The Wexamour Chronicle

They're Here

An influx of Bureau officers and serpent-mousers came up the south road this week. The office calls it a routine scouting mission. The Board asks every household on the strip to read the following and look after one another.

The Faded Lands Community Board reports that a large number of Bureau officers, with the serpent-mousers folk have taken to calling mantimousers, arrived on the strip this week and told the Board only that it was a routine scouting mission. The Board, which was never consulted, sets down five plain recommendations to keep households safe and avoid confrontations with the Bureau, urging neighbours to travel the roads together and by daylight, to keep close watch over the serpent-folk the animals were bred to scent, and to write down and report anything they see. It is the arrival the Chronicle’s MantiMouser investigation warned was weeks off, now standing on the strip’s own roads.

Three Smells That Mean Spring in the Groves

Every year I wait on the same three smells to tell me the season has turned. Here they are, in the order they come.

A Whispering Groves seasonal column. Maren Voss waits each year on three smells to know spring has come, the first warm rain off the forest floor, blossom drifting from the grove canopy, and the resin and ash of the old fire scars in the great trees. A warm, sensory piece on its surface, though beneath it the Groves’ frozen cycle shows through, a blossom that no longer falls and a burn that no longer comes, loved by a narrator who cannot see the wrongness in either.

Where to Find a Bargain on the Downs This Spring

Honey is dear and eggs are dearer, but there is still a deal to be had if you know which stall to stand at. Your thrifty guide to the season's markets.

A cheerful, practical roundup of the season’s best value at the Millhaven market: where the honey and eggs still cost too much, why the turnips are suddenly cheap, and a stall-by-stall list of where the coin goes furthest this week.

A Message to Our Readers

A note on a change in the stewardship of this paper.

The Chronicle announces that Godfrey Ashmere will take up the position of Editor, with the confidence of the paper’s proprietors and a mandate to bring its coverage into closer keeping with institutional standards. Readers are asked for their patience as changes take effect in what the paper covers and how.

Help Ikavelth Recover & Cover Her Hospital Care

ORCM Chair Stilver Lugrathe has opened a public fundraiser to cover his daughter Ikavelth’s mounting hospital and recovery costs following her admission to Grove Hospital. The campaign has drawn donations from across the region.

ORCM Chair's Daughter Hospitalised Following Domestic Disturbance

Bureau officers responded to a noise complaint at the residence of ORCM Chair Stilver Lugrathe. His daughter, Ikavelth Lugrathe, was transported to Grove Hospital following what officials have described as a domestic disagreement.

What Lies South of the Town: A Review of the Evidence, Such As We Have It

Nobody on the strip will talk about the south, and that refusal is old, and it is deliberate. So rather than collect a silence, I have gone to the maps, the old surveys, the physical accounts, and the sightings our own pages have printed, and tried to weigh what can actually be established against what is merely feared. The evidence is thin. Read together, it is also pointing somewhere, and it is not pointing at nothing.

Hollis Barrow breaks the strip’s long refusal to discuss the land south of the second creek and reviews what can actually be established about it: why the region has always declined to ask, a cartographic record that stops at the second creek by someone’s deliberate choice, unconfirmed but consistent accounts of older ruins, the spring’s disappearances, and the ghost sightings that all share a southward bearing. Weighing hearsay against confirmation, he concludes that whatever lies south, the one thing the evidence rules out is that there is nothing there at all.

The Strip Is Seeing People Who Are Not There, and It Is Seeing Them Nightly Now

A woman seated in a house that should be dark. Another who keeps pace on the Downs road and is gone when you turn. A third the children will no longer cross the creek to pass. The Board has collected the reports because somebody should, and because pretending you did not see a thing has never once made the thing leave.

The Faded Lands Community Board gathers a season’s worth of ghost sightings from across the outer reaches, now arriving faster than the Board can write them down: a richly dressed woman seated in a lit hollow house, a green-gowned figure who walks the Downs road without answering, and a silver-haired woman at the crossing the children have stopped taking. The strip is divided between those who name it and those who, in the Evernal way, would rather let it pass in silence.

The Door That Only Opens One Way: What the Chronicle Found When It Went Looking for the Reverie's Missing

Our wellness pages called it the loveliest hour in the Groves. Six weeks on, this reporter has counted at least nine people who walked out to the Misthollow lodge and have not been seen since, and one of them wrote for this newspaper.

A Chronicle investigation into The Reverie, the immersive attraction at the restored Misthollow lodge, finds a growing list of patrons who entered and never returned home, records that appear to be missing, and a proprietor who answers every question with a smile and nothing else. Among the unaccounted is the Chronicle’s own wellness correspondent, Marigold Fenn, who has filed nothing since the piece that praised the place.

The Vaelthir Hour: Stilver Lugrathe — The Man Behind the Office

Season 12, Episode 274

Sorin VanDenBerghe sits down with long-form correspondent Joey Vaelwick to discuss his three-day On Record interview with ORCM Chair Stilver Lugrathe.

Key to the City of Vaelthir Goes to Smallest Recipient on Record

In a first for the honour, civic officials have awarded the Key to the City of Vaelthir to Luna, a flood-relief volunteer the Office of Resource and Civil Management confirms is the smallest recipient in its history.

What Does When The Clocks Fell Silent Get Right and Wrong About the Silence?

The McGuire Group's landmark production is a Wexamour institution. As history, it is something else entirely.

The McGuire Group’s beloved When The Clocks Fell Silent returns to the Nascium Playhouse, and rather than review a production everyone already knows by heart, Ron Rudson turns his attention to the history it claims to retell.

One Night Only: When The Clocks Fell Silent Returns to the Nascium Playhouse

The McGuire Group brings their landmark production back for a single performance this June.

The McGuire Group’s beloved When The Clocks Fell Silent returns to the Nascium Playhouse for one night only on Tuesday, the 23rd of June.