Expanded Profiles

Character Profiles

Meet the companions, agents, and keepers of buried truth whose choices shape the fate of the Sundered Age.

Sable Dunmore — Wrenfolk record-keeper and protagonist of Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Sable Dunmore

Wrenfolk · Keeper of Records · Ashfen

He says he wants to file a complete and accurate record and return to his desk. What he actually wants is harder to name.

Sable Dunmore is a Wrenfolk record-keeper from Ashfen, a quiet market town where a careful hand and an accurate ledger are usually enough to keep the world in order. He is precise by habit, modest almost to a fault, and far more observant than he gives himself credit for. Sable does not seek danger, glory, or even adventure; he prefers tasks with clear edges, honest records, and a sensible place to put things when they are finished.

But Sable has the rare and troublesome gift of noticing what does not belong. When an impossible object comes into his keeping, he does what he has always done: he writes it down, compares the evidence, follows the thread, and refuses to alter the truth simply because it has become inconvenient. Beneath his quiet manners and dry self-doubt is a steadiness the world may need more than courage — the kind that keeps a record faithfully, even when the record begins to change everything.

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Burr Dunmore — Wrenfolk craftsman and Sable's cousin in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Burr Dunmore

Wrenfolk · Craftsman · Sable's Cousin

The anchor. He grumbles at everything and abandons nothing.

Burr Dunmore is a craftsman — stone, wood, metal, the joining of one thing to another. He is practical to his bones, deeply skeptical of anything that cannot be measured or repaired, and constitutionally opposed to situations with no sensible exit. He has been Sable's cousin for thirty-one years and has spent most of that time telling him when an idea is a bad one, then helping him do it anyway.

He does not discuss feelings. He occasionally reveals them by accident — by showing up when he said he wouldn't, by fixing something no one asked him to fix, by going very quiet in the moments other people go loud. His complaints are a form of presence; the day Burr stops complaining is the day something has genuinely gone wrong. He carries his tools everywhere. He has never once left anyone behind.

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Thessaly Vorn — elven disgraced linguist and companion in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Thessaly Vorn

Elf · Disgraced Linguist · Vel Tharun

She was expelled from the Grand Linguistic Archive for publishing a paper that was correct. She has been right and professionally dead for twenty-eight years.

Thessaly Vorn was, until recently, a Senior Fellow in Comparative Script Studies at the Grand Linguistic Archive in Vel Tharun. She is no longer affiliated with the Archive. The reason is a paper she submitted in good faith, with full documentation, and with the understanding that the findings would be uncomfortable. The Archive found them more than uncomfortable. She now teaches basic elvish grammar in Merrath, which is not nothing, but is considerably less than what she is capable of.

She is not bitter. She is impatient. Her mind is the sharpest in any room she enters, and she knows it, which would be insufferable if she were not also almost always right. She argues hardest with people she respects, translates in real time, corrects without being asked, and gets more technical when she is frightened. She was expelled for being correct once. She intends to be correct again.

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Breck Ironhallow — dwarven ruin-walker from Kharanor in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Breck Ironhallow

Dwarf · Ruin-Walker · Kharanor

Sixty years mapping ruins no other dwarf will enter. He knows exactly where he is going. He has always known.

Breck Ironhallow left Kharanor at one hundred and eighteen years old — young by dwarven measure — and has not gone back. In the sixty years since, he has mapped ruins across Valdenmoor that no other surveyor will touch: sites that behave oddly, that resist documentation, that seem, in some quality no instrument can measure, to be more present than ordinary ruins have any right to be. He is the best ruin-walker on the continent and he has never told anyone why he became one.

He is economical to the point of silence. He says what he means, no more, in the fewest words the sentence will allow. He is carrying something he has not yet put into words — and the shape of what he is not saying is visible in everything he does say, in the ruins he chooses, in the way he reads old stone, in the fact that sixty years of maps all circle the same destination without once arriving at it.

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Mara Ashbone — orc shaman of the Thurak steppes in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Mara Ashbone

Orc · Shaman · The Thurak Steppes

She felt the tablet from three days away. She describes it not as an object but as something that has been speaking.

Mara Ashbone is a shaman of the Thurak steppes — which, in her tradition, means she has spent fifty-four years learning to pay attention in ways most people are trained not to. She reads the land. She knows what the earth is carrying, what has been buried in it, what is missing from it. She arrived in Ashfen without being sent for, without announcement, and without particular urgency. She knocked like someone who expected to be expected.

She is the calmest person in the company, which the company finds more alarming than alarm would be. She does not perform her gifts or explain them at length. She states what she observes, waits, and lets the observation find its level. Her dread — which is real and considerable — is not something she expresses. It is something she has carried for years as a form of preparation. She joined the group by simply not leaving.

