<<set $save to "Dawn">>
<p>You wake beside your wife. Your children have long grown out of notifying you of their rising, leaving the house quiet and just as reluctant to relinquish sleep as you. Cold, watery fingers of light at the window pry at your eyelids nonetheless: there is work to be done.</p>
<p>And so you brush aside your beloved’s dark hair to kiss her forehead before you slip quietly out of bed to dress for the day.</p>
<p>Which calls to you, the <<link "hunger">><<set $pov to "hunger">><<set $save to "Bite">><<goto [[Hungry Bite]]>><</link>> or the <<link "harvest">><<set $save to "Bite">><<set $pov to "harvest">><<goto [[Harvest Bite]]>><</link>>?</p>
<div id="interface">
<div id="left"></div>
<div id="ui-bar" data-passage="UIBar"></div>
<div id="p-cont">
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<div id="start-page" data-passage="TitlePage"></div>
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</div><div style="width:100%;text-align:center;padding-top:16vh;"><h3><a href="https://lapinlunaire-games.itch.io/">Lapin Lunaire Games</a></h3><h1 style="font-variant: common-ligatures historical-ligatures discretionary-ligatures;">wid ats</h1>
<<include "menulinks">></div><<link '<div id="back" title="turn back time"><span>↢</span></div>'>><<run Engine.backward()>><</link>><span class="tooltip">
<span class="hover">
<<link "saves">>
<<run UI.saves()>>
<</link>>
<<link "settings">>
<<run UI.settings()>>
<</link>>
<<if tags().includes("menu")>><<link "return" $return>><</link>><<else>><<link "menu" "menu">><</link>><</if>>
<<link "restart">>
<<run UI.restart()>>
<</link>>
</span>
<span class="delta"><<link "🝰">><</link>></span>
</span><!-- <<link '<div id="codex"><h1>Codex</h1></div>'>><<run Dialog.setup("Codex");Dialog.wiki(Story.get("Codex").processText());Dialog.open();>><</link>> -->
<<link '<div id="character"><h1>Content Warnings</h1></div>'>><<run Dialog.setup("Content Warnings");Dialog.wiki(Story.get("ContentWarning").processText());Dialog.open();>><</link>>
<<link '<div id="credits"><h1>Credits</h1></div>'>><<run Dialog.setup("Credits");Dialog.wiki(Story.get("Credits").processText());Dialog.open();>><</link>><<if Save.autosave.ok() and Save.autosave.has()>><<link "Resume">><<script>>Save.autosave.load()<</script>><</link>><</if>>
<<link "Begin" "Dawn">><</link>>
<<link "Remember">><<run UI.saves()>><</link>>
<<link "Settings">><<run UI.settings()>><</link>><p>Created by <b><a href="https://lapinlunaire-games.itch.io">LapinLunaireGames</a></b> for <b>NeoInteractives Recipe Mini Jam (2024)</b>. </p><br><br>
<ul>
<li>UI template by <a href="https://nyehilismwriting.tumblr.com/">nyehilism</a></li>
<li>Secret Darling font by <a href="https://putracetol.com/">Putracetol Studio</a>
</li>
<li>Floral vector illustrations from Canva</li>
</ul><<set $save to "Dawn">>
<<set $pov to "hunt">>
<<set $child to "child">><<set $child to "son">>
<p>Cold marble eyes follow you on your way to the breakfast table, as they always do. You pass the statues of saints and their stigmata in the usual fashion: head held high and occupied with thoughts of the mortal sufferance at your own hands.</p>
<p>The table is spotless beneath its spread: farinaceous baskets boasting flaky, delicate layers and perfectly golden-brown caramelisation from which float the aroma of butter and fine milled grain; a silver urn of coffee beside its cream and a spiralled stack of sugarcubes; slices of firm-fleshed melon arranged like a pastel sun dripping nectar and flanked by the heavy, velvet-cloaked hang of indigo grapes.</p>
<p>Quiet hands set down a fresh omelette before you, roast mushrooms spilling from folds of tender gold.</p>
<p>“The young lord wished for you to receive this.”</p>
<p>A wave of your hand and paper rustles into it; your heir’s long-stemmed hand loops over it in lashes of <<link "deep blue">><<run Dialog.setup("Taran's Letter");Dialog.wiki(Story.get("TaranLetter").processText());Dialog.open();>><</link>>.</p>
<p>Once you’ve finished your omelette, you reread your son’s letter and allow yourself the carnal quotidian indulgence of ripping apart a croissant with none of your wife’s surgical precision. The pot of jam glistens thick, seedless crimson on the knife you use to spread it over the fluttering layers of your croissant.</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "A shadow of grief passes over you with your first bite.">>
<<goto [[Hungry Bitten]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<<set $child to "daughter">>
<p>Birdsong accompanies your efforts to pad silently to the kitchen and put the kettle on. The day is calm—all the better to surprise you with the sight of bread, freshly baked, and a <<link "note">><<run Dialog.setup("Ember's Letter");Dialog.wiki(Story.get("EmberLetter").processText());Dialog.open();>><</link>> on the table beside it.<p>
