Run the pre-David pass exactly as specified in [redacted][redacted]…

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2026-09-02

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Run the pre-David pass exactly as specified in redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished, 95-the-twelve-foot.md unpublished redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished. Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md in full first, then draft/book-01/SCENES.md's act-three binding list (end of file), notes/canon/characters/ for redacted, Peri, Edwin, minor.md (Lord Marsh, the gatekeeper, redacted, redacted, redacted), and scenes 85, 93 for immediate context. Warnings to police: the 'writing it down' motif (count; 95 ends on Peri's middle-column entry and 96 on redacted underlining Edwin's name — at most one of the three may end on writing: rule and propose); 'because' density (ration; propose reattachments); new adults' sentence shapes: Lord Marsh (past forty, stands, decision-first; does his long speech in 94 read as a lord or as redacted? is 'I find that I am looking forward to it more than to anything I have paid for this year' a button?), redacted (fewest words; 'aye' — dialect? the book bans dialect; rule on 'aye'), redacted (does not speak for the first hour; 'did not stop being useful' is a canon-quoted groundwork phrase — flag as reuse), the secretary; redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's knife work at the foot of a seven-foot cut from the bank top? check); sense (redacted cut the face on the ninth and stood it down on the eleventh: two days of not weathering is not 'knowing'; the twenty-six days from the ninth to the seventh of Fallowmonth: 9 Har to 7 Fal = 28 days: FLAG the arithmetic); clocks; whether Peri's 'Twice is a thing. I don't know what thing. Middle column' is hers or a composed tag; whether 96's redacted answer speech is too long. STRICT: never read chapters/, rewrite/, draft/book-01/rejected-act2/, summaries/, or plans/book-01/arc-0*.md, unpublished or their git history.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.

32 tool calls

🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md

🔧 Read draft/book-01/VOICE.md

✅ 257 lines, 16258 chars

✅ 426 lines, 27364 chars

🔧 Bash: redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished draft/book-01/scenes/95-the-twelve-fo…

✅ 115 lines, 19292 chars

🔧 Bash: tail -120 draft/book-01/SCENES.md && echo ===== && ls notes/canon/characters/

✅ 114 lines, 10039 chars

🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/85-*.md draft/book-01/scenes/93-*.md

✅ 60 lines, 9928 chars

🔧 Bash: grep -n "Openings: no scene opens" -A 30 draft/book-01/SCENES.md | head -60

✅ 31 lines, 4800 chars

🔧 Bash: wc -l notes/canon/characters/*.md && sed -n '1,400p' notes/canon/characters/redacted.md

✅ 410 lines, 25091 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -i "marsh\|redacted\|redacted\|redacted\|gatekeeper\|secreta…

✅ 11 lines, 806 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -i "middle column\|three columns\|notebook" notes/canon/characters…

✅ 30 lines, 4121 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '325,370p' notes/canon/characters/minor.md

✅ 45 lines, 2744 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -n -i "month\|calendar\|days in" notes/canon/world/calendar.md 2>/dev…

✅ 1 lines, 31 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted; ls notes/canon/world/; grep -rn "twenty-eight days\|thirty days\|days long…

✅ 38 lines, 2317 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; for f in 94-*.md 95-*.md 96-*.md; do echo "== $f"; ec…

✅ 19 lines, 383 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes; for f in 94-*.md 95-*.md 96-*.md; do echo "== $f"; gr…

✅ 21 lines, 2282 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted; grep -rn "Twelve Foot" notes/canon/ draft/book-01/SCENES.md draft/book-01/…

✅ 11 lines, 3147 chars

🔧 Bash: cd redacted; sed -n '230,255p' notes/canon/world/geography.md; sed -n '255,270p' draft/…

✅ 42 lines, 2842 chars

Findings — scenes 94, 95, 96

Part 1 — sense, counts, facts

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    Arithmetic. Months are 30 days (timeline.md: Day 47 = 1 Fal, Day 77 = 1 Salt); the scene is 7 Fallowmonth. 9 Harvestmonth → 7 Fallowmonth is 28 days; 11 Harvestmonth → 7 Fallowmonth is 26. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Either make all three "twenty-eight" and let redacted count from his spade, or keep twenty-six and attach it to the stand-down throughout ("nothing has happened on it for twenty-six days, and the face has stood twenty-eight"). The third instance ("wanting somebody to ask him") should count from the ledger entry, so twenty-six.

3. (95) "and the why's four words" / "Four words for the why" / "you wrote it in four words" vs. the quoted entry "Ground won't weather."
That is three words. Canon has the entry as Ground will not weather (minor.md, redacted). Restore the four-word form in the quotation: "Eleventh of Harvestmonth. Fourth mile stood down. Ground will not weather. redacted."

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    Two foot six plus about eighteen inches plus a hand's breadth is about four foot four, not five foot one — the second core reproduces the first core's layer depths and then reports a top ten inches lower. The overlying peat has to be thicker there or the finding is impossible. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. (95) redacted "knowing" on the ninth. "I stood there on the ninth with the spade and I cut a face and I looked at it and I knew, the way you know a beast's going to go before it goes."
    redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  3. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    Down off it to where? redacted sentence: unpublished prose As written it reads as him going into the drain, which contradicts both redacted's roster line (redacted.md road rules) and scene 95 unpublished. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  4. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    Edwin asked Marsh's household on the previous day not to call her the girl, and Marsh conceded it in front of him. He would not then say it himself to a tenant's man who will have it repeated. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  5. (95) "because redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    "it had cost her nothing yet" has no clear referent and no flat restatement — the looking? the not speaking? Replace: *"because redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  6. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted' boundary was."
    redacted is Marsh's foreman; the boundary is not his. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted's began"* — and let redacted' objection follow from that ("a number that stops at another man's redacted is no use").

