Dispatch From the Hollow

Internal TestFlight is on v46, Alpha Howl, build 202609101146, accepted by Apple at five to noon. It carries the Druid and Alpha experiments, Mist and Shadow, Bond arrows, the revised claw and bite sounds, the four-weapon six-technique Practice Armory and the weapon animation studies. One thousand one hundred and seventy-eight release checks pass against the exact packaged game.

The campaign itself is playable from the abandoned camp through the Whispering Wilds, the Warren and the Rat King, the Ranger's Last Cache, the Quarry Troll, the Hollow gatehouse and the Lantern Well, and now the Oathkeeper at the bottom of it. Beat him, take his three Memories, and the far gate opens back to the upper gallery. The rest of the Hollow Keep, the Ashen Reach and the castle remain to be built.

Options, then the DEV button, opens an isolated level with all ten charms, all ten arrow types, both weapons and a hundred practice Memories. Every node can be learned and reset there without touching the campaign save. It is where the cloak trials live, where the Alpha Howl was signed off, and where the weapon comparison is happening: rats for coverage, a wolf for pursuit, the shielded Oathkeeper for commitment. New ownership stays in that disposable ledger until the campaign has a real room to teach it in. The design refuses to invent an invisible reward.

In order. The Hollow Keep, with a shielded captain and a room where banking a Ricochet shot matters, built together as one task. Then the Ashen Reach and the Watchtower, where the Phoenix charm adds traversal and rain-fire rather than re-granting the fire the quarry already gave. Then the buried castle approach, where Mist teaches passage through a sealed seam before it is ever used as a critical gate. Then the Underhalls, combining known verbs under pressure with no new controls dumped before the story payoff.

The transformations have candidate homes too: Druid could unlock a high-canopy leap route, Mist a marked root seam, Bond an encounter with a trapped beast. None of those are placed yet, and the doc is careful to say so.

The doctrine that governs the order has not changed since the first of September. Vertical slice before breadth. Ability and level together. Keep greyboxes ugly until they are fun. And at every gate, a build on a real device and a checklist of what to judge. We do not advance past a gate that feels wrong.