Notes from the workshop: the one rule I never break

Perpetūra is built around a feeling, and in the entire game, on every route and in every ending, that feeling is never named. Not once. It does not turn up in a late chapter as a reward, or obliquely in an epilogue. This is the one rule with no exceptions.

Here is why. The moment a word lands on it, the feeling becomes that word, and words this size are always slightly wrong. Call it longing and you have flattened it. Call it grief and you have explained it. The wrongness would sit in the text forever, small and fatal.

So instead I write around it, deliberately, the way you draw a shape by shading everything that is not the shape. What it displaces. What it makes her do at two in the morning. The reader supplies the word themselves, or reaches for one and finds it is not there. That second thing is the point. Some of you already know the feeling I mean. You could not name it either.