented to a one-eared ditch-rat as a venomous hill adder (P04). Fulfilled at dawn by a wild sun-seeking adder on the lime shelf; residual credit value, two points. Surrendered.”
Noll Vey knelt with his stone palm over the seated blue chip on the oak bar. His basalt knee-joints ground faintly against the cold flagstones, sending a dry shiver through the masonry beneath his weight. “Surrendered,” he repeated.
He remembered that first night with painful clarity: the stench of wet lime, the freezing November drizzle leaking through the broken vault, and the terror of being an unhoused core in a pile of rubble. He had heard the ditch-rat scratching at the rotted wainscot and had spun the lie out of pure panic, praying the rat would scurry away before it gnawed his tallow candle to the wick.
A tiny, almost imperceptible warmth at the very bottom of his north-wall socket—the first two points of fear-credit that had kept him from falling six feet onto the flagstones and shattering before anyone in Mere even knew he was there—winked out like a candle-end pinched between wet fingers.
