The ANON Chronicles

Chapter 1: The Keeper of the Well

A free short story set in the world of the ANON collections. Grab a brew and settle in.

Long before the marble terrace, before the gold frames and the bright banners, there was only the forest.

It was not a gloomy forest. The trees there glowed, softly, the way embers glow when a fire has decided to stay. Moss lit the paths in pale green. Fireflies drifted like lost sparks looking for a birthday cake. And in the middle of it all, where the oldest roots met, stood a stone well.

The well was older than anyone could remember. Its stones were worn smooth, and carved around its rim, in letters you could only read when the light was right, were three words: Explore. Learn. Decide.

Every morning, just before the sun came up, a figure walked to that well.

The figure wore a long cloak the colour of midnight sky, a simple crown that caught the first light, and a sword at the hip that had never once been drawn in anger. The forest folk called this figure ANON, because ANON had never asked to be called anything else.

ANON carried a bucket. Not a big bucket. Honestly, a rather modest bucket. A bucket that a passing squirrel once described, loudly, as "a bit tiny for a royal."

Every dawn, ANON walked down to the silver stream, filled the bucket, carried it back up the hill, and poured it into the well. Then ANON took out a lantern, opened a great leather ledger chained to a post beside the well, and wrote a single line.

Day 1. One bucket.

The next morning: Day 2. One bucket.

And the next. And the next.

The ledger was not locked. The lantern beside it never went out. Anyone could walk up, turn the pages and read every line, from the very first to the very last. Some did. Most did not, at first, because a person pouring water into a well is not exactly exciting.

"Why bother?" asked a cat one morning. He was a large ginger cat with a face that looked permanently disappointed in the weather. The forest called him Grumpy, and he had stopped arguing about it years ago. He sat on the well's rim, watching ANON pour.

"Because the well matters," said ANON.

"It's one bucket," said Grumpy. "The well's enormous. You'll be at it forever."

"Probably," said ANON, and wrote: Day 31. One bucket. Cat present. Cat unimpressed.

Grumpy read it over ANON's shoulder and made a noise like a kettle giving up.

Word travels in a glowing forest. Soon others came to see the keeper who never skipped a dawn.

A pair of travelling card players arrived, shuffling a deck of Aces so fast it hummed. They bet each other a biscuit that ANON would miss a morning before the full moon. They lost. They bet again. They lost again. Eventually they stopped betting and started bringing breakfast.

A clattering band of skeletons wandered in from the hills. Cheerful fellows, mostly elbows, who laughed so hard at their own jokes that their jaws fell off. They offered to help carry water. They were terrible at it, since buckets fall straight through ribcages, but they kept trying, and ANON thanked them every time.

And one evening, at the edge of the clearing, a pair of enormous golden eyes opened among the trees. They did not blink. They did not speak. They simply watched the well, and the ledger, and the lantern, all night long. In the morning they were gone, and three words had been scratched into the bark of the nearest oak:

We see. We know.

"Charming," said Grumpy. "Absolutely not creepy at all."

The seasons turned. The ledger grew thick. And something strange began to happen at the bottom of the well.

It started to shine.

Not much. Just a little more each morning, like a star slowly remembering how. Travellers would lean over the rim, see that faint light far below, and then do the most important thing anyone in the forest ever did. They walked over to the ledger, lifted the lantern and read it for themselves. Every day. Every bucket. All of it written down, out in the open, for anyone who cared to look.

Nobody had to take ANON's word for anything. That was rather the point.

On the seventy-seventh morning, ANON came to the well as usual. The stars were fading over the far lake, the one so clear it held the whole night sky inside it. The bucket was filled. The water was poured. ANON opened the ledger, lifted the pen...

...and stopped.

Below yesterday's line, in ink still wet, in handwriting that was not ANON's, someone had written:

Day 78. Two buckets. Look up.

ANON looked up.

High on the hill above the forest, where no path had ever gone, a terrace of white marble was catching the very first light of sunrise. And standing at its edge, small and far away, someone was waving.

To be continued in Chapter 2.

Like ANON's ledger, our record is open too. Every daily boost is logged on the Proof of Work page, where you can check it on-chain for yourself. Fancy a break? The ANON Arcade has free games, with no wallet and no sign-up.

Chapter 2: The Marble Terrace

There was no path up the hill. There never had been.

ANON stood at the bottom of it with the empty bucket still in one hand, looking up at the white terrace glowing in the sunrise. Brambles. Loose stones. A slope so steep that even the goats in the forest pretended it wasn't there.

"Absolutely not," said Grumpy, who had followed without being asked. "You've poured your bucket. Breakfast is the next item on the agenda. I've checked."

"Someone wrote in the ledger," said ANON.

"Someone wrote rubbish in the ledger."

"Someone poured a second bucket," said ANON, "and wrote it down where anyone could check. That's not rubbish. That's the opposite of rubbish."

Grumpy considered this, sighed the long sigh of a cat who knows he has already lost, and climbed onto ANON's shoulder. "Fine. But I'm not walking."

So they climbed.

It took most of the morning. ANON's cloak snagged on every thorn on the hill. The crown slipped twice and had to be fished out of a bush. The skeletons tried to help by going first and calling back which stones were safe, but they kept falling apart halfway through a sentence, so the advice came out as "Left is fine, the big rock is…" followed by a clatter and a lot of laughing.

Near the top, the brambles simply stopped. In their place were steps. Wide, smooth, white steps, as if someone had been building their way down to meet them.

At the top of the steps was the terrace.

It was bigger than it had looked from the well. Marble, pale and clean, with low walls carved in the same faint letters as the well's rim. Along the back wall hung a long row of golden frames. Most were empty. A few held a soft light inside them, the same light that had started to shine at the bottom of the well.

And in the middle of the terrace, sitting on an upturned crate and eating an apple, was a small old woman in a patched green coat with a long brass spyglass across her knees.

"You took your time," she said, cheerfully. "I thought you might not come."

"You wrote in the ledger," said ANON.

"I did." She held out a hand, sticky with apple. "Wren. I light the lamps along the ridge. Have done for years. Every morning I'm up here before the sun, and every morning I see a little figure with a little bucket walking up to that well." She tapped the spyglass. "Seventy-seven mornings. I counted. Then I thought, I can read that ledger from here on a clear day. Why not go down and actually read it properly?"

"And you did," said ANON.

"Every page. Every line. Every bucket." Wren nodded firmly. "Nothing hidden, nothing rubbed out, nothing added in the night. I checked it twice, because I'm suspicious by nature. Then I walked down to the stream, filled my own bucket, poured it in and wrote my line. Seemed only polite."

Grumpy narrowed his eyes. "And the marble? The frames? The rather large terrace that wasn't here last week?"

Wren laughed. "Oh, it was here. It's always been here. You just couldn't see it from down there until the well started shining. Light travels uphill in this forest, didn't you know? Every bucket you poured lit it up a little more."

ANON walked slowly along the row of frames. In each one that glowed, there was a tiny shape, a line, a mark, as if someone had pressed a thumbprint into the light. Underneath each frame, carved into the marble, was a short line of writing. ANON leaned close to read the nearest one.

Read the ledger. Then decide.

The next one said the same. And the next.

"Who are these for?" asked ANON.

"Anyone who climbs the hill," said Wren. "Anyone who reads the ledger for themselves and chooses to stay. I don't decide who belongs up here. I just light the lamps."

For a while nobody spoke. The sun was fully up now. From the terrace you could see the whole forest glowing below, the silver stream, the well with its faint light, and, far off, the starry lake still holding a little of the night inside it.

"So," said Grumpy eventually. "Two buckets a day now, is it?"

"It's never been about how many," said ANON. "It's about writing every one of them down."

"Then tomorrow," said Wren, standing and brushing off her coat, "I'll race you to the stream."

They walked back down together, slower this time, on the white steps that hadn't been there yesterday. At the bottom, the card players were waiting with breakfast, as usual. But they weren't playing. They were staring at their deck of Aces, spread across a flat stone in neat rows.

"We counted it four times," said the taller one, looking pale. "There's a suit in here that wasn't there last night."

The cards rustled, though there was no wind at all.

To be continued.

The ANON Chronicles

Chapter 3: The Extra Suit

Nobody ate breakfast that morning. Not even Grumpy, which tells you how serious it was.

The cards lay on the flat stone in four tidy rows, the way the card players always laid them out to count. Hearts. Diamonds. Clubs. Spades. Thirteen in each, from Ace to King, every one present and correct.

And then a fifth row.

It hadn't been dealt. It had simply appeared, cards sliding out from the bottom of the deck one at a time, as if someone polite were waiting for their turn to speak. They were pale grey, the colour of morning mist over the stream, and in the corner of each one was a small mark like a hand held up to say hello.

"That," said the taller card player, pointing with a shaking biscuit, "is not a suit."

"It's a suit," said the shorter one. "It's just not one of ours."

Wren crouched beside the stone and lifted her brass spyglass, though the cards were barely an arm's length away. "Old habit," she said. "I like to look closely at things."

ANON knelt and turned over the first grey card. On its face was a picture of a hand, open and empty, drawn in fine silver lines. Under it, in the same faint letters that circled the well, someone had written:

The Dead Hand. Dealt fair.

"Dead," said the shorter card player faintly. "Oh, lovely. Very cheerful."

The skeletons, who had been sitting in a row on a log, perked up at once. "Dead is fine," said the nearest one. "Dead is great, actually. Some of our best friends are dead." His jaw fell off from laughing, and he had to put it back on before he could add, "All of them, now we think about it."

Then the air beside the stone shimmered, like heat over a summer road, and the deck began to shuffle itself.

It did it beautifully. The cards arched and riffled and bridged, neat as a waterfall, and when they settled back into a single pile a figure was sitting cross-legged on the other side of the stone. It was pale and slightly see-through, with a round, kindly face and a waistcoat covered in tiny embroidered spades. It wore a green dealer's visor tipped back on its head.

"Morning," said the ghost. "Sorry about the fright. I never quite know how to introduce myself without one."

Grumpy's fur stood up so far he looked twice his usual size. "You," he said, "are standing in my breakfast."

"Sitting, technically," said the ghost, and moved over a little to be fair.

"Who are you?" asked ANON.

"A dealer," said the ghost. "Or I was. Long time ago, at a table by the starry lake. Folk said I had the fairest hands in the forest. Never dealt from the bottom, never marked a card. When I stopped being, well, alive, I found I didn't want to stop dealing. So I kept a little suit of my own. It goes where the games are honest." The ghost nodded at the card players. "You two have been playing fair for weeks. Betting biscuits, losing biscuits, writing your scores down. It caught my attention."

The taller card player blushed to his ears. "We do write the scores down," he admitted. "In the back of ANON's ledger. Seemed only right."

"I've read them," said the ghost. "Every line."

ANON looked at the grey cards again. "How many are there?"

The ghost smiled. "Count them."

So they did. ANON counted, then Wren counted, then both card players counted together, out loud, tapping each card. Grumpy refused to count on principle, then counted anyway when he thought nobody was watching.

The numbers all matched. Not many cards. Fewer than you would think a whole suit should have.

"Some have already been picked up by travellers who wanted to keep one," said the ghost. "And some were never dealt at all. Those just sit in the deck, waiting. I don't make any more. When a suit is finished, it's finished."

"Then how does anyone know how many are left?" asked Wren.

The ghost pointed, with a translucent finger, up the hill towards the well, where the lantern still glowed beside the open ledger.

"Same way you know anything around here," it said. "You don't take my word for it. You go and look. Every card I've dealt is written down, and anyone can count them."

For a moment nobody said anything. The stream chattered. A firefly drifted down and landed on the grey Ace, as if it wanted to read it too.

"I like this one," said the nearest skeleton. "Can we keep him?"

"He isn't a stray," said ANON, though ANON was smiling.

"I might stay a while," said the ghost, gathering the deck into its hands. "This forest feels honest. And I'll admit I'm curious about your well. Down by the lake, they say its light reaches all the way to the water now."

Wren lowered her spyglass slowly. "That's odd," she said. "I was up on the ridge at dawn. The lake was bright. Brighter than I've ever seen it."

"Starlight," said Grumpy. "Lakes do that. It's their entire job."

"Not in the daytime, they don't," said Wren.

Far off between the trees, where the forest opened onto the water, something golden blinked. Once. Slowly.

The ghost dealt one grey card onto the stone, face down, and slid it towards ANON.

"For later," it said. "Don't turn it over until you're at the lake."

To be continued.