The Book of Names

Every soul that stops Dante asks him the same thing, and it is not pity: that its name should go back among the living. Guido da Montefeltro speaks only because he believes nobody will climb back up to repeat it. The game takes that request literally and makes it its currency, with the doctrinal point written into the code: suffrages count in Purgatory, not here, so you promise fame and not salvation. The first name is collected in the dark wood already, and from there down the book never closes again.

Three ways of taking a name, and they are three different games. Promising it weighs full, and whoever promises is given goods. Tearing it out by force weighs a third more, because you carry a name that did not want to be carried, and it is the only honest reason for weapons to exist in a place where nothing dies. Getting it by lying, that is, by saying you are staying down here, weighs a little over a third: a liar is given no favours, he is given the rule of the place and nothing else.

The weight does not count pages, it counts how far you have committed yourself, because a living man loaded with promises smells of the way out: each unit raises the trace by fifty five thousandths, up to double and no further, and no indicator says so. You find out because the beasts reach you sooner. A name spent leaves the book and does not come back, so the shortcut opens only by betraying somebody you had promised to remember; and the names of Limbo open nothing, because those souls never passed before Minos at all.