<p>Another glance at the table reveals the jar of jelly and butter tucked just behind the bread in its carefully-wrapped cloth; the glass jar is still warm when you touch it, butter pooling gold around itself where the heat of being sandwiched loosely between loaf and glass has melted it.</p>
<p>Strange for your daughter to have risen so early, but she has been acting rather strange these past few days: more secretive, reticent as a tender bruise when pressed on her recent, unexplained cheer and saturninity alike. </p>
<p>Your worries flourish and wither in high-tided waves as you look over her note again, a fond smile pulling at your mouth when you see the scrawled hearts scattered around her sign-off. Even with her half a head above her mother and insisting that’s all the qualification her years need to be seen as equivalent, she’s still your little love.</p>
<p>Ember must have left recently; steam curls up from the bread when you cut yourself a slice and breathe in the ripe malty aroma that rises, angelic in its rainbow robe where the sunlight shines through, from the oat-laden crust. Its pillowy crumb soaks in the butter you glide over it, embracing a generous spoonful of luscious red jelly overtop like a swath of silk.</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "A shadow of grief passes over you with your first bite.">>
<<goto [[Harvest Bitten]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<p>Dearest Father, </p>
<p>The tour progresses well—though I am sorry to miss Taligild’s anniversary wake. I always am, you know. </p>
<p>In lighter news, I’ve discovered Aixois to be quite stunning indeed, not so sleepy and dreadfully quaint as I found it during my last trip with the fellows from the academy. I do hope this finds you near a meal; I’ve sent ahead some instructions to the estate to prepare a favourite from the region. I know your favoured pairing with tea has long been plain raspberry, but the lavender does add something.</p>
<p>My best to you and Mother.<br>
T.</p><!--"choices" widget = creates p element w/class "choice" -->
<<widget "choices" container>>
<p class="choice">
_contents
</p>
<</widget>><p>Good morning Daddy!</p>
<p>There’s bread on the table and lavender-raspberry jelly by the butter. Made it myself (Mat will tell you he helped, which is only half tricksy true. He volunteered for tasting, //I// did all the stirring.) Went out with a friend. Love you lots.</p>
<p>Em</p><p>Sweet, woodsy tartness bursts bright on your tongue and wraps itself in the soft, rich gilding of salt, cream, and yeast. Even with your concern and bittersweet recognition of time slipping by faster than you’d like, it’s impossible not to enjoy your meal.</p>
<p>Your morning warms under sunlight and your daughter’s affection, absent though she may be. Perhaps you’re brooding over nothing. Whatever Ember is clutching so close to her chest, you’ll just have to trust that she’ll come to you when she’s ready to reveal it. She’s inherited your eye for detail and her mother’s determination; you can only hope that together you’ve taught her enough about mastering caution that she knows better than to build wings out of wax if she hopes to fly to the sun.</p>
<p>A bit of jelly plops to your plate from the edge of your bread. <span class="choice"><<link "You go to wipe it up, but before you can devote yourself to another bite, a voice sounds from behind you.">><<set $save to "Hallow">><<goto [[Harvest Hallow]]>><</link>></span></p>
<p>It isn’t the jam; your chef’s attention to detail and your son’s to your preferences are as immaculate as ever. Lavender soothes the cutting edge of ripe raspberry, floral sweetness lingering heady on your tongue in the aftermath of butter.</p>
<p>Something makes you pause after you dab away the oil on your fingertips, a faint, thin smile tugging at your lips as your fingers still. Taran, with all the habits that made spoiling him a paradox of ease even before he’d gone from youngest child to eldest by virtue of being the only remaining, had at least either the good manners or sense enough not to lick his fingers clean after eating.</p>
<p>In front of you and his mother, at least. A sigh escapes you as you recall the last time you’d seen him pictured in the gossip rags that make up so much of the city’s lifeblood. That hadn’t been too difficult of a mess to handle, but still a responsibility that needn’t have landed upon your desk.</p>
<p>Perhaps this trip to the south and its bucolic climes will calm your son’s hedonistic streak into something less in need of his parents’ management.</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "Before you can devote yourself to more thought or another bite, a voice sounds from behind you.">>
<<set $save to "Hallow">>
<<goto [[Hungry Hallow]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<p>“Father?”</p>
<p>This is impossible. The world roars around you as you turn—jerk yourself around in the chair more than turn, really, but the sharp screech of its legs over the floorboards barely registers in your impossible urgency—to behold the face of your eldest child.</p>
