Sere: Crossing Taun

You are a traveler. The country you are walking to is on the far side of Taun, and the road through is the only road.

Eleven days of ordinary road end at a ridge. Below the ridge, a city fills its valley the way water fills a print — grown over completely, a long time ago, and busier than it looks. Whatever keeps its rows pruned and its water on schedule has been keeping them all along. You will walk in one side and out the other. Nothing in Taun asks you to fight it.

SERE is a prose crossing. What the road gives you:

Three surfaces. Solid bears. Shell doesn't. Void is a door. Reading costs nothing — read before you cross, and the city opens in places it doesn't advertise.

A ledger that isn't yours. Nine names in a stranger's hand, room left after most of them. The entries answer as the road introduces you.

Notes in the same hand, left exactly where you'd want them, by whoever crossed before.

Things to carry, logged flat. The meaning is the carrier's job.

An implement with three charges and more uses than charges. Spend them seldom. Spend them well.

Rest where the air stands. The city makes eddies without meaning to. The crossing holds there while you set it down.

And at the end — if you find where the road resumes — the chance to leave a note of your own. It will say what you actually did.

One route, many crossings. The keeper of the upper district reads you back. The Lattice's price for its one useful thing is a story from the road behind you — one you'll have to have lived. What you stand still for, what you break through, what you spend: the crossing remembers, and so does the note.

A crossing runs 45–90 minutes. Finding everything takes longer than one. Plays in the browser, desktop or phone. Your progress is a save code you copy and keep — the page itself does not remember you.

Part of Lai-Tamnan, a world by Hyperdense.