2026-09-02
User:
Run the pre-David pass exactly as specified in redacted/.claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md (read it first, in full, and follow every part) on one freshly drafted scene: draft/book-01/scenes/73-thirteen-down.md unpublished. Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md in full first, then notes/canon/characters/ for redacted, Peri, Edwin, minor.md (redacted, redacted, redacted), and scenes 63, 65, 71, 72 for immediate context. Current warnings to police: the 'writing it down' motif as a house verb (count instances; propose cuts where it is a period not a decision); redacted, redacted and the narrator converging on one clipped maxim-capped register (redacted: procedural, unhurried, no epigrams; redacted: attests and inherits, no definitional 'That's X'); scene openings that announce their own turn; endings that button; dialect (plain modern English; first-person "I'll not"/"I'd not" retired); em dashes in body (none allowed); negative parallelism; viewpoint slips (Edwin's viewpoint throughout); sense errors and counts. Specific attention: (a) the ending paragraph on the
[Holm Deep.]box: is it overwritten, does it explain, is redacted in the right place; (b) the mason's sentence: said once, unanswered, and not underlined by the narrator; (c) the candle paragraph: thirteen people watching a candle — is it doing work or is it a device; (d) 'felt three hundred years old saying it' in the first paragraph. STRICT: never read chapters/, rewrite/, draft/book-01/rejected-act2/, summaries/, or plans/book-01/arc-0*.md, unpublished or their git history. Report numbered findings with the quoted line, the fault, and a proposed replacement. Do not edit any file.
I'll start by reading the skill and the required context files.
🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md
🔧 Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md
✅ 257 lines, 16258 chars
✅ 426 lines, 27364 chars
🔧 Bash: cat -n draft/book-01/scenes/73-thirteen-down.md unpublished
✅ 37 lines, 6578 chars
🔧 Bash: ls notes/canon/characters/ && wc -l notes/canon/characters/*.md
✅ 19 lines, 496 chars — appearance.md / redacted.md / edwin.md
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && ls | sed -n '55,90p'
✅ 20 lines, 543 chars
🔧 Bash: redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished draft/book-01/scenes/65-the-sluice-ke…
✅ 86 lines, 13304 chars
🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/71-in-the-hill.md unpublished draft/book-01/scenes/72-not-in-t…
✅ 78 lines, 11990 chars
🔧 Bash: cat notes/canon/characters/redacted.md
✅ 41 lines, 2181 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n "first warden\|redacted\|redacted\|redacted\|candle\|four th…
✅ 12 lines, 895 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '1,60p' notes/canon/characters/minor.md; echo ====; grep -n "redacted…
✅ 61 lines, 3852 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n "redacted\|redacted\|redacted\|redacted\|redacted\|redacted…
✅ 38 lines, 2883 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '205,260p' notes/canon/characters/minor.md
✅ 56 lines, 3604 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted; f=draft/book-01/scenes/73-thirteen-down.md unpublished; grep -n -- "—" $…
✅ 14 lines, 193 chars
Findings on draft/book-01/scenes/73-thirteen-down.md unpublished. (Nothing edited.)
1. "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted with a lantern"
Broken sentence: redacted is both subject and instrument. Nothing restates flat.
→ "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
2. "and the thirteenth name was Edwin's"
Contradicts scene 72 unpublished, which is explicit: "the mage on the twelfth line ... the girl on the thirteenth." Peri is the last name, not Edwin.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
3. Count spine across 71/72/73. Scene 71 unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose and herself; six of redacted's, and redacted. That's twelve", with Peri as "the twelfth". Scene 72 unpublished's paper is "Charter, four, redacted first; redacted, seven, redacted last; Moss; Millbrook" = thirteen down, and this scene's title and body take thirteen. Scene 73 unpublished is internally consistent with 72 ("redacted and redacted and the fourth of hers, redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's four including herself; "redacted's six ... with redacted at the back" = seven). So the error is upstream in 71, but it lands here: a reader arrives at "thirteen down" having been told twelve two scenes ago. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose They went out at twenty past six ... redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Twenty past six to twenty past eight is exactly two hours, not "a little over".
→ either "half past eight" at the thorn, or drop "a little over" from the first clause and keep it only for redacted's walk on the thirteenth.
5. "At half past eight redacted stepped over the chain." against "thirteen people ... at half past eight in the morning watching a candle."
Between the two: the candle burned and was counted to ten and pinched out, the throat was crossed to and described, redacted's exchange happened, and redacted read the whole order and had the four things said back by two people. That is fifteen minutes of business inside one minute of clock.
→ candle at "half past eight"; the chain at "At a quarter to nine redacted stepped over the chain."