<p>It is impossible that they stand before you, eyes clear and sharp, but there Taligild is: lips pale but not blue, the scraps of summer sky in their eyes unclouded by sickness or the chilly grave it led them to.</p>
<p>“Taligild—”</p>
<p>Something softens the spectre’s expression on the first syllable, flutters into blasé acceptance on the second, and when your breath hits the last like a bird shot out of the sky, the sun resolves the impossible face before you into that of your living heir, bright over his jaw to showcase the truth of the insouciant smile he so often wears. Something inside you shutters, sealing itself away.</p>
<p>You clear your throat and lean into vaguely irritated surprise so that it does not occur to you to feel or express embarrassment. “Ah. Welcome home. I understood your tour was to be of the grander category. What brings you back so soon?”</p>
<p>“Would it be so difficult to believe I was homesick? Hearth calls to heart.”</p>
<p>You raise an eyebrow and wipe your fingers clean on the napkin, abandoning the remainder of the jam-gilded croissant. “Aixois has turned you into a poor poet.”</p>
<p>Taran’s face slides into a smirk as he chuckles and looks away. When he speaks again, his voice robes itself once again in the indolent drawl you’re accustomed to hearing from him.</p>
<p>“A pity. But I did not seek you out without reason. There is something I wish to show you, Father.”</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "He turns, beckoning you to follow.">>
<<set $save to "Haunt">>
<<goto [[Hungry Haunt]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<p>“Daddy?”</p>
<p>You turn, wiping crumbs from your fingertips, and surprise’s petite feet slam into your gut with all the force of a stampede.</p>
<p>Your daughter stands before you, twisting the end of one pinafore string around her finger a little too tightly to be pure idle motion; relief breaks a smile over her face like sunrise and for a moment you see her as she was before she grew out of playing pretend with you and into the pair of her mother’s dancing shoes that used to be too big for her to wear while balancing her feet atop yours for a spirited whirl around the house.</p>
<p>Her braids are coiled up and pinned around her head like a slightly lopsided crown of fire, though the end of one is uncurling from its restraints to wave enthusiastically as she grins, crinkling the freckles over the bridge of her nose. </p>
<p>“What are you eating?”</p>
<p>Some of the tension slips from your shoulders. Your immediate concern at seeing her back unexpectedly after discovering her even more unexpected early departure had been that she’d stormed back home furious or fuming after a fight with whichever friend she’d been out with—but Ember is smiling and there’s a silly lilt to her voice that doesn’t warble too high the way it does when she’s trying to hide her upset.</p>
<p>“Bread and jam //somebody// must have snuck into our house,” you answer, standing and walking over to give her a hug. “Whoever made it must not have washed their hands too clean, it’s just salty enough.”</p>
<p>She laughs, high and bright like the sunshine her hair twists into flame, but takes a small, smooth step back before you can hug her. You stop where you stand, arms slowly lowering.</p>
<p>Your efforts to keep your face untouched by the crestless wave of hurt disappointment that crashes over you apparently fail; something apologetic shimmers over Ember’s face and she tugs again at her apron—your eyes must have really been drenched in sleep still to have mistaken it for one of the ruffly pinafores she’d spend so much childhood in before her younger brother’s birth had meant your wife had less energy to pleat endless quarter yards of selvage by candlelight.</p>
<p>“I wanted to show you something,” Ember says. One foot twists nervously from side to side as she tips her weight onto the ball of it and your alarm peaks again. </p>
<p>“Of course, little love. What is it?”</p>
<p>She brightens (relief and continued concern slide cold fingers down your spine) and turns, beckoning for you to follow.</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "Of course, you do.">>
<<set $save to "Haunt">>
<<goto [[Harvest Haunt]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<p>Your son’s stride is easy and confident as he leads you down the halls, kept from arrogance by the comfortable, subtle set of his shoulders; this you note with a proud strain of gladness. When he had outgrown his tutors to go off to the imperial academy, you had hoped his childhood rambunctiousness would join them in donning the unlikely robes of nostalgia, to little avail. </p>