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Dorn Calder — human road-broker and companion in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Dorn Calder

Human · Road-Broker · Valdenmoor

He says he wants a number considerably larger than what anyone is about to offer. Whether that is the whole truth is a separate question.

Dorn Calder is a road-broker — a merchant of connections, information, and the kind of practical knowledge that gets people from one side of a problem to the other. He is charming, well-travelled, deeply pragmatic, and honest enough to be useful and dishonest enough to survive. He has traded in goods, favors, and leverage across most of Valdenmoor, and has an instinct for reading a room that borders on the uncanny.

He joined the company for reasons he describes as commercial. Whether that is the complete account is something the company has learned not to take for granted. What is certain is that he is effective, that he is genuinely good at the things he claims to be good at, and that he is, underneath the performance of a man who puts a price on everything, capable of distinguishing between the things that are for sale and the things that are not.

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Vorrath — the First Found Drevari, oldest living being in the world of Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Vorrath

Drevari · The First Found · Age ~14,000

He has been in the Karath Range for three thousand years. He was not asleep. He was deciding.

Vorrath is the oldest living being in the known world — a Drevari, one of the Firstborn, composed of stone and memory and something the younger races have not yet found the right word for. He has been still in the Karath Range since the Collapse. He was not sleeping. He was watching what the younger races did with the world after his people withdrew from it, and deciding whether they were still worth speaking to.

He is not warm, at first. His first words carry the weight of everything the younger races have done to his people, and the reader feels it. He speaks in Vel-Drath before he renders it into common speech. He withholds things. He gives things slowly and with complete intention. His kallite — the luminous mineral that runs through his form — responds to truth in ways the company learns to read before they learn to read him. He is the most significant being in the world and he knows it and does not perform it.

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Ilyr Vaust — Imperial Curator of Continuance and central antagonist of Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Ilyr Vaust

Human · Imperial Curator of Continuance · The Quiet Ledger

He does not consider himself a villain. He considers himself the only person willing to make the necessary decisions.

Ilyr Vaust is the Curator of Continuance for the Aldenmere Empire — the architect of the Quiet Ledger, a compartmentalized apparatus for the management of dangerous knowledge. He is intelligent, patient, and entirely sincere in his belief that some truths are more harmful than the damage they explain. He has spent his career not suppressing facts but managing them: sequencing their release, containing their consequences, ensuring that the empire remains stable in a world that is, in his considered view, not ready for the full record.

He is not a man who shouts or threatens. He is a man who makes quiet decisions with long consequences, through agents he has never met, in operations he cannot fully trace. His network depends entirely on his personal authority. The thing Vaust cannot account for is someone who keeps a record not because they have been authorized to, but because they believe the truth matters regardless of authorization.

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Captain Renn Arct — Imperial Retrieval Commander in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Captain Renn Arct

Human · Imperial Retrieval Commander · Books I–II

He follows orders with conviction. He is very good at it. This is precisely the problem.

Captain Renn Arct is an Imperial Retrieval Commander — a specialist in the recovery of sensitive materials and the management of information that has moved beyond its authorized limits. He is professional, methodical, and not cruel. He follows orders with the conviction of a man who has decided that conviction is more efficient than doubt, and he is very good at his work.

He is not a fanatic. He is an instrument — precise, well-maintained, and pointed. The difficulty with an instrument is that it cannot ask whether what it is pointed at deserves to be retrieved. Renn has built his entire career on the assumption that this question belongs to someone else. The road north of Merrath will test that assumption before the company reaches the mountains.

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Magister Elian Sarev — Imperial philologist and agent of the Quiet Ledger in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Magister Elian Sarev

Human · Imperial Philologist · Books I–II

He read Thessaly's paper. He knew she was right. He helped bury it anyway.

Magister Elian Sarev is the empire's finest philologist — a scholar of languages, scripts, and the history of what gets written down and what does not. He is the most academically credible person the Quiet Ledger employs, which is partly why it employs him. When Thessaly Vorn submitted her paper on proto-Veranthi directionality, Sarev read it carefully. He understood it. He recognised that she was correct.

He is a man of considerable intelligence and considered cowardice, and he knows the difference, which makes it worse. He has made his accommodations with the institution in ways that allowed him to keep working and keep publishing — through the narrow angle of a man who tells himself he is choosing his battles. The company, when they encounter him, will not be a battle he chose.

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Sister Calis Vehn — Imperial Confessor and agent of the Quiet Ledger in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Sister Calis Vehn

Human · Imperial Confessor · Books I–II

She is devastating because she is kind. That is not an accident.

Sister Calis Vehn is an Imperial Confessor — a listener, a counsellor, and a collector of what people say when they feel safe. She is genuinely warm. She remembers details. She asks the right questions in the right order and creates, in the space of a single conversation, the feeling of being completely understood. People tell her things they have not told anyone.

