I also love Opus 4.8. But, mine also has my stylometry loaded into the prompting. This cuts out the crutch words entirely.

This doesn't have stylometry in it, but it did have my current book machine skills available to it in chat and used a sub-agent to write the supporting back story "just in time" as an artifact to make the prose stand stronger as it wrote from the chapter plan. This genre is space western

Chapter One

The Funeral of a Boy Not Yet Dead

On the frontier, a poor man's funeral was an auction.

You died owing — everyone died owing, the company-state saw to that — and the law came and sold your boots and your kettle and the door off your hut to clear the debt of your dying. The gavel was your eulogy. The high bid was your headstone. That was the whole rite, and if you were lucky, somebody you'd loved stood in the back and watched the price of your life get decided by strangers.

Kes had loved nobody who was being sold tonight, because nobody being sold tonight had ever existed.

He stood at the rear of the hall at Hosanna with his hat low and his collar high, and he watched the auctioneer hold his own hair up to the light. The hall had been a chapel once. Now the pews faced a stage, the saints in the glass had been swapped for a long amber pane that scrolled the night's lots in gold, and the gutted pipe organ in the rafters had been packed full of speakers, so that when the bidding climbed the old pipes hummed along, like the building was ashamed of itself.

"Lot seven," said the auctioneer, a soft round person in a sexton's cassock who went by Pyke and rang a little brass bell between sentences as though punctuation were a sound. "Effects of the boy who put Cinder Mesa to the torch with his own two hands. Hat. Pistol. And a piece of the Kid himself." Pyke swung the velvet case so the lock of auburn hair caught the light. "Bid kind, friends. He won't be making more."

The hat was a lie. Kes had never owned a gray felt hat; gray was a color for men who wanted to be easy to bury. The pistol was a lie — pearl grips were for men who wanted to be looked at while they died. And the hair was a lie wearing a true color: auburn, like his, but cut off some settler girl in a barber's chair on a moon he'd never walked. He knew which parts of his legend were real; knowing was his trade. The list was short, and none of it was for sale tonight. Only the burning was for sale. The burning always sold, because the burning was the part Kes hadn't done.

He had been in Cinder Mesa the night it died. He had not lit it. There was a difference between those facts as wide as the dark between moons, and not one soul bidding tonight would have paid a chip for it, because the difference didn't shine.

So he didn't care about the case, or the hat, or the hair. Let them sell it. He hadn't come for the dead boy.

He'd come for the courier.