<p>As if sensing your long-awaited relief, Taran turns to look at you. The collar of his shirt is slightly awry, fabric creased awkwardly in either haste or apathy. He isn’t wearing his anointment pendant (not particularly cause for surprise, given the libertine habits that have worn your smile into its current long-suffering state, but still vaguely disappointing in the same way of an overcast spring day). You swallow your discontent, only for a sigh to skim over you at the sight of twigs and bits of grass smeared under the fold of his collar.</p>
<p>“Just through here,” he says, and the cool gleam of his voice is so like his mother’s, so reflective of every facet of hers that you’d both hoped your children would inherit to polish their futures, that your exasperation vanishes like dew under midday sun.</p>
<p>He pauses, brow furrowing slightly as he takes in whatever has seeped into your expression. It isn’t often that you see such a flavour of guileless confusion on Taran’s features. For all your frustrations with him, he had taken like a hound to the hunt after some of the most important lessons you had to offer here in the seat of the court—and though you might wish he were a bit neater about using his skills, your son furnishes himself with influence’s curée and the means to sustain his taste for it as easily as he draws breath.</p>
<p>“Your mother will be glad to see you back as well, premature as it is. You would be wise to mind your appearance before we take a midday repast together.”</p>
<p>Your son smiles at you—it is truly unsettling how he has mastered his gaze to cut through its subject entirely, a marvel of turquoise iris and high-handed pupil. Pride and relief flood you.</p>
<p>“You humble me, Father.”</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "You follow your poor poet of a son through a dark, arching doorway.">>
<<set $save to "Waxing">>
<<goto [[Wax]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<p>You smoothed every plank that make up the bones of this house with careful hands, but the ones that you follow your daughter down tap strangely against your bare soles, sounding more like a dry branch against windowpane than solid wood meeting flesh.</p>
<p>Ember’s footsteps have been light as air since her tenth birthday when she learned how to roll her weight over her feet and land with only the softest clap of her heels from leaping like a sweetpea vine caught in the wind. Your footfalls remind you of a bear lumbering out from hibernation in comparison. </p>
<p>As if reading your thoughts, she turns and giggles, waving a hand at you to make sure you keep up. Only when the familiar blonde wood beneath your feet suddenly snaps into a velvety smoothness that you instinctively know cannot be achieved with any plane or scraper in existence do you realise as well that the footsteps you’ve been following are not quiet.</p>
<p>They are silent. </p>
<p>You pause, unease prickling at the base of your spine and leaping into thin, brittle panic when the walls shiver into elegant, long-limbed trees whose branches sway without wind. The vision of your daughter turns.</p>
<p>“Just a little farther. It's okay, Daddy. I promise.”</p>
<p>Your parents knew the Fair old tales and that they should be handed down with quiet tongues lest the things inside them take undue interest. You dressed them up in the same foggy glamour of moonless nights and bumps in the dark to whisper them to your own children, knowing that fear first dispels wisdom before yanking it close like a chip on the shoulder—and Ember knows them well. Too well to be fooled the way you had been: the consolation of it writhes in your stomach like a serpent after its own flesh.</p>
<p>The thing wearing your daughter’s face smiles and lets its teeth flash sharp against a soft voice: “You know I can speak no falsehood. As surely as you have eaten of the blood of the forest, nothing of it will seek to spill yours while you share its table.”</p>
<p>Your daughter’s hand curls elegantly through the air. “Come, father. Before impatience finds a new form for hospitality.”</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "You follow the shape of your daughter through a dark, arching doorway.">>
<<set $save to "Waxing">>
<<goto [[Wax]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<p>The room before you stretches on in aching shades of liquorice, round-edged spears of light gleaming off polished wood from some unknowable source. The sconces lining the walls are unlit; if you squint, you can catch glimpses of milky glass unfurling from the dark base like strange flowers.</p>
<p>A bell chimes, distantly.</p>
<p>A sudden pop of sap sets a fire crackling merrily in a hearth at the head of the table you could not see earlier, illuminating a table made of the same mirror-glossy wood as the floor and a stag’s head mounted on the wall directly above the flames. The glass of the stag’s eyes catch the light strangely, collecting it in milky strands like moonstone rather than scattering it back to the corners of the room. On the table awaits a feast of empty plates: shining silver and flawless porcelain present themselves to your peripheral vision like some bizarre dragon’s hoard.
