Cloughifen — the MURK line, clean

Session Zero — a genuinely random character

No build was chosen to flatter the system. Species, type, array, and name were all rolled cold before a single scenario die was touched:

Whatever came up, came up — including the possibility of a flat, awkward spread with no clean axis to lean on. What it produced instead: a Xin MURKER with GRIT and MURK tied at the top. Not the tank Coker is. A different kind of build entirely.

The Character — Cloughifen, Level 1

Xin MURKER — four-armed, hivemind-bright, trained to read the murk before it reads her.

• Species (Xin): floors 3 / 3 / 2. Trait Ocular Read — passive: read intent through eye contact at close range, no roll required; once per encounter, predict an opponent's next action and act before them regardless of initiative. Four arms: two weapons held ready at once (not exploited this run — one weapon carried). Hivemind: yes.
• Type (MURKER): +2 MURK → 4. Skill Murk Read — detect MURK density and recent murk-active events in a location.
• Array: +3 GRIT → 6, +2 MURK → 6, +1 WIT → 4.
• ¢hits: ¢40 → Hexikid shard (dmg 3, GRIT, Piercing) ¢25 → ¢15 left. GRIT and MURK are tied — the shard keeps the physical axis honest even on a murk-first run; a Piercing edge is never wasted in this mill.
• Items: snough torch · field dressing · (one slot free).
• Wounds: 0 · Murk Clock: 0 · XP: 0
• Wound thresholds (half starting, rounding up): GRIT ≤3 · WIT ≤2 · MURK ≤3.

Route chosen: the MURK line — Drowned Carr (A3) → the flooded channel → collapse the node at the Millstone Chamber. GRIT and MURK are numerically tied, but the MURKER's training decides it: Cloughifen reads the flow, not the rock.

A1 — Dunford Arms · Murk 1

Marta the edge-contact briefs Cloughifen for free: the gnawmard colony was active two murkneets back, the briar has come up through the millstone floor. Cloughifen buys the Hexikid shard, banks her ¢15, and goes. A scratcher watches from the roof, facing the mill road. (Stats full — no rest needed.)

A2 — Open Fell · Murk 2 — the fork

Three ways to the mill. Cloughifen reads the ground before committing — a settlement-edge read, no Clock cost.

Read the ground (2d6 + WIT 4 vs Default 8): R1 = 3 → 7. FOKED. Nothing the route descriptions didn't already tell her.

No matter — the discipline she trained in decides it for her. Two gnawmards watch from the waymark stone, alert, oriented on the mill. She takes the low line: the Drowned Carr.

A3 — Drowned Carr · Murk 4

Dead alders standing in black water, the same water that surfaces under the mill. Cloughifen steps in and starts reading the flow instead of the footing.

Entering Murk 4+ — Clock 0 → 1. Reckoning (breaks ≤1): R2 = 7. Holds. Clock = 1.

Cross the flow (2d6 + MURK 6 vs Hard 11): R3 = 9 → 15. CLEAN — she reads the flow the whole way across and comes out already attuned to the node's discharge. A boggart throws dead wood somewhere off in the drowned trees; she is already past it, already listening to something else.

This is what a MURKER's axis buys: not brute passage, but arrival on the discharge itself, already inside the current the briar feeds on.

B — Dunford Mill Complex · Murk 3 (baseline)

Entering Hex B — Clock 1 → 2. Reckoning (breaks ≤2): R4 = 11. Holds. Clock = 2.

Dyapnid disposition (2d6 + 3): R5 = 6 → 9 — Territorial. They hold the upper structure. Not a factor — Cloughifen never goes near the Main Mill; the carr surfaces her straight into the murk-current below it.

The CLEAN crossing means no Mill Pond, no scratcher read, no cold climb down a slumped sluice wall for a dead transmitter's ping. The flow carries her past all of it, straight for the chamber, MURK unspent.

Zone: Millstone Chamber · Murk 5 — Boss

Entering Murk 5 — Clock 2 → 3. Reckoning (breaks ≤3): R6 = 10. Holds. Clock = 3.

Murk Event (d6): D1 = 3 — The Clock lurches. The murk floods the count on top of the entry tick. Clock 3 → 4. Reckoning (breaks ≤4): R7 = 7. Holds. Clock = 4.

Four ticks on the Clock before she has fought anything — higher than Coker ever ran it, and it never broke. She surfaces into the chamber already half-inside the node's pull: the amber light hanging two feet off the floor, thornwork running to it like roots to a taproot, Keeva spent but standing at the foot of the stair, Darcas caught three feet from the node, not struggling any more.

The Final Encounter — Collapse the node

The briar is a Boss (GRIT 7): it acts every round, lashes for Physical 3, and entangles. It does not need to be killed — it needs the node unmade, on whichever axis you own. Cloughifen owns MURK, and she came down the murk-current already standing in the node's discharge.

Round 1 — snough torch lit, briar wards off; free round. Cloughifen does not spend it closing distance — the carr already put her at the node's edge. She spends it reading the discharge apart.

Collapse the node (2d6 + MURK 6 vs Severe 14): R8 = 12 → 12 + 6 = 18 vs 14. SUCCESS — on the free round, before the briar has struck once.

The amber discharge folds in on itself and goes out. Across the whole chamber the thornwork slackens in a single breath, grey and dead, and the briar never gets a lash in — the fight ends before it starts, not because the Boss was soft, but because a MURKER reading her own axis got there before the clock could turn.

Extraction, no further cost. With the node dead, Darcas comes free of the thorns without a fight. Keeva is walked up the stair. Both team members out alive.

Outcome — Full Contract

Keeva debriefs at the Arms. The node wasn't in the classification file because it isn't natural — it was placed, by something that knew the mill would be surveyed, and the briar was the trap it grew: a thing that holds, set to wait for a recovery team to come hauling the first body out. Cloughifen brought two out instead, and never gave the briar a single round to work with.

DPDC payment: ¢160.

Final Tally

Advancement: Level 2 reached (per-session stat growth now 2). +1 stat-growth point banked from this session, to apply in downtime.

Headline: a genuinely random build — rolled cold, not picked — turned out to be a MURKER with GRIT and MURK tied, and the dice ran clean straight through: no Toll paid, no stat lost, no lash landed, a double-six on the roll that mattered. The Hexikid shard she bought never left her hand — the MURK axis solved the whole scenario before the briar got a turn. Read this one next to Coker's: same mill, same node, two builds, two axes, both walk out clean. That's the pitch.

Companion logs: Coker — the GRIT line · Black Moss — the MURK line, dead.