Six letters, four branches, one reader

Sometimes I wonder, how would we look at ourselves from the future.

No judgement, just a gaze. Someone who reads our fragments a hundred years later, trying to understand what it was like to live here. What we found ordinary. What we no longer noticed. What we did see, but didn’t know how to carry.

That thought lingered. And then it became Veld.

What it is

Veld is a correspondence. Six letters, one time through.

Someone from a far future writes to you. Her name is Veld. She reads in old fragments and has chosen you out of them. What she wants from you, she doesn’t quite know herself at the beginning.

You answer her. No typed text, only choices per letter. What you answer changes what she writes back.

Under the bonnet sits a profile system. Four axes on which your answers place you. It isn’t there to pin you down, it is there to see you. Letter 2 branches into four storylines, chosen by your first answers. Each branch has two sub-routes within it. Veld notices when in a later letter you move against your earlier answers, and she names it. People are not one position.

The last letter is for you alone. Made from what you have given across the whole exchange, built sentence by sentence from fragments matching your profile. No two last letters are the same, and it is not a procedural text generator. Everything is written, only the selection is yours.

It is free, in the browser, Dutch and English. One hour, more or less. No account, no tracking, no ads. Your progress saves as a code that you keep yourself, I keep nothing.

The first from ELS

This is the first completed work from ELS. Het Laatste Dorp is very close, but Veld is the first. Free, accessible to anyone. It is small, and that is what it should be. An in-between. To show: this is my style, these are the stories I tell.

Whether it works, I’ll know only when others read it. Do you find it lovely? Pass it on. Doesn’t land for you? That’s fine too, feedback welcome, you can also ignore it entirely. I didn’t write it to achieve anything in particular. I wrote it because Veld wouldn’t leave my head. What happens after that, I’ll see.

Veld lives here: https://everlingeringstories.com/en/veld/