The Hernsew Lingster

The tide is coming into Yowe Fen and your flock is on the wrong side of it.

You are the last Lingster — the one person left who can still hear what the hernsews say. Five of them stand on the stage-posts up a rotted timber causeway, and each one bars the way until it is answered. A bird calls. You hear a phrase in a tongue nobody else bothered to learn. You say back what it means.

Answer well and it stands aside. Answer badly and it shrieks, the water comes up a notch, and the fen gets that much closer to taking a yowe.

Six yowes at the Low Staithe. One causeway. Five birds. One tide.

Hernsew is a real language

It is not a lookup table. There is a glyph alphabet with fixed meanings, and phrases are built by rule. kraa is water, -eth hangs on the thing that rises, sinn is a bird standing where it stands. By the fourth post you are not guessing — you are reading, out of glyphs the first three posts taught you, and you can say why your answer is right.

Every bird speaks aloud, and every line is on screen at the same time: the glyphs, the romanised call, and the Lingster's own reply.

How to play

Move	W A S D
Look	mouse
Answer a hernsew	click the line you want to say back
Hold the run	Escape

Walk up the causeway. When a hernsew hails you the panel opens: the glyphs it used, the phrase as it sounded, and the glyphs you already own. Pick the reading that fits. The gate ahead opens, and one more glyph goes into your phrasebook.

Watch the gauge down the left edge. It is the tide, and it never stops. A wrong answer costs you twenty-four seconds of it.

Worth seeing

• The five hernsews. Ithkeel, Haalwen, Skerr, Vrannock and Oonhraa each have their own voice and their own way of asking. Oonhraa, at the last post, does not ask a question you can answer by matching words.
• The fen at dusk. Slate and peat and rust, reed banks going black, the lantern and the birds' pale plumage the only bright things in the frame.
• The water. It comes up through the deck as you walk, and the last stretch of causeway is not the same place the first stretch was.
• The best ending. Six went out onto the causeway. Six can come off it.