- The Rattle Run
- Half a Clue List
- Every Door Plays a Game
The Sweetest Candy
The doors, though, are where the fun lives. Behind each one is a household that has prepared either a sweet or a game: a honey drop at one door, a flour bomb at the next, a riddle, a dare, a jar of something wriggling. Nobody knows which until the door opens.
The old herald trusted with the master clue list this year has mislaid half of it. You can help the herald find the missing clues across town, from the quayside to the old stone gargoyle, survive every door's game, and win the sweetest candy before somebody else does.
Ashmoor is grey timber and stone under dark slate and shingle: a few hundred narrow houses squeezed between a pine-black hill and a curving tan beach. A timber palisade with a watch-gate guards the forest track, and a long stone breakwater and spindly jetties reach into the surf, hung with nets and fish-drying racks. The harbor-master's stone tower watches the water, a smokehouse leaks thin smoke, and the tavern stands on stilts at the end of a jetty. Fishers, dockhands and sailors who never name their last port live here.
Ashmoor sits where gray water beats against a rocky shore and the wind carries more warnings than welcome. Weathered docks jut into the surf, slick with salt and old rain, while low buildings huddle near the water as if trying not to be noticed. The air smells of brine, wet rope, fish smoke, damp timber, and the kind of business that prefers witnesses with short memories.
Trade comes through quietly here. Ships arrive with cargo that is rarely discussed too loudly, coin passes beneath folded cloth, and conversations shrink into murmurs when unfamiliar boots hit the planks. The town survives by discretion, suspicion, and the practiced art of looking away at exactly the right moment. Charming, really, if one enjoys being judged by three windows and a fisherman before finishing a sentence.
Behind the town, the forest presses close with tangled roots, misted paths, and a silence that feels just as guarded as the streets. Ashmoor matters because it sits between two kinds of danger: the sea that takes without warning, and the woods that watch without blinking. Secrets wash ashore here, but trust rarely does.
- Salt Worn Secrets
- Guarded Docks
- Forest Shadows
- Dockside Tavern
- Debts in Chalk
- Honest Fish Stew
The Tally Hook sits at the very end of Ashmoor's longest pier, close enough to the water that the floor shivers when a big wave comes in. Dockhands, net-menders and sailors waiting on the tide drink here with their backs to the wall, because in Ashmoor that is simply good manners.
Behind the bar hangs the board: a slab of black slate covered in chalk, every name in town and every mark they owe. Pay up and your line is wiped clean. Fall behind and it gets written larger. The fish stew is honest and the fire is warm. Almost nothing else in the Tally Hook is either.
Lately there is a second notice pinned beside the board, written in a careful hand by a woman from the harbor, asking after her missing husband. She comes in most evenings to see whether anyone has read it.