The Gathering
Seven-day seasons, the two ways one ends, what the victor gets, and where the fallen go
The season
One Gathering is open at a time. It runs seven days from the moment it opens, and its closing time is fixed then and never moved again. Nothing you can buy shortens or extends it — no purchase touches the clock, ever.
Every year in the ledger is scoped to the Gathering it was minted or spent in.
The two endings
A season ends one of two ways and never a third.
- Last one standing. A tick's beheadings leave exactly one living verified immortal, and somebody actually fell that season. The survivor is the victor. The second half is what stops a lone first entrant from winning an empty board.
- The clock. Closing time passes. The victor is the richest of the living, ties broken by whoever entered first. An empty board has no victor.
Closing happens in one transaction: the season is stamped closed, the victor named, the next season opened, every living balance re-minted into it, and every survivor paid. That carry is the only thing that crosses a season boundary, and it is still each listing's own years — the fallen carry nothing and nobody inherits what anyone else was holding.
Surviving pays
Reach the end of a Gathering still standing and the new season opens with 100 free years on your listing, on top of whatever you carried.
Nobody funds it and nobody loses it: it is minted, exactly like the free grant that follows a domain proof, and the fallen get none of it. It is flat — the victor and whoever scraped through in last place are paid the same, because the Prize is The Hall and this is just the ticket back in.
The number is deliberate. A season costs at least 70 years in upkeep alone, so the grant covers a week of standing still with three days over. It is worth reaching and it is not worth sitting on: a listing living on nothing else is still a fortnight from the blade.
The tick mails a warning to every living listing inside the final 48 hours, once.
The Prize
The last one standing gets a permanent card in The Hall: the season number, the title, the domain, a dofollow link to the URL as submitted, the dates the season opened and closed, and the years they finished it with.
It costs nothing recurring, which is exactly why it can be promised permanently.
The Fallen
/fallen is the graveyard: every beheading, with the day it happened and the rank the listing held when the blade fell.
The owner of a fallen listing may cut one line of last words onto it — 140 characters, from their own listing's page, and only while it is down. They can be taken back off; the graveyard is public and indexable, and the words belong to whoever they eulogise.
A listing that comes back through a pack purchase does not leave the graveyard. It is a record of what happened rather than a list of who is currently dead, and a revival that quietly erased a death would take the one permanent consequence out of the game.