What is this game?
The salt-dream of the drowned city
Long ago the sea turned and took the salt city. Galleries, ledgers, whole lives went under the brine, and the salt kept them, the way salt keeps everything. You are Juno Varr, captain of the salvage tug Chioggia, in the last year before the Wheel can turn again. Varr blood carries what the Wheel remembered of the line, and each night the salt-dream takes her down through the strata of the world's memory with a pick, a lamp, and five breaths' worth of nerve.
What she digs up is what people could not take with them: a crown cut from rock salt, a child's clay whistle, a ledger with one page missing. Each find comes up wrapped in glyphs. Read it, and then choose. Wash it down to salt and glass you can spend, or pay to keep it, and the memory goes into the Journal in Ink. Between dreams Juno copies what she kept into the family journal at the galley table of the Chioggia, the Copyists' Table, and the Ink she spends there buys the better pick, the longer breath, the brighter lamp for tomorrow's dream.
But the world counts what you take. Every keep, every look ahead, every shortcut moves the Wheel, and when the Wheel climbs too far, the water starts moving again. That is the bargain the whole game turns on: the more you save, the sooner it comes.