  7. (94) "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    No reason on the page for a foreman to object to a warden at a drain his gang is digging; the reader cannot supply one until scene 95 unpublished explains it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  8. (95) "redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    The living end is beyond a peg; "moved along" reads as a step, and the four cuts as one standstill. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  9. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Nobody had."
    He cannot know what nobody has ever seen. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  10. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    Reuse across consecutive scenes reads as a copied clause, not a callback. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Part 2 — gesture at meaning; buttons

14. (94, scene-end of the Marsh interview) "and I find that I am looking forward to it more than to anything I have paid for this year."
A resolving button, and one that hands the lord the best line in the room. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

15. (96) "meaning a thing and standing still while it was done were two different sizes of thing."
"sizes of thing" is a coinage doing the work of a measure it never names; it is also the scene's one narrator aphorism, spent on vagueness. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    "the world went on" is a significance-flag with nothing under it. Cut the clause; the two "agains" already close the sentence.

  2. (95) "Nobody wrote that down, and then redacted did."
    Coy: it tells the reader a beat has happened rather than saying what happened. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose

18. (96) "and she had learned that from somebody."
An unnamed antecedent standing in for a reason. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Part 3/4 — world, character, register

  1. (95) "said, 'Aye,' and nothing else" and "redacted thought about that and said aye." — RULING: "aye" is out.
    It is the dialect ban's exact shape: a syntax/lexis marker standing in for local colour, and twice in one scene it is a tic. Plain modern English: first instance "said, 'Yes. In my name,' and nothing else"; second *"and redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  2. (95) redacted: "I'll not say more than that, because that's all the knife says."
    Two faults. First-person "I'll not" is retired by name (VOICE.md, "particularly weird"). And "that's all the knife says" is the tidy verdict-tail banned for her (redacted.md 7a — Edwin's construction). redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  3. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    Same retired form. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  4. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    This is the best-turned sentence in the scene and it is in the wrong mouth: a balanced two-half construction with the verdict in the second half is Edwin's shape, and it makes Marsh the second-cleverest man in the book on his first page. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted than like a lord, and the narration's "It was the way redacted asked things" half-admits it; with the epigram flattened, "decision first and money second" carries the resemblance and the resemblance becomes a fact about the trade rather than an echo.

23. (94) Edwin's four "I am going to" clauses.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Sixpence is not."
    The last is the title and earns the scene; the sixpence explanation is the mechanism and stays. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Sixpence is not" is Edwin's voice and is not a button; it lands mid-speech, and the sixpence is a canon practice (institutions.md), not an invention for the line. Keep it.

25. (94) "and after that he did not stop being useful."
minor.md quotes this as redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose Canon quotations are facts, not lines to reuse (VOICE.md §3), and this one would be found by grep. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    Exactly the banned opening shape: NAME + verb + TIME + trailer (SCENES.md act-three binding). redacted sentence: unpublished prose (95 opens on the pegs and 96 on the gouge: both fine as objects. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted' hands" repeats 94's original rhythm, so fixing 94 also fixes the run.)

27. Scene endings on writing — RULING: 95 keeps it, 96 gives it up.
Two of three end on an act of writing (95: the middle-column entry; 96: redacted underlining the name), against the binding "no more than one in three", and 94's last sentence is writing-adjacent too. 95's ending is the act's spine and is named in the scene table; it stays. For 96, end on the departure and let the underline sit inside the paragraph: *"redacted wrote 'nobody knows, E. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose

28. (95) Peri's close: "Twice is a thing. I don't know what thing. Middle column."
"Middle column" as a two-word close is a callback fragment carrying its meaning by itself, which the voice memo forbids outright; and "Twice is a thing" is a composed tag rather than her sincere, wrong-from-the-foundations voice. The two lines before it are hers and are good. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

29. because density — RULING: ration to four per scene; 94 has seven, 95 eleven, 96 six.
Most carry real reasons and must stay (cutting reasons is the act-two failure). The ones to reattach, because the reason is either obvious or better as a fact:
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The pen stopped."*
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

30. Canon conflict to raise, not fix in prose. SCENES.md act-three binding says "the Twelve Foot (Marsh's mouth)" — a Deep, redacted's trade. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted, eleven miles off. The scenes are consistent with geography.md; the binding line is the error, and redacted's business at the Twelve Foot is her own men, not an assessment. Flagging for the main session; no scene edit needed beyond finding 10.

Direct answers to the queried items

The two closing lines

The device a second round would be about: the ledger. Three consecutive scenes run on the same move — somebody says a thing, somebody else writes it in a book, and the writing is the beat. It works in 95, where the ledger is the discovery; in 94 and 96 it is the punctuation of every paragraph (five and eleven instances of write/wrote/written), and Peri, redacted, redacted and Edwin all do it. To make it work: let 96 carry the protocol as already-settled routine and give its beats to the hands — the gouge, the plank, the thumbprint, the spade astride the hole — with redacted's writing mentioned twice and never at a paragraph's end. If that cannot be done, the alternative is to cut the protocol's re-statement in 96 entirely and open on the second core.