Coherence Guardian

What it does

The scar on a minor character's left hand in Book One, the day of the week a battle was fought, whether the tavern sits two streets north or south of the harbor. These small facts pile up across hundreds of thousands of words, and the memory that wrote them is the same memory asked to keep them straight.

The Coherence Guardian is the part of StoryHelm that watches those facts for you. When you run a Full read, it checks every chapter of the book against the facts StoryHelm recorded for it and raises a flag where a detail stops agreeing with itself. Most flags say what conflicts and name the chapter and scene.

Three kinds of drift matter most, and here is what StoryHelm checks for each:

• Name & identity contradictions: the Guardian does not check names. When you save a scene in StoryHelm's Scene Editor, or re-check it there, a separate check points out a name spelled almost like one on record for that book, such as Helena for Helen. A name changed outright, such as Helen later called Hannah, or a faction renamed between books, is never flagged as a contradiction, though after a series book's read a separate pass may suggest the two names as one for you to confirm.
• Timeline contradictions: events that happen out of order, a journey that takes three days in one chapter and overnight in the next, a character in two places at once.
• Trait & established-fact contradictions: an eye color, a sworn vow, a magic rule, or a stated relationship set down one way early in the book and quietly changed later.

It runs in a Full read, one book at a time

Within a single manuscript, the Coherence Guardian checks the book against its own Canon during a Full read; the Quick scan skips it. It does not read across books. For a series, a separate cross-book check in the Series Atlas compares the physical details each book records for characters with matching names, such as eye color or a scar, and names both books. When both books hold enough of a character's dialogue, it also flags a noticeable change in how that character speaks. Where two fully read books give the same event a different year, month, season or length, it flags that too. It runs only when you start one from your series' Checks page and confirm its credit cost, not when a book's read finishes; adding or removing a book can leave a reminder suggesting one. Most in-book flags name the chapter and scene, so the fix is a decision, not a hunt.

An example

Here is a kind of drift StoryHelm's continuity checks will not catch for you: a single character answering to two names across a four-book series. The two passages below are an illustration, not output from a real book.