Ashfold, the year after
A cartographer returns to a valley she thought she'd never see again.
The valley
Ashfold is a mining-town-turned-orchard in the folds of a coastal range. For four generations it shipped plum brandy down the river and received the rest of the world in postcards. Nobody there expected the fire. Nobody, in truth, expects any fire — that is the nature of fires.
Last October the ridge burnt for eleven days. The town lost its chapel, its schoolhouse, eleven homes, one tractor, and a pair of twins named Ivo and Mara who had been playing at the edge of the old forest.
When the smoke cleared, forty-three people stayed. The rest went to cousins in the capital, or to the coast.
Auren
You are Auren Hale. You were born in Ashfold in a room above the bakery and you left at nineteen to study cartography. For twenty years you have been paid, modestly, to draw shorelines and municipal boundaries for governments too tired to draw them themselves.
The letter arrives in early March. It is from your aunt Iselm, who raised you after your parents died. It reads:
The walls are still up. Most of them. I think you should come and help decide which ones to keep.
You catch the night train.
The people who stayed
Iselm
Your aunt. Seventy-one. A retired schoolteacher who has been, since the fire, the unofficial mayor of a town whose actual mayor left on the fifth day. She is patient with everyone except herself.
Caro
A cellist who moved here from the capital in 2019 to write music nobody asked for. Lost her studio and twelve years of recordings in one night. Has not stopped playing. She runs the salvage inventory.
Teo
Twelve years old. Refuses to be called a child. Knows where every loose floorboard in every surviving house is, and keeps a ledger of them, because he says somebody has to.
Dr. Halvani
The only physician. Also the only person in town who can still make the mechanical clock at the rebuilt chapel tick. The two skills are, in his view, the same skill.
Mara
She does not appear in the townspeople's census. She appears in the game.
The question Ember Line asks
What do you owe a place you left? What do you owe a place that kept being itself without you? The game does not take a position on either question. It gives you a hammer, a satchel, a chalk line, and about forty hours of daylight per chapter, and watches to see what you do with them.
Continue to Features to see how all this translates into a thing you can play, or read the devlog to see how we built it.