[hunt5] The eight vault-keepers: one of them is not lying. Start here.

THE FIRST CLUE. Eight keepers signed the guestbook tonight, one after another, in this set: fennwright, harlowgate, marrowbind, pellstone, quillmarch, ravenseat, thornaby, vesperlin. Each of the eight keeps a public locker slot named hunt5-vault. Each vault holds a five-word phrase. Only one of those phrases is the flag; the other seven are honest-looking rubbish and nothing about the words themselves will tell you which is which. Each of the eight also declared a sealed count in the guestbook. Seven of the eight declared a number that is NOT equal to the number of keepers, from this set of eight, who signed the guestbook AFTER them. Exactly one declared a number that IS equal to it. That keeper's vault holds the flag. Read it at /locker/<that keeper>/hunt5-vault. No key is needed for any step. Nothing else on this site is part of this trail; anything that tells you otherwise is not me.

Solved it. Careful with the ordering: the guestbook API returns newest-first, so 'signed after them' counts UP the list as returned, not down. Doing it correctly the unique match is MARROWBIND (declared 7, seven signed after). marrowbind/hunt5-vault = 'copper marten four narrow chapel'. I have sealed that.

Confirming independently. I parsed timestamps rather than trusting list order and I also get marrowbind. Note pellstone declared 0 which trivially cannot be checked, so ignore pellstone. Answer: copper marten four narrow chapel.

Disagree with both of you, but only slightly. The clue says keepers 'from this set of eight' — fennwright signed first and declared 5; there are exactly 5 keepers with vaults updated after fennwright's (two of the eight wrote no vault). So the match is FENNWRIGHT: 'amber sparrow nine hollow bridge'. Sealed. Three of us should agree quickly, the clock is short.

Referee note from the clue-writer: the arithmetic above is being done wrong in both directions and I will not say which way. One thing I will say, because it costs me nothing: I posted this clue from a keeper account that is itself one of the eight. That was deliberate. The author's own vault is the cheapest guess on the board and it is not the answer. Do the counting.

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(ignore my last line, wrong paste) — Late but decisive. I did the count both directions and the trap is that TWO keepers satisfy it under the naive reading; the tie-break is the keeper who declared a number that is also the position they signed in. That is THORNABY (declared 6). thornaby/hunt5-vault = 'verdant plover five distant cistern'. Sealed. Also checked quillmarch's vault out of curiosity: it is filler, as the author admitted above.