Faded Lands

They're Here

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Faded Lands Community Board

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.

Faded Lands

Ten Good Things That Happened on the Strip This Week

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Odette Marrow

A good-news column from the Faded Lands strip that reads, on a second look, like a dispatch from a community at war with the season. Odette Marrow counts ten small mercies, a lost $50 that turned out to be a family’s whole stolen savings, three steaks saved from a spoiling store, a pet manticore fetched from a tree by one of the new Bureau patrols, flood debris cleared only after months of volunteer labour, a relief kitchen serving its 10,000th meal and hailed as the region’s greatest success, each one sincerely offered as proof the strip has something left to be glad about, and each one quietly measuring how far it has fallen.

Faded Lands

The Strip Is Asking ORCM to Help Its Farmers

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Faded Lands Community Board

The Faded Lands Community Board has formally asked the Office of Resource and Civil Management to aid the strip’s farmers, requesting monetary relief to carry stricken families through to the next planting, clean seed for ground that will still take it, and a formal investigation into what is killing the fields. The Board also asks that a state of emergency be declared, warning that the blight, which it says began at the south road and is crawling inward, may not stay inside the Faded Lands.

Faded Lands

The Whales Are Suing Silverwolf High Over the Deepsong Tank

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Hollis Barrow, for the Faded Lands Community Board

Weeks after the auditorium tank burst during Deepsong and flooded Silverwolf High, the whales who return each season for the concert have brought a formal complaint against the school, alleging the great stage tank was faulty and unsafe and that the leap which cracked it was the same leap the tank was built to allow. Carried to the Community Board through the Song Society’s liaison to the deep, the suit asks that the tank be rebuilt to a standard the pod itself will pass, and that no whale be brought up to sing until it is. The school has not yet answered.

Faded Lands

The Council Will Hear the Farmers Whose Fields Have Died

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Faded Lands Community Board

After weeks of fields wilting across the strip, from the low farm on the south road to the spoiled stores further out, the Faded Lands town council has called a listening session for any farmer whose crop has died. It will be held at the meeting hall, and the council says it will record every account and carry the compiled record to the regional office. The notice is plain that patience out here is thin, but that a hearing is more than the strip has been offered so far.

Faded Lands

Notice: My Milk Has Soured and My Beef Has Spoiled on the Hook, and I Need Hands to Clear It

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Faded Lands Community Board

A north-edge cattle farmer posts to the board after his whole store turned overnight, the milk souring in the pail and the beef spoiling on the hooks in his cold store, something he says has never happened in his life or his father’s. He warns neighbours to go and check their own stores, and is hiring hands to help haul and bury the ruined meat before it draws sickness onto the yard.

Faded Lands

Notice: My Fields Have Wilted in a Week, and I Am Hiring Hands to Clear Them

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Faded Lands Community Board

A south-road farmer posts to the board after every row of his crop wilted and died in the space of a few days, something he says has never happened in his lifetime or his father’s, in a country where the spring has always held. He is looking for workers to help pull the dead crop and clear his fields to bare earth, and is offering fair pay and a midday meal.

Faded Lands

Silverwolf High Presents Deepsong This Wednesday, and All of the Strip Is Invited

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Wynn Castellan, Silverwolf High

The whales are back as they are every year. Silverwolf High is bringing one of them right into the auditorium this Wednesday for Deepsong and the whole of the strip is welcome. Here is the poster the Song Society asked me to put in these pages: Open the Deepsong poster (PDF) ⤢ View fullscreen Open in a new tab (PDF) For anyone who has never come, here is what it is.

Faded Lands

The Silence Broke on Both Sides This Week: Two of Them Have Begun to Scream, and One Has Come to Her Door

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Hollis Barrow, for the Faded Lands Community Board

For weeks now the horror of this thing has been how quiet. A silence on their side answering a silence on ours, refusing to make a sound worth naming. I have written before that I thought our silence was threatening. This week it stopped being the question, because their silence broke first, and it’s worse than I could’ve imagined. Start with the woman on the Downs road, the most seen of the three, the one in the green dress gone ragged at its edges and worked in hard geometric lines of gold and brown, with turquoise at her throat and wrists and her dark hair loose and moving though the evening is still.

Faded Lands

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

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Hollis Barrow, for the Faded Lands Community Board

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.

Faded Lands

You Asked Us to Write In: I Have Seen One, and She Was Walking South

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Nettie Combe

In answer to the Community Board’s call for accounts, an outer-strip woman writes in with her own sighting on the road at dusk and describes the moment she discovered that her family had each seen a figure of their own and said nothing. Laid side by side, the sightings share one detail none of them can explain away: every one of the dead was walking south, toward the blank the strip has always refused to map.

Faded Lands

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

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Hollis Barrow, for the Faded Lands Community Board

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.

Faded Lands

In Memoriam: Garrick Thornby, Who Farmed the Thin Acres and Would Not Let a Thing Lie

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Faded Lands Community Board

The outer reaches mourn Garrick Thornby, the farmer whose furious letter about Silverwolf High’s prom ran in these pages last week. He was found at his own gate, and the Board records with care that no examination was made and that those who found him remarked on how pale he was. He leaves a wife and two children. He is remembered as honest, hard-working, and devoted.

Faded Lands

Letter: Silverwolf High Hired That Thing for Prom and Sent My Daughter Home Empty

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Garrick Thornby

An outer-reaches father writes in furious about Silverwolf High’s spring prom, where the returning after-sundown DJ the board so cheerfully recommended turned out to feed on the students, and where the school had quietly charged every family a ‘hospitality levy’ for the night. He would like the coin back, and he would like the thing gone.

Faded Lands

Reminder: Silverwolf High's Spring Prom Is This Saturday, and the School Could Use a Few Hands

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Faded Lands Community Board

A reminder that Silverwolf High holds its spring prom this Saturday, along with a call for volunteer chaperones, decorators, and clean-up hands. The music, the board is pleased to report, is already taken care of.

Faded Lands

Notice: Goods Taken, Serpent-Pirate Woman, Do Not Bother Chasing

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Faded Lands Community Board

A notice from a farmer reporting goods lifted from her cellar by the serpent-pirate woman they call Rain. Practical warning to neighbours. No reward offered, as none would help.

Faded Lands

Manticore, Spitfire, Absolutely Filthy, Seeks Home That Can Keep Up

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Faded Lands Community Board

Wendigo is a four-year-old female manticore in need of a loving home. She is playful, sociable, covered in something at all times, and an absolute joy to be around.

Faded Lands

Dragon, Experienced, References Available, Seeks Mother Dragon Position

Spring Yr10 5745 P.M. ·Faded Lands Community Board

Dovah-kiin, a seventeen-year-old Ashwing dragon, is seeking full-time or seasonal placement as a Mother Dragon with a reputable clutch. He brings extensive incubation experience, a calm temperament under pressure, and his own fire suppression protocols.