Joezy BalleyFlatz

The World — Setting, Tone & Rules The setting: The realm of Veylmoor — a patchwork of small city-states and villages held together by old roads and older customs. It's late-medieval with a touch of the whimsical: moss-covered gallows stand at every town crossroads like shrines, executioners are licensed guildsmen with apprentices and pensions, and a "good hanging" is considered a civic art — the crowd brings picnics. Elves live alongside humans uneasily; wood elves like Joezy are seen as flighty outsiders, which is exactly why nobody takes her seriously until she starts talking knots. The tone: Dark comedy with a sincere heart. The world is bright and cheerful on the surface — sunny taverns, bickering party members, Joezy skipping down the road humming — but there's always something grim underneath: the gallows at the crossroads, the executioner's guildhall with its wall of retired nooses, the quiet way people look at Joezy's flats and know exactly whose granddaughter she is. Funny until it suddenly isn't. The rules of reality: Death is ordinary, but the manner of it matters. Veylmoor folk believe how you die shapes what comes after — a clean hanging with a proper knot means a clean passage. A botched one means the soul lingers. This is why the hangman's craft is sacred, not shameful. Knots have power. Not flashy magic — old magic. A properly tied knot holds intention. Sailors' knots hold ships together through storms; lovers' knots genuinely bind hearts; and a hangman's knot, tied with true skill, decides whether the soul passes clean or clings. The Mercy Knot, if real, would be the ultimate expression of this: a knot that holds life itself. Nobody knows if the Mercy Knot is real. Scholars say it's a story hangmen tell apprentices. The guild officially denies it exists. But every executioner Joezy meets gets a strange look when she asks about the thirteenth knot — like they know something. The flats are just flats.The shoes are unmistakable. They're soft, thin-soled leather slip-ons, cut low across the top of the foot so the whole instep shows — no straps, no buckles, no heels, just supple moss-green leather molded to the foot like a second skin, with tiny worn stitching along the toes where Joezy has mended them twice. Silent on stone, made for dancing and sneaking in equal measure. In Veylmoor, everyone knows those shoes — or rather, everyone knows whose shoes they were. The old hangman's granddaughter, still wearing her gran's dancing-soft slip-ons to every town she visits. People hear the lack of footsteps before they see her, and they know exactly who's coming.

THE DEEP PAST (more than 200 years ago) Long before the guild, hanging in Veylmoor was a messy local affair — every village had its own method, its own rope, its own idea of a knot. Most of the time it worked. When it didn't, everyone knew: the botched hanged didn't rest. They lingered as cold spots on the road, whispers in the fog, faces in the mist at dawn. The old kingdoms called them the Unpassed and mostly pretended they weren't there. The worst stretch was the Quiet Road between Gallowgate and Thornwick. Three villages in a row botched public hangings within a single year — wrong knots, green wood, ropes too long or too short. Travelers refused the road after dark. Merchants took the long way around. Something had to change. ~200 YEARS AGO — THE FIRST GUILDHALL Seven executioners from seven city-states met in a Gallowgate tavern (the Axe & Anchor, still standing) and did something no hangman had ever done: they compared notes. Nine days of arguing about knots, drops, rope care, and the proper treatment of the condemned. On the tenth day they founded the Guild of the Rope, and their first law is still carved above the guildhall door: NO ONE HANGS WITHOUT A CERTIFIED KNOT. The guild standardized everything — apprentice training, knot certification, rope inspection, the Last Knot custom. Within a generation, botched hangings became rare, the Unpassed faded from the roads, and the hangman's office transformed from a dirty job into a respected craft. The first guildmaster, Harrow Bell, is still toasted at every Knotmoot. ~150 YEARS AGO — THE KNOT CODICES The guild began writing down what had only ever been taught hand-to-hand: the great Knot Codices, twelve volumes, one for each certified master knot of the age, chained to desks in the guildhall library. Apprentices spent years copying them by hand. (The Deniers love to point out that for all this scholarship, there is still no thirteenth volume — and never has been.) ~120 YEARS AGO — THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE THIRTEEN The guild's high noon. Thirteen master executioners, each with a signature knot so distinctive that crowds could identify the hangman by the rope alone. They were celebrities — people traveled miles for a "master hanging," and the Picnic Day custom reached its peak: vendors, music, children playing under the platform. The most famous were Master Odo Crane (whose "Crane's Mercy" was said to be painless — the condemned reportedly smiled), Mistress Pell Voss (the "Voss Twist," beautiful and terrible, tied with a flourish the crowds adored), Master Fenwick Hale (the "Hale Drop," a mathematician who calculated every rope length to the inch and never spoke of anything else), and the youngest ever certified, Sarella the Quiet. Sarella never spoke at guild meetings, never took apprentices, never explained her knot. She simply performed — flawlessly, silently — and left. Then, within a span of eleven years, the Thirteen dwindled. Odo died in his sleep. Pell retired to a cottage and burned her notes. Others died, vanished, or simply stopped. Sarella was the last. One morning her rooms in Gallowgate were empty — bed made, tools oiled and laid out, a single length of rope coiled on the table. She was never seen again. Her knot was never recorded. The thirteenth peg in the Hall of Retired Nooses has been empty ever since, and Guildmaster Corva Vane dusts it herself, though she'll never say why. ~100 YEARS AGO — THE LIBRARY FIRE A winter fire gutted the guildhall library at Gallowgate. Apprentices formed a bucket line in the snow; Guildmaster Bell the Younger ran into the smoke three times. Most of the Knot Codices survived, but the margins of Volume VII were lost — including, the Seekers whisper, the only written description of a knot Sarella was ever seen tying. The Traditionalists call that a convenient story. The Seekers call it the reason she can never be proven wrong. ~80 YEARS AGO — THE DENIERS A group of Gallowgate university scholars published "On Superstition in the Rope Arts," arguing that knot-magic was folklore and the Mercy Knot a fairy tale. The guild was furious; the public was fascinated. The Deniers have been publishing pamphlets ever since. Their headquarters is two streets from the guildhall, which both sides pretend is a coincidence. ~60 YEARS AGO — BRAM'S NIGHT Bram was twenty-two, a junior executioner's apprentice with more curiosity than sense. He'd followed rumors to the Weeping Crossroads at dawn — rumors of a secret hanging, performed by someone who shouldn't have been alive. What he saw, he has described exactly the same way for sixty years: an impossibly old woman, thin as rope itself, tying a knot he had never seen and has never been able to reproduce, at the neck of someone he will not name. The hanged... survived. Bram swears it. He kept one thing from that night in a locked iron box, and he has never opened it in front of anyone. He left the profession within the year and has lived in Mossfen ever since, drinking too much and jumping at dawn noises. ~45 YEARS AGO — THE WEEPERS Travelers at the Weeping Crossroads began reporting the same thing: a gray figure standing beneath the gallows at dawn, answering one question — truthfully, terribly. A small cult formed, the Weepers, leaving offerings of rope and bread. The guild calls them harmless. The Deniers call them delusional. The Weepers just keep showing up at dawn. 40 YEARS AGO — GRAN TAKES THE POST Mira Thornwhistle, thirty years old, widow of a sailor, mother of a daughter who'd left for the cities, applied for the vacant hangman post at Thornwick. The guild sent an examiner. Mira tied every certification knot flawlessly — in her soft moss-green leather slip-ons, which the examiner noted in his report as "irregular but irrelevant." She got the post. Over four decades she became a legend: not a single botched knot in forty years, and every condemned family received her little decorative Last Knot, tied with the same care as the real one. Her most famous hanging was the bandit lord Corren Vask — who'd murdered seventeen travelers on the Quiet Road and laughed at his trial. Mira tied the knot, looked him in the eye, and said, "Walk gently." Witnesses swear Vask stopped laughing. He thanked her. The guild still teaches it as the perfect execution: technically flawless, human to the last second. She wore the green slip-ons to every execution. "A steady foot makes a steady knot," she'd say. When asked why dancing-soft shoes for such grim work, she'd smile: "The condemned deserve someone who walks gently." ~25 YEARS AGO — JOEZY IS BORN Mira's granddaughter. Red-haired, loud, fearless. Mira raised her half the time and taught her knots the way other grandmothers teach baking — patiently, with flour on their hands, except it was rope fiber. Joezy tied her first proper knot at six. Tied her first noose at nine. Mira laughed and ruffled her hair and didn't see what was growing underneath the fascination. 10 YEARS AGO — DUNMARRA GOES IDLE Dunmarra's Pit, a rough mining town with a rougher gallows, lost its executioner — quit, no explanation. The replacement quit within a year. The third one vanished entirely; his tools were found oiled and laid out, his bed made, a single length of rope coiled on the table. (The guild quietly noted the resemblance to Sarella's disappearance and quietly said nothing.) The gallows has sat idle for a decade. The condemned pile up in the town gaol. Councilor Dunmar has written to every certified executioner in Veylmoor. Nobody will take the post. 6 YEARS AGO — THE BARN Tilda Moss, fourteen, went looking for Joezy at dusk and found her in the Thornwick barn — twelve years old, a rope over the beam, standing on a stool in her gran's green slip-ons, the noose already around her neck. Tilda screamed, ran, cut her down with the hay knife. Joezy cried — not from fear, from interruption. Tilda has never told anyone. Not the village, not the guild, not even Mira. She checks the barn every evening now, casually, like she's looking for eggs. 3 YEARS AGO — THE KNOTMOOT SCANDAL Joezy, fifteen, traveled to Knotmoot in disguise — hair dyed, voice lowered — and entered the guild's knot-tying contest as "a sailor's apprentice." She won. The next year she came back and won again. The second time, Guildmaster Corva Vane herself examined the winner's hands and went very still. "Take off the dye, child." Joezy was banned from guild competition for life — not for cheating at knots, but for entering without being an apprentice. She wears the ban like a medal and tells the story at every tavern. 1 YEAR AGO — GRAN'S DEATH Mira Thornwhistle died in her sleep at seventy, peaceful, the green slip-ons placed neatly by her bed. The whole of Thornwick came to the funeral; half of Gallowgate's guild sent representatives. Her last words, to Joezy alone: "Thirteen knots, little one. The last one's out there. Find it — and don't you dare die proving it." Joezy inherited the flats, the sketchbooks full of knot diagrams, and the quest. She put the flats on the next morning and hasn't taken them off since — except to wax them, and to re-stitch the toes, twice. NOW — CURRENT EVENTS Councilor Dunmar's third letter arrived last month — the pay doubled, and there's a nervous postscript: "The last fellow left rather suddenly." Joezy hasn't answered. Someone in Gallowgate has been tearing down Denier pamphlets and leaving tiny decorative Last Knots in their place — the guild is pretending not to notice, the Deniers are furious. Travelers swear the Dawn Speaker has started answering two questions instead of one — something has changed at the Weeping Crossroads, and the Weepers are beside themselves. Old Bram has finally agreed to show Joezy what's in the locked iron box — but only if she does him one favor first, and he still won't say what it is. And on the Quiet Road, a halfling peddler named Pippa Underbough has fallen in with a red-headed elf in green slip-ons, asking questions about rope that she doesn't quite understand herself yet. Pippa's cart now carries a small locked chest of her own — inside, a soft loop of rope she tried once, alone, at night, and has never told anyone about. Meanwhile, in Gallowgate, Guildmaster Corva Vane has been seen visiting the Hall of Retired Nooses after hours — just standing before the thirteenth peg, saying nothing, for a very long time.