<p>Your child is gone. Staring at you from a door directly across the one you entered from is a man. For a moment, his features strike something within you—a stroke of passing recognition, perhaps, or of fear brushed delicately onto your spine like wind through tall grass.</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "He takes a step towards you, and you toward him.">>
<<goto [[Gibbous]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<p>Neither of you speak at first; the flames keep silence from brewing as you take in the stranger and realise with <<if $pov is "hunger">>dry amusement<<else>>no little apprehension<</if>> that he is doing the same to you.</p>
<<if $pov is "hunger">>
<<include "Hungry Gibbous">>
<<elseif $pov is "harvest">>
<<include "Harvest Gibbous">>
<</if>><p>His frame is broad, boasting sturdiness in the same way you recall from summers spent watching your father review his rosters of labour staff and private artisans at the estate in the western plains. Those men had worn age coarsely as this one does, heavy over faintly sloped shoulders and worn garments; it had seemed to you both then as a boy and now as a man that they burned through life because their station demanded it just as yours demands a slow, distilled measure of fuel. </p>
<p>To ignite in vivacity as this man does—there is the first sign! a tension drawing his body shut like a glove around reins, a tick in the unmastered jaw, a hardening of the eyes with no superficial deflection to gloss it over—would be to destroy your own power altogether, the same genre of catastrophe as allowing a tiny spark from a careless cigarette to rouse a wildfire. The unchecked, involuntary agency of his body betrays him; were you a young man you might have felt pity. </p>
<p>Now, you feel only the tightening of throat and hackles that belongs to prey become predator. You smile and remember the first wolf your son brought down with a well-placed shot.</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "Raising a hand in greeting, you introduce yourself.">>
<<set $save to "Clearing">>
<<goto [[Clearing]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<p>His clothes are fine, heavy wool that can't have seen more than two seasons’ worth of use at most—silk flashes at you from near his throat and your wife's voice echoes in your mind, grumbling about patricians’ commissions being nearly more trouble than they were worth. The way he appraises you hums of an aristocrat’s self-assurance as well: haughtiness worn like smile lines and shrugged over the shoulders, a certain aloofness that suggests command, and an unspoken, unshakeable assumption that those commands will be promptly followed.</p>
<p>The man’s face is well-lined, pleated with echoes of consternation that speak to their evocation in ease, high stakes heated white-hot but handled with the protection only blue blood or ludicrous amounts of gold can offer. His eyes flicker over you again, blue made steel in the dim light, and opens his mouth to speak.</p>
<p>Alarm electrifies your spine and you hold a hand out. Your voice does not sound entirely your own: “Wait.”</p>
<p>His surprise boils down and scorches into irritation, so you hurry to draw out a triquetra on your palm for whatever protection faith can offer and explain. </p>
<<choices>>
<<link "“Best not share names here.”">>
<<set $save to "Clearing">>
<<goto [[Clearing]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<<if $pov is "hunger">><p>Before your breath turns to speech, the man’s eyes widen, pupils swallowed in alarm; his voice is rough, more of a bark than the order he issues: “Wait!”</p>
<p>Under your stare, he gathers some kind of composure, sketching out something with a fingertip on the inside of one palm as he speaks. </p>
<p>“Best not share names here.”</p>
<</if>>
<p>The room rattles violently. Table, chairs, logs, lights—everything groans under a sudden force that forgets to grip your legs, leaving you and the other man standing but shaken as the crash moves on, growing more distant but gaining sounds beneath its belt as it goes: a howling wind; the staggered thunder of hoofbeats; baying hounds; shouts in some strange tongue that leaves your head ringing; the crunch and rustle of dry leaves.</p>
<p>Firelight glints off the stag’s strange eyes. </p>
<<if $pov is "hunger">>
<<include "Hungry Clearing">>
<<elseif $pov is "harvest">>
<<include "Harvest Clearing">>
<</if>>
<p>Your eyes dart to it again, having adjusted to the dimness. Twelve, fourteen, sixteen—twenty-seven points branch from its antlers and spear the air, curving into a wicked crown. A greater show of prize slaughter than you’ve ever seen. You look back at the broad, tired wolf of a man with fresh consideration.</p>
<p>He could be a groundskeeper—you know from the way he studies you and your shared surroundings that this place belongs to him no more than it belongs to you—but there is something about the suspicion in his eyes, trained on the mounted stag’s head, that makes that conclusion uneasy. </p>
<p>“An impressive trophy,” you begin, and his face pales. The absence of fire makes him look older—as old as you might in his place, with your advantages stripped down to pure age rather than environment. The stag was poached, then? Or evidence of something else</p>
<p>“Eighteen tines is the rarest Monarch I’d seen before this,” you press. “It must have been a great hunt and a grander feast.”</p>
<p>You hadn’t thought it possible for his face to become any more bloodless than it already was, but the firelight renders him absolutely ashen in the wake of your gentle prompting. He draws in a breath and says, “It was not my hand that hung them there.”</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "Your interest prickles at his evasion.">>
<<set $save to "Crescent">>