Her kindness is real, which is what makes her dangerous. She is not performing warmth to extract information — she genuinely cares about the people she speaks with, and cares, in the same breath, about stability, and has never found these two concerns to be in conflict. She has never had to. The company will be the first situation in which the two things she serves point in different directions, and the question of which one she chooses is not one that announces itself in advance.

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Tarin Voss — courier and infiltrator for the Quiet Ledger in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Tarin Voss

Human · Courier & Infiltrator · Books I–II

He has no ideology. This makes him easy to hire and very hard to trust.

Tarin Voss is a courier, a forger, and a man of many faces — not in the dramatic sense, but in the practical one. He is good at being unremarkable. He remembers the right detail, forgets the inconvenient one, and arrives in places slightly before anyone expected him and slightly after anyone thought to watch for him. He works for whoever has the contract.

He is not, by his own account, a bad person. He moves things. He delivers messages. He occasionally switches them. He does not ask what the things are for. He has built an entire career on the proposition that curiosity is someone else's job — until the road north of Merrath, where the things he is carrying turn out to matter more than the courier fee.

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Prelate Ossin Drae — Warden of the Vault and guardian of the Vel-Kel in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Prelate Ossin Drae

Human · Warden of the Vault · Book II

He guards the artifact the empire calls The Anchor. He has guarded it for so long he has stopped wondering what it actually is.

Prelate Ossin Drae is the Warden of the Vault — the ecclesiastical authority responsible for the artifact the Aldenmere Empire has designated The Anchor, and for the institution that has grown around its keeping. He is a man of deep and sincere faith in the institutions he serves: the empire, the prelacy, and the continuous stability that both have provided for as long as anyone has been counting.

He is not dishonest. He genuinely believes what he says about the artifact — or rather, he believes the version of it he has been given, which is not quite the same thing. He has never questioned the name The Anchor because the name came with the role and the role came with his life's work. When someone appears who uses a different name — in a language he cannot read but that the stone responds to — the gap between what he was told and what is true becomes visible in ways he cannot account for.

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Maelor Thane — Quiet Ledger field operative touched by the Unmaking in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Maelor Thane

Human · Field Operative · Books II–III

He has spent too long where the Unmaking is active. Details slip around him. He has not yet noticed.

Maelor Thane is a field operative for the Quiet Ledger — experienced, capable, and deployed to the difficult situations that require someone who can function without oversight. He has been sent to difficult places for a long time. The Ledger does not officially track how long.

Something is wrong with him in a way that is hard to name. Rooms are quieter when he enters. Details become slightly imprecise in his vicinity — not dramatically, not noticeably unless you are paying close attention. He does not know this is happening. He would describe himself as experienced, which is true, and efficient, which is also true, and fine, which is increasingly not. The company, when they encounter him, will notice what the Ledger has not.

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Aldun Stonecroft — Keeper of the Deep Record at Kharanor in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Aldun Stonecroft

Dwarf · Keeper of the Deep Record · Kharanor

He did not bury the truth because he hated it. He buried it because he loved Kharanor.

Aldun Stonecroft has been Keeper of the Deep Record at Kharanor for so long that no one in the stonehall remembers his appointment. He is the institutional memory of the southernmost dwarven hall — quiet, meticulous, respected, and entirely bound up in Kharanor's stability and reputation. He does not present as a man with something to hide. He presents as a steward.

He inherited a silence when he took the role and has maintained it, year by year, in the careful administrative way that well-meaning people maintain silences they believe are necessary. He has never had a dramatic moment of choice — no single day on which he decided to do wrong. He simply kept doing what the role required, and the role, quietly, required more and more. He is not a villain in any register he would recognise. He is a man who loves his people and has spent two centuries deciding what they need to be protected from.

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Veylin Dross — Senior Archivist of the Grand Linguistic Archive in Songs of the Firstborn
Character Profile

Veylin Dross

Elf · Senior Archivist · Grand Linguistic Archive · Books I–II

She is not protecting the empire. She is protecting four hundred years of elvish scholarship. The fact that these have become the same thing is not something she has examined.

Veylin Dross is Senior Archivist of the Grand Linguistic Archive at Vel Tharun — the most senior elf in the institution below the Archivate itself, a position she has held for over two centuries. She is meticulous, respected, and genuinely brilliant. She has spent her career building the most comprehensive catalogue of pre-Collapse texts in existence and believes, sincerely, that she is the world's most careful custodian of what little survives. She voted for Thessaly Vorn's expulsion without hesitation. Not from malice. From institutional conviction: Thessaly's paper would have required acknowledging that four centuries of accepted elvish translation were wrong, and the damage to the Archive's authority would have been significant. Veylin made the calculation that protecting the institution