A Defence of the Paper Coast · being Sheet XIV of a survey never finished
Lamps of Vellamere
Ink0
Blight—
the quill is lifted
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Marginalia
A Defence of the Paper Coast, being Sheet XIV of a survey never finished
In 1687 a draughtswoman named Ysolde Marrow surveyed the harbour town of Vellamere and drew it onto this sheet. Three years later the sea took the town in a single night. The chart is all that remains of Vellamere — and the town is still in it. Lamps move in the drawn windows. Smoke leaves the drawn chimneys. A town drawn carefully enough remembers itself.
But paper is mortal. Everything that ruins a sheet is coming up the Ink Road from the torn edge: damp, foxing, silverfish, ink-blots, worms, erasers, knives — and at last a clean fair copy with no town on it at all. Each blight that reaches the harbour puts out one of Vellamere's twelve lamps.
She filled the margins with the only defenders a chart has: its decorations — and drew them carefully enough that they remember themselves too.Y. Marrow del., 1687
❧Choose a marginal from the legend and draw it on the land beside the Ink Road. Only the Sea Serpent may be drawn in the water.
❧Destroyed blights return their pigment as ink. Between blights, spend it on new marginalia or on deepening the ones you have — four times each.
❧Twenty blights, from 1690 to 2026. Some hide, some burrow, some dodge, some shield each other, and some are too heavy to be blown back. Read the conservator's notes (✎).
Impression № — every chart is drawn anew, and any number can be drawn again.
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Conservator's Notes
Sheet XIV: an account of the marginal decoration, in a second hand, and of the damage
The Marginalia
The Blights
The Twenty Blights
Damage against a shielded blight is reduced by a third. Armour reduces needles only: bites, wind and light pass through it. Burrowed things cannot be touched at all. The wind shoves each blight back only once every few seconds, and the heavy blights lean into it.