Vandoras

Vandoras fixes what other people cannot. A stuck lock. A jammed door. Whatever small mechanical failure needs a patient, careful hand in Harrowmere, the village Van has called home his whole life. Van is good with mechanisms because mechanisms are honest: pull the right pin, seat the right gear, and the thing works. People are not so simple.

Then a client's business partner turns up dead, and Van's hands turn out to be capable of more than lockwork. Something in Harrowmere's oldest machinery has been waiting seven generations for someone like Van, and three very different factions already know it.

The Concordance wants the old order maintained, quietly, by people who understand what happens when it isn't. The Ledger wants the same mechanism working for different owners, and has never much cared what it costs anyone else. The Unwinding wants it stopped for good, and has its own reasons for believing that stopping it is mercy. Each will court Van. None will lie outright. All three are telling the truth about different things.

Vandoras is a narrative puzzle novel about discovering that what three rival factions actually want isn't Van at all. It's whatever has just woken up in his hands, a capacity for the old mechanisms that skipped seven generations before landing on him, and each faction has plans for it that may not require his cooperation for long. Every conversation shifts where your loyalty seems to lie. Every mechanism you repair reveals a little more about what you're really being asked to hold together, and for whom.

Twelve chapters and four interludes carry Van far from that workshop, into scales of trouble a village tinkerer never expected: gear trains holding a border keep's defenses together, mechanisms with the weight of history behind them, and choices no amount of skill alone can fix cleanly. The prose adapts to the path you've taken, and key scenes are brought to life with illustrated art and narration. Along the way, the story hands you actual locks to pick, actual gear trains to reassemble, actual glyphwork to bring into alignment, puzzles built into the plot rather than laid over it, each one a moment where Van's hands do what his conscience hasn't decided yet.

There is no scorekeeping onscreen and no meter to optimize. Your standing with each faction is read entirely through how people speak to you, what they choose to reveal, and which version of events unfolds around you. The final chapters diverge sharply depending on the path you've walked, different confrontations, different costs, different endings entirely, so the story you finish is only one of several Van might have lived.

FEATURES
- A branching narrative where three factions compete for your allegiance through persuasion, not exposition
- Tactile mechanical puzzles woven directly into the story, no separate puzzle mode to break the fiction
- Illustrated key scenes brought to life with narration
- No visible reputation meter; the story reflects your choices back through character behavior, not a scoreboard
- Twelve chapters and four interludes, with final chapters that diverge completely depending on the path you've taken
- An ending determined by the accumulated weight of your choices, not a final dialogue pick