Rivers of Seiran
The customs, histories and people of Seiran, the city that rows its lanterns out to sea: the Ferry Guild and its rules, the three houses that make its paper, the calendar kept by the tide, and the night the old sea wall broke. Written the way the city would write them.
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Entries
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Entry 1
The Low Tide Festival
4 min read
The questions every Seiran child asks before their first Low Tide, with the answers the canal schools teach: why the canals close, why the lanterns go to the Markers, and what to say when you hand yours over.
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Entry 2
The Ferry Guild
4 min read
The customs of the Ferry Guild as every apprentice copies them out, from the seven widows who founded it to the rule that no ferry goes beyond the Markers, with three centuries of ferrywomen's notes in the margins.
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Entry 3
The Floodyear
4 min read
A history of the night the old sea wall broke in the 282nd Low Tide: the surge, the 412 lanterns, the four nights it took to row them out, and the two ferries that went past the Markers.
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Entry 4
The lantern makers
4 min read
Nobody makes the lanterns of the dead, but three families have made the paper for everything else for two hundred years. A history of the Oda, the Ren and the Sugi, their paper, and their long argument about who came first.
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Entry 5
The Tide Calendar
4 min read
How Seiran counts its years by the lowest tide, why the Ferry Guild keeps the tables, and the years the reckoning went wrong, from the preface the guild's reckoners print every year.
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Entry 6
Hana Mori
4 min read
A letter from a fisherman to the head of the Ferry Guild, about a daughter who will not stop turning up at East Landing, and the short reply written on the back.
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Entry 7
Old Mother Sabe
4 min read
A portrait of the head of East Landing by the lantern maker who has known her since they were eight: her oar, her terrible tea, her very few words and the things she has never explained.
