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The Sceptic's Wake Free first chapter

Interactive romance

The Sceptic's Wake

by Marguerite Wren

Romantasy Romance Comedy
4.7 · 6 reviews

The Ninth Lantern is the last shrine still burning on the Long Road, and its flame will not survive the season. So Tamsin, its dying keeper's only apprentice, sets out to carry that last ember to the Motherhouse before every ward between here and there goes dark, bound step for step to Silas Rook, a sellsword collecting on an old debt who finds her gods, her visions and her entire vocation faintly ridiculous. He does not believe in the Long Road's ghosts. He believes in his sword, his fee, and absolutely nothing else. He is also, infuriatingly, the only reason she is still walking. Somewhere between the bickering and the campfires, between the dead that will not stay buried and the man who keeps saving her life while insisting he does not care, Tamsin starts to wonder which of them is really the one without faith.

warm gothic road romance, banter-driven slow burn, genuinely funny, hopeful, fade-to-black

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From a session

The cold mile starts the way they always do, crickets going silent and Silas going quiet,
which is somehow worse. You crouch at the tree line and read the dark the way Aisling
taught you, feeling for the thin place the way you would feel for a draft under a door.
Silas, of course, is unimpressed. "Any day now," he says, drawing his sword like a man
testing a rumour. You find the thin place two breaths later, right where his blade happens
to be pointed, which you allow yourself exactly one second to enjoy before the first of the
dead comes through it. "Right there," you say. He does not ask how you knew. He never does
anymore. That, more than anything, feels like winning.

From the writer

I wanted to write a haunted road that was also, somehow, a comfort. Every gothic quest I love ends in ash, so I built this one to end in a lit window instead, and to laugh along the way there. Tamsin and Silas argue like people who have decided, somewhere under the arguing, to trust each other anyway, and that was the whole game for me: write the banter until the banter turned into something neither of them meant to say out loud. Keep the lantern lit. It gets cold on the road, but it is not that kind of story.

Marguerite Wren, who wrote this adventure

12 written scenes · 5 characters with agendas of their own · 8 places to discover · secrets you have to find yourself

You decide everything

Who you trust, who you fall for, how far you go: the story bends to every choice.

Every character is alive

An AI storyteller plays everyone you meet and responds to everything you say or do.

The story remembers

Who you kissed, who you crossed, every promise: it all comes back.

A score that swoons

The score shifts with the tension and longing of the scene.

What players say

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