Morning came squared and kind. Oakwatch blinked — . (ready) from its glass eye; the river—full but civilized—slid past Glass Isle; the horn cairns along Founders' Way hummed the same note when Jory tapped them—each a syllable in the language of ready. 🙂
— Morning Brief — Novaterra• White-Cut (Day 4 of 6): left bank, mid-sun; hollow drum check first• Return Check: litter received (sun-down) — complete• Clinic: Tomas (Millcross) — rest/steam; cough stable• Cordon: arcs steady; sand lines fresh; knee-teeth reset (non-white)• After-Sight: Ready (0/1)• Spawn Window: 3–8 days (watch)• Morale: Work-bright, watchful 🙂
Tavi had kept his word at sun-down: two cutters and a boy had returned the litter clean, rope coiled, sticks re-wrapped. They set it under the Parley Box and did a careful thing—stepped back two paces before waiting. Elara lowered white a finger—seen. Mara pressed a cup into each hand and did not say good job out loud. 🍲🙂
Now day-four stood like a ledger with blank lines. Ansel re-cut the white posts; Garran and Orla planted semicolons where the bank began to lie; Fen stood the middle like permission; Reeve Piet tucked the reserve in the shade with the patience of a door leaned on. Jory hooded the gourds, set the hollow drum on the table with its open back daring the world, and tapped the rim once: ponk.
"Remember," Elara told the wall, "two short opens help, one long ends day. Hands visible. Tongues polite."
Mara set the water bucket under white and nothing else. "Soup after," she said. "Nobody negotiates with stew." 😑
Calder and Ameline laid out clean cloth and salve. Bryn chalked a pair of sand lines at the slickest lip where tired ankles would confess early and be forgiven. Hale tucked two mouthpieces in a willow knot-hole and patted the bark like a horse.
They came quiet again.
Twelve goblins today—Mokh at point, Tavi rope token visible, two paint-striped foremen, ten with mats. No drums. They stopped at the line as if the line lived in their bones now.
Elara raised white to waist. Jory breathed two short—space, not theater. 🫡
"Hollow," Aiden said gently, tapping the drum rim.
Mokh tapped: clean ponk. Tavi tapped a stall then edge—Ras's fingers mirrored wait; left bank. Air gave back air.
A younger cutter (ears high with want) bounced the hilt of his knife against the drum's rim with the innocent malice of a boy asking if rules have corners. The sound changed—just a hair—like a consonant snuck into a vow.
Ras's head turned. "Peg in sleeve," he said without moving his mouth.
The boy blinked. A sliver of lacquered wood fell from his cuff and confessed its shape on the plank—too small to seem like a weapon, exactly the right size to write maps in drum.
Mokh didn't look at Elara. He looked at the boy. He took the peg, snapped it once (quiet), and set both halves on the open back of the hollow drum where all could see the nothing it had tried to hide. He said a word to the boy that changed his shoulders. It was not cruel. It was instruction.
Elara lowered white by a finger—seen; proceed. Jory's mouth did something that could be a smile and a sermon paired, then remembered no theater and stayed useful.
Cutting began. Reeds gave; sedge argued; mats filled. The bundle-ticks—two small taps between clusters—appeared without drum, just fingers on mat frames. Ras counted; Jory quietly mapped the ticks into a horn cheat-line that would never be blown out loud; Venn, watching like weather, wrote hungry men can do math without drums on his slate and underlined it twice.
A cutter's blade slipped and nicked a thumb. This time the foreman himself raised two fingers in the shape of two short, as if borrowing the sign from air. Calder walked out visible, rinsed, bound, said "Hurt ends" in Tavi's language, and walked back. The foreman nodded—small, private, satisfied.
Downstream, Hale flagged a shadow and Bryn sighed in a way that meant again?. Canvas, cheap mirror, handbill scraps. The boy under it had yesterday's apology on his mouth. "Broom," Bryn said. He nodded, relieved to be already halfway to honest.
— White-Cut (Day 4/6)• Foragers: 12 → 9 mats (three sent back early)• Incidents: 1 thumb nick (treated); sleeve peg found/snapped; 1 mirror nest cleared• Conduct: hollow drum respected; finger-tick counts used; no stones (ours)
Before they broke, Aiden pointed with his chin at the Green Terms board Venn had posted at the shrine yesterday: Cut tops, not roots. Eight mats full; two back early. No mats across white. Hollow drum for parley only. Two short opens help; one long ends day.
Tavi read the board the way a man reads weather: slowly, twice, then again with his knuckles. "Roots, not," he murmured, and you could see him decide to carry that home and take the argument it would buy.
Mokh glanced at the lines left on the bank where mats had slid and not ruined anything. He grunted in the language of fine and then added a hard little word that, in any tongue, means only if it keeps working.
"Day five," Elara said. "Bring two who learn salve. No drums. Knock ours."
Mokh tapped the hollow once, like a man patting a mule that hadn't kicked him. Tavi's mouth tilted toward humor and then arranged itself back into duty.
One long, Jory called—end. The mats turned and tilted on purpose to show reeds inside. Exactness is its own liturgy.
Millcross breathed better with Tomas home. Morning steam under a cloth, broth, gentle walks to the door and back. Calder set a little oiled cone at his bedside—when the cough came, he breathed through it and the air remembered to be kind. Ameline taught the braided wife how to do it with hands that already knew rope; Lucien's binders brought linen and left without acting like saints.
Ana of Silverbrook came to see the fool herself and brought needles because a woman can insult without words when she delivers a thing someone has been forgetting to buy. She scolded Tomas into a smile; he coughed less while she scolded.
"Inside the palisade?" Aiden asked later, soft, not greedy.
Tomas sat with his back to the cottage and watched dust behave. "They've got two bosses," he said, breath between words. "The paint men on the banks—count, nod, make sure nobody steals the grass afore it's grown. And a drum man with bright lacquer what likes to talk more'n he eats. He don't like the paint men much. Says rain is his messenger."
"He'll like the spawn then," Elara said, already putting that shape where a plan lives. Her jaw did the math. "Three to eight days."
Tomas scratched his beard and made a face at its patchiness. "They hang beads near the market—little ones. Not for selling. For counting. I think the beads talk to the drum when no one's watching." He shrugged. "I'm a mill man. I hear teeth turn. Some teeth turn at night."
Venn wrote bead-lanyards = silent pegs? and put a box around it. Jory's eyes went bright with new mischief he promised not to weaponize yet. 🫡
Clove drifted by, left a folded leaf on the door, and vanished like a person who refuses to own footsteps.
Your hollow shamed a sleeve-peg. Good.The next trick is beads that aren't beads.Teach your child-sun to count strings as easily as stones.— C.
Lia's cousin, drafted by destiny and an overconfident note, marched to the shrine with her child-sun and learned to count strings out loud until the rhythm got stuck in the marrow of passers-by. "One is a finger. Two makes a question. Three is work," she declared, proud and correct. 🙂
Afternoon turned to small carpentry and big patience.
Glass Isle: Émile set two thin lenses in brass so Jory's shelf could swap them without touching glass; Kessa added a silly hook that made even Hadrik smile.
Battery: Rinna cycled the crews through silent reloads in rain-gear, because weather has opinions; NO GREEDY SHOT got traced again by Mira's careful brush.
Pathfinders: Bryn set pebble stacks where mirror boys kept trying to sprout. Hale tucked a spare mouthpiece in a fence post, whistled once, and told it not to get ideas.
Clinic: Ameline finished the sedge-bite card (rinse, bind, reassure—no heroics) and drew a crude picture so pride didn't need to read.
Venn posted a small Bridge Law addendum under the optics plank:
White Immunity: No debt or credit enforcement inside white.Rope Tokens: honored by Pact signatories; forgery = fines/work-service.
Lucien read it and bowed—small, sincere. "Credit yields to law," he said. "My clerks will complain. I recommend ignoring them."
"We love ignoring clerks," Mara lied, handing him soup. 🍲
Toward evening, Rowan Three-Slash rode the far ridge with two of his glass-eating lies and watched white without smirking. Jory breathed two short—polite compress—and Rowan's riders stepped aside like dust that had learned manners. Rowan dipped his spear in the direction of Mokh's palisade and then in the direction of white—the closest thing he had to a prayer. He went away without being the story, which is growth. 😌
The Fort smoked one long sulk of smoke and then reconsidered. Rain had taught it humility; white was teaching it a more complicated grammar.
At sun-down, two cutters returned to the line without mats and set a bundle of straight, uncut reed on the plank. "For rope," Tavi said, as if embarrassed to admit the idea had occurred. "Your knots are good."
Mara tilted her head as if listening to a god who had learned to say please. "We'll make rope and brooms," she said. "Bring no drums tomorrow. Knock on ours."
Tavi tapped the hollow rim twice—not a code, just a satisfaction.
— Reed Exchange — Small Trade• Gift (Fort → Novaterra): straight reed bundle (rope/broom)• Return (Novaterra → Fort): 2 small vials sedge-bite salve (instruction written with pictures)• Note: Exchange occurred inside white; recorded under Bridge Law (non-coin)
Night put honey on the Flats. Thorn and Bramble slept under cloths like punctuation marks that know not to interrupt. Oakwatch winked — . (ready) once at the last light and shut its mouth.
Mara ladled Night Soup for watchers and binders and for a boy with broom hands still learning his road. 🍲🙂
Elara leaned her elbows on her knees and let the day sit in her bones. "They'll test at spawn," she said. "Paint men with banks and a drum-man who loves weather. We'll need the semicolons to hold and pivot."
Aiden bumped her shoulder. "And we'll need boredom," he said.
"Good arithmetic."
"Novaterra," Aiden told the cairns and the tower and the river that had learned to carry names without spending them, "we made hollow louder than cleverness, taught fingers to count without drums, and walked a man from bead-math to bread with only two short between. Spawn comes; so does work. No heroics. Just work." 🙂
The wind ran down a gourd and came out two short—make way. Sleep stepped into the path; no one charged it a coin.
— Evening Summary — Novaterra / Left Bank / Millcross• White-Cut (Day 4/6) complete; sleeve peg caught/snapped; 0 stones (ours); 1 thumb nick treated• Hollow Drum enforced (again); finger bundle-ticks observed (mapped silently)• Tomas: cough steady; breathing cone issued; family trained• Recon insight: Fort has paint-bank foremen + lacquer drum man (rain-lover); bead lanyards suspected silent pegs• Exchange: reed bundle ↔ sedge-salve vials (inside white; logged)• Cordon steady; spawn window 3–8 days; sally appetite low• Morale: Quiet-proud; white trusted; soup excellent 🙂