Emberwood

The season counter moves only when you walk from one region to another, and you get twelve moves before the Ember Rite ends the run.

Talking is free. Reading is free. Fighting is free. Going somewhere is the only thing that costs you time — so every request you accept is a claim on the same twelve moves, and the ones you don't reach in time close permanently.

How it plays

• Four regions — Hearth, Thornwood, Stillwater, Ashridge — connected in a ring plus one cross-link between Hearth and Stillwater. One hop ages the world by a season, so planning a route is spending the three years the run lasts.
• Ten requests across six lives, each with an authored expiry season. Wick stops asking about the kite after season 4. Mother Bell's marsh medicine runs out at season 6, and if you were elsewhere when it did, she dies. Nothing is retryable.
• The journal is always open and always honest. Every live request shows the seasons it has left from the moment you take it, and its badge turns ember with one season remaining. A loss is meant to be foreseen and chosen, not discovered.
• People age on a schedule you can see. Portraits and world sprites both change at seasons 0, 4 and 8, so everyone shifts twice across a run — Wick goes 7 to 9 to 10, and the silhouette changes with him.
• Chains gate each other. Halden only asks for an apprentice if you taught Wick the bow; the Warden stays hostile until Halden's blade exists. One skipped favour can close two.
• Three endings, decided by how many of the six chains you finished — Ashes for 0–2, Embers for 3–4, Hearthfire for 5–6. Which chains you close counts, not how many favours you clear: four completed requests can still be one finished chain, and one chain is Ashes.

The four regions are generated once from a single seed and never regenerated; seasons re-dress the same ground, so Thornwood in Autumn is recognisably the wood you walked in Spring. The palette turns over with it — blossom, green, amber, grey-blue — with fireflies in Summer, falling leaves in Autumn and snow in Winter, so you can read the season before you read the wheel. No sprite or tile art ships at all: every mark in the world, including the faces, is drawn at runtime.