6. "The air met them at two hundred yards." / "At the thorn she stopped them"
Scene 63 unpublished fixes the thorn at "two hundred yards from the door". The scene therefore names the same place twice as if they were two stages of the approach.
→ make the first one a different distance ("The air met them a half mile out"), or cut "at two hundred yards" and let the thorn carry it.
7. "because redacted's house ate standing before a hill and redacted had asked her what redacted did and taken it"
Canon (redacted.md, Established, ch. 019): redacted eats standing, every morning. It is her habit, not a borrowed redacted practice, and the sentence invents an institution to explain a thing already established about her.
→ "They ate standing, because redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
8. "her own hands' at the laces"
Ungrammatical; no restatement available. Presumably "her own hands at the laces".
→ "and put her own hands to the laces,"
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Two faults. The relative clause slips subject ("which were the boots ... and had been resoled"). And the point of the beat — that redacted passed bad boots — is left as a silence the reader must price.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Flat restatement of the sentence before it.
→ cut "Nobody hurried."
11. "and that his hand missed it every third step"
A counted specific the viewpoint cannot have; he notices the want, not the interval.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
12. "and she had never yet laughed at anybody for saying the air had moved, and would not start today"
Edwin cannot know the first clause and certainly not the second; it is narration standing in for her authority, and "would not start today" is a flourish.
→ put it in her mouth inside the order: "Say it if you think it moved. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
13. "and felt three hundred years old saying it"
The claim is empty by being true: he is three hundred and twelve. The idiom means "suddenly aged", which cannot happen to a man that age, so the sentence gestures at weight and cashes nothing — and it is the last clause of the opening sentence, where it reads as the paragraph's point.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
14. "thirteen people standing in a row on a peat island at half past eight in the morning watching a candle"
This is the narrator stepping back to frame a tableau and inviting the reader to find it striking — the device, not the observation. It also contradicts the file order established three paragraphs earlier ("a loose file"). redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose
15. "and it was not said again, then or afterwards, and Edwin wrote it down that night with the man's name against it and no comment under it."
This is the narrator underlining the mason's sentence — exactly what the sentence must not have. "then or afterwards" is a flash-forward out of the scene, and the writing-down is a period, not a decision (contrast the genuine one four paragraphs above, where he wrote it down because he had asked twice and been given nothing). It is also the scene's second "wrote it down" in five paragraphs, on top of scene 72 unpublished having ended on the rule about writing things down.
→ "Nobody answered him. redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Italics quoting a phrase inside narration reads oddly (Part 6), and the sentence footnotes a line that has just landed.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
17. "and redacted, at the back, said "Out. Steady. I'd say warmer,""
redacted echoes redacted's three terms back in redacted's own order and redacted's clipped shape. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted is procedural, demands the form, no epigrams. As written the two women are one voice with a lag.
→ "and redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose "Out. Steady. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
18. The order paragraph runs redacted's rules into a chain of short declaratives ending "Nobody goes after anything. Nobody stops to help unless she says." — the clipped-maxim register the warning names. The chain is reported speech, so it can be given shape without losing content.
→ break it: give the two absolutes to her directly in quotes, once, and leave the rest as report ("She said the order once. She would go first... redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Then she said the two she always says aloud. "Nobody goes after anything. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
19. The closing paragraph on *[Holm Deep.]*. It is overwritten and it explains. "Twelve people who had all been told the same thing at the same moment by a voice that had never once said anything else, and not one of them said what it was, because everybody there had it and nobody there had ever been told what it meant" is a gloss on a beat the three preceding clauses have already delivered in images (the hand going still on the bill, the head turning half an inch, Peri's mouth set). redacted is also in the wrong place: it runs past the box, past the lighting fact, and lands on redacted's back, which buttons.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Nobody said what it was. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted was already past it."
20. Minor, worth a check rather than an edit: redacted is canon-established as the redacted hand with the knee, "on the cart" (minor.md). This scene puts all six of redacted's down the hill and gives the sixth slot to a new name, redacted. If redacted's knee still keeps him off, redacted is five hands plus redacted and the thirteen does not close. Either name redacted as replaced and say by whom, or the count needs redoing.
Device that would draw a second round: the writing-it-down motif. It is now a house verb rather than a character act — scene 72 unpublished ended on it as a stated rule, and this scene uses it twice more, once (finding 15) purely as a full stop on a beat. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted one is not), and it should be absent from at least the next two scenes.
Second candidate: the clipped-declarative register is now shared by redacted, redacted and the narrator's report of the order, so the scene has one voice speaking through three mouths. Fixing 17 and 18 separates redacted (procedural, attests as hers, unhurried) from redacted (attests and inherits); the narrator's stretch in para 29 then needs to be plainer report and not a chain of maxims.