Dispatch
Something is missing from this city
A dispatch from The Serpent and the Staff, part one: a near-future Britain that has learned to live with disappearance.
People are disappearing. No one is panicking. That is the scariest part.
A country that looks away
In the world of The Serpent and the Staff, whole families vanish without explanation and the institutions that should care stopped pretending long ago. In near-future York, disappearances have become background noise — easier to call them leaving for something better than to ask the obvious question.
Some disappearances are accidents. Some are policy.
The walls of every city are papered with photographs of the missing. Nobody asks about them. Asking is dangerous, and danger is expensive.
The premise
This is a Britain held together by checkpoints, rumour, and survival — atmospheric, tense, and grounded. No clean dystopia, no chosen-one fantasy. Just a city that learned to be quiet, and the people who refuse to.
Nothing vanishes cleanly. The first dispatch starts here.