<<goto [[Crescent]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>><p>Before you can do something about it, laughter unfurls from the fireplace, rich and pervasive as smoke rising from a bonfire. It slams like a gale into your frame, pushing you back a few steps until your legs hit the back of a chair and your wheeling grip finds purchase on the side of the table.</p>
<p>The stag’s glass eyes roll violently, spinning faster and faster as velvet crawls up the bareboned stalks of bone that sprout above each socket; blood wells and drips beneath the soft taupe tissue as it sheathes each branch of bone. Fire leaps from the crackle in the hearth and into the stag’s eye sockets, pocking the strange milky glass nearly to the point of shattering; the marbles shrink around their new craters, haloed by fire, and the stag shakes its severed head, setting its impossible antlers a-clatter.</p>
<p>It works its jaw, muscles that should not exist ebbing and flowing to and from atrophy, and finally bursting free of the stitches silencing it; bits of broken thread scatter like miniscule feathers, some blinking bright and swift in the fire before succumbing. The stag chuffs, black-rimmed lip ruffling around a set of something more fang than tooth, and bellows.</p>
<p>It is a call that chills your bones and sets your blood boiling beneath your skin. As the last of its echoes fade, the fire spirals from its place in the hearth, swallows the stag’s head, and recedes to reveal the soft-furred skull free from the wall and supported by a great mass of shadow and rattling vertebrae with no apparent end to where it coils heavy and pale underfoot.</p>
<p>The head shakes again as if rippling the stiffness from unseen shoulders, and snorts as its moon-pupiled eyes fix on you and the man standing on the other side of the table. </p>
<p class="choice cern">
<<link "“Welcome to my table, youngbloods.”">>
<<goto [[Sow]]>>
<<set $save to "Sow">>
<</link>>
</p>
<p>Your eyes dart back immediately, suspicions weaving together in your mind to form a tight, silken conclusion you would rather not accept. Firelight glints off too many antlers to count, thick as branches in a silent forest and sharper than any thorn.</p>
<p>You tear your gaze away from the stag’s wicked crown and look again at the strange man before you. He too had taken note of where the firelight liked to linger; his eyes leave the stag to meet yours, narrowed in faint calculation, and anxiety thrums like the heat of summer under your skin.</p>
<p>“An impressive trophy,” he muses, and your blood freezes where it runs. If your suspicions are correct—and only at the births of your children have you ever prayed harder than you do now—this man will weave ruin to share over an Old Lord’s table. “Eighteen tines is the rarest Monarch I’d seen before this.”</p>
<p>His face is wreathed in benevolent, casual encouragement, but there is something sharp under the plush coat his voice wears. Like his eyes, it becomes steel when cast in the light of the fire. </p>
<p>The man smiles as though you have become friends through the disorienting danger you find yourselves in. “It must have been a great hunt and a grander feast.”</p>
<p>The ice in your blood grips you tighter. He studies your reaction, eyes sparkling over an unchanged smile. Perhaps he does know of what he speaks, of the things he tempts from the shadows with his carefully-phrased curiosity. </p>
<p>He shifts, laying a hand casually over the back of the chair nearest him, and you realise that perhaps you are not sharing the disorientation of this danger. Perhaps he is the new form of hospitality that your daughter’s voice had warned you of.</p>
<p>You draw in a breath, acutely aware that without proper care, it could be your last. “It was not my hand that hung them there,” you tell him. </p>
<p>He only looks more amused. Fear and frustration gnaw at you, tightening your hand against your thigh. Mortal hubris has never been a good weapon to wield against the Fair Ones, let alone their justice—and if his blood runs not blue but in ancient rivers, no amount of modesty or ingenuity may save you.</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "Despair rears its head and sinks cold fangs into the thought of your daughter lost somewhere alone.">>
<<set $save to "Crescent">>
<<goto [[Crescent]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<p>The stag nods towards the table. <span class="cern">“Sit. I invite you to share my table.”</span></p>
<p>There is little other option. Wariness guides your eyes to meet that of the man across from you before snapping back to the bone-crowned stag. Slowly and in reluctant, unintentional tandem, you both sit. </p>
<p>The empty platters and dishes on the table fill with a shimmer that forces your eye away: fresh bread, loaves and slices and crescents piled as though spilling from a cornucopia; butter moulded into strange, incomprehensible shapes and pressed with flower petals; fragrant pools of vibrant jam that run over their vessels’ borders in luscious rivulets.</p>
<p>Eyes of moon and fire meet you unflinchingly. <span class="cern">“I understand this form is unsettling for those unused to gazing upon it, even those with intent strong enough to summon me. Perhaps an introduction would ease your troubled minds.”</span></p>
<p>Another wave of clattering bone fills the room as the thing settles into a sort of seat at the head of the table. </p>
<p class="cern">“I am the Hunt. I am the Harvest and its Hunger, and I am all that was hallowed before holiness knew its name. I am hound and harried both, the ancient ache of autumn and the serpent that becomes its own satiation. I am He Who Hones the Moon, the Horned King, the Undying Father of the hearth and all that it houses. Now tell me: what cause does a king before crowns have to answer mortal summons?”</p>
<p>He pauses, eyes burning a path between you and your dining partner. The lips of the stag part again, smile flashing like a scythe before the Horned King answers himself: <span class="cern">“Blood calls to blood calls to boon. The treasures of your domains have wandered into mine—and of course, the benevolence of an undying father seeks to notify those of less enduring lineage.”</span></p>
<p>The antlers rattle once more and the mirror-mooonlight gleaming in the empty space before the Horned King shapes itself into a clear but strange vision: <<if $pov is "hunger">>Taran, sleeping soundly with his arms around a young woman whose hair spills over her back in the same red curls as the man before you<<elseif $pov is "harvest">>Ember, sleeping with her head tucked over the chest of a young man with the same proud set to his features as the man before you, evident even in sleep<</if>>. Tiny wildflowers wave softly by their bare, entangled feet in the gentle sweep of a wind that sways the moss-stained tree they rest beneath.</p>
<p>Shadow dapples their faces and fades with the rest of them as the Horned King clicks his jaw into being unfleshed and back again. You can see your own shock reflected on the face of the man across from you as though on a second face of the coin fate has tossed you. Watching it distil from disbelief to immediate reckoning of anything and everything available in the situation, contours carved deep with concern, is strange, nearly stranger than all the things that have happened since you entered this space between his world and yours: it is bearing witness to a mirror without knowing if you are the reflection or the source.</p>
<p class="cern">“Ah, but I’ve been so rude, forgetting etiquette. How shall I address you, gentlemen?”</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "To your surprise, you both speak at the same time: “As what you see me for.”">>
<<goto [[Seed]]>>
<</link>>
<</choices>>
<p>The Horned King pauses; if it is possible for a disembodied, semi-skeletal stag’s head to look amused, he does, very much so. <span class="cern">“Very well. Fathers we all entered, and fathers we shall continue to be.”</span></p>
<p>Delicately, he drags a long, bone-thin breadstick from its bundle and through the edges of two lakes of jam, muddling where they meet. Between crunches, the Horned King muses, “<span class="cern">There is a reason your children’s hands took the other’s. They both seek something as close to another life as they can find—do not gaze upon me with such eyes. I speak nothing that you do not already know, even if your denial drips most devoutly.</span>”</p>
<p>You meet the reflection of your own eyes again across the table. The Horned King sighs; a brisk wind runs impatient fingers through your hair.</p>
<p class="cern">“You pace and prowl as though your lives are as enduring as my court. Do now as mortals must: <i>eat</i>. Taste one despair and spit it out so you may feed one another what your children thirst for. Find a way to keep their efforts from unravelling the other’s. Your kind have carried kin through ages dim and lustrous on the backs of endings. I offer you the chance to create a happy one.”</p>
<<choices>>
<<link "You do not touch the food, but you remember your $child’s voice.">>
<<goto [[Reap]]>>
<<set $save to "Reap">>
<</link>>
<</choices>><p>Your discussion lasts hours—perhaps more, perhaps less. It is difficult, if not impossible, to pinch the passage of time into anything knowable while you stay at the Horned King’s table. However long it is, it is spent negotiating in columns of quantified consideration: yours of your child and his of his.</p>
<p>There is the matter of that which divides you most obviously, of course, and your respective disparities regarding possession of gold and all that its weight entails. The Horned King makes no remark, but does wheeze and rattle his chain of vertebrae when it becomes clear that you and your counterpart intend to skirt around the matter to force the other’s hand to be the first revealed.</p>
<p>So you exchange a glance, one slightly harder and less prepared for situational amity than its dubious predecessors, and move on to other things: you speak of family, of location, of maturity and faith and a million things besides, until the noose has exhausted the full length of its feed and you find yourselves circling the same weary trap.</p>
<p>Again, to the same eerie gavotte the fire’s snapping provides, you stab into the dance: “And surely a man of your calibre has the means to understand—”</p>
<p>Bone clinks and the Horned King’s eyes roll; fire and full moon spin you from dizzy unease into full nausea and you fall silent.</p>
<p>“<span class="cern">What,</span>” he says in a voice like the scrape of flowers over a grave, “<span class="cern">is your purpose in circling bloodied prey without any intention to deliver its fate? I state again: you are not moons. Your phases wane, never to wax again.</span>”</p>
<p>Rot blooms lush and velvety over the jam on the table like a carpet of sage speckled with snow; the sweetness of sugar turns to sour wine. A croissant's layers unfurl into the shape of a limp hand, seed-studded pulp oozing from the gash separating fingers from palm. The crust of the bread beside it peels away from pristine, taut muscle, loaf still erect for a moment before it collapses into a pile of unskinned flesh.</p>
<p>The Horned King’s eyes roll once more. A heavy breath shudders through the room, crisp as the first flaming leaf to fall in autumn, and the food on the table restores itself. </p>
<p class="cern">“Perhaps the children are fools because they are fathered by them. Why have you come to sup at my table, fathers? What ties do your children command over you, that to seat you I had to send nature in their forms?”</p>
<p>You stare at your counterpart from the other side of the table as your answer rises within you.
<<if $pov is "harvest">>“My heart has found its happy ending. If I can give that kind of joy to my children, of course I will.”
<<else>>
“What is a father’s duty but to look after his children? Affection is a beast’s finest coat.”
<</if>>
The gaze that meets you from across the table is heavy with unspoken judgement. It settles in your chest not because you cannot comprehend his reasoning, but because you can and do.</p>
<p>The Horned King clacks in what could be approval or agitation. <span class="cern">“And so your coin stands on reeded edge. Remember: the world spins on.”</span></p>
<p>The glaze of the table’s lacquer swells up and swallows you—when the silver and shadow fade from your eyes, you sit surrounded by sun at your own table. The remnants of your morning meal lie before you, sacrament missing a single bite.</p>
<p>Your hand moves slowly towards it, some morbid curiosity skinning itself into hunger and darting along your veins.
<<link "Before you reach it, your wife bursts into the room, eyes bright and wild.">>
<<if $pov is "hunger">>
<<goto [[Hunger]]>>
<<elseif $pov is "harvest">>
<<goto [[Harvest]]>>
<</if>>
<</link>>
</p>
<p>In her hand is a letter, clutched so hard the crinkle in her shaking grip is more of a breathless flap. You do not need to look to know that the ink matches the note you’d found earlier that morning, what seems like half a lifetime ago.</p>
<p>“He has gone mad! //Mad//,” she fumes. “Stars and stake, between him and his sister we are ruined. One married and devoted to debasing the name she surrendered, the other determined to beat her to it by sheer quantity if not poor quality of decisions.”</p>
<p>Grief hones her tongue and pares away the softness from her concerns the way it does yours. You bite it back and mull over the discovery of silent iron in your mouth.</p>
<p>You look down at your son’s stupidity. At the boyish attempt at affection that you cannot bring yourself to despise despite feeling that your own father would have, had it been your earnest mistake.</p>
<<include "Rebirth">>
<p>“She’s gone,” she gasps. “Her bed—it’s empty, her clothes are still here, but—the shoes, my love, the dancing shoes. They’re gone. She’d never leave them behind if she meant to come back—if she—No one has seen her, I went as far as the mill.”</p>
<p>She swears and begins to pace. You rise but do not attempt to catch her: she, much like your daughter, recognises comfort only when her fire calms enough to seek it. Your wife understands; it pains her as much as it does you. She clasps your hand in hers for a moment, hard enough that you feel her pulse slamming through her thumb, before releasing herself back to efforts both fruitless and necessary.</p>
<p>You look down at your daughter’s parting affection.</p>
<<include "Rebirth">>
<<set $save to "Rebirth">>
<p>The meal is somehow less alluring now, a little less lustrous and tempting. Hunger roils over you with a thousand different faces. You raise a bite to your mouth and let it settle upon your tongue; its mundanity is a balm upon you. Somewhere past a hundred sunlit glades and the thrumming in their shadows, you know another father is doing the same.</p>
<p class="cern" style="text-align: center;">And the rest was another meal for another day.</p>
<<timed 3s t8n>><p style="text-align:center;font-family: secret darling;font-size:2em;">Thank you for playing. Ready for <<link "another meal">><<run UI.restart()>><</link>>?</p><</timed>>//Wild Oats// contains the following content: <b>mild blood/gore, body and food horror</b> and is not intended for players under the age of 13.