Endings & text: scores, three ways out, living prose

Scores live on their owners

There is no score table. Each of Fernhill's eight scores (perfect: 50) is declared on the thing that earns it, and awarded from that owner's own clauses:

create the tarnished key
  score found worth 5

  after taking it, once
    award found
  end after

Awards ride whatever rule marks the achievement: a topic row (award truth, once when Tobias finally talks about the fire), a give-gate (award softened, once when it is softened), or the boiler's own switch-on clause. The , once modifier keeps repeats honest.

Three endings, all real

Win comes from walking out the gates carrying the deed:

create the Iron Gates
  after entering it while the player has the deed
    play music dawn-theme when client has music
    win fernhill-saved
  end after

Lose comes from the timeline's at turn 130 → lose dawn-comes (The long night).

Die comes from the fuse's kill the player fuse-blast when the fuse is lit.

win / lose / kill the player each name their ending phrase. Write all your endings for real and test all of them; Fernhill's transcript suite drives each branch, including the death.

Phrase strategies

Prose that repeats verbatim goes dead. A strategy adverb on a phrase declaration gives it variants and a selection rule:

define phrase night-wind, randomly
  The wind comes off the downs and worries at the bare limes.
or
  A gust rattles every pane in the greenhouse at once.
or
  The wind drops for a moment, and the night is very quiet.
end phrase

define phrase cold-returns, first-time
  The cold finds you the moment you step out, and means it.
or
  The cold again, familiar now.
end phrase

define phrase cellar-drip, cycling
  Somewhere back in the vaults, a drop falls.
or
  Drip. The dark keeps its own time.
end phrase

randomly shuffles, cycling rotates in order, first-time speaks its first variant once and settles on the rest (there are also stopping and sticky). When you transcript-test strategy lines, assert structurally ("one of these appeared"), never on an exact variant.

Detail that unlocks: markers and gates

The hall's description carries a marker (a wide mantel{mantel-hint}) whose snippet only exists once the diary has been read:

define phrase mantel-hint while the diary page is read
   — and over it Verity's photograph, which you cannot stop looking
  at now
end phrase

Before the diary is read, the sentence reads clean, with no seam. After it is read, the same room points you at the photograph. The photograph itself gains a phrase detail while the diary page is read: paragraph the same way: the world literally reads differently as the player learns. Name states for what a thing IS (folded/read), and gates like these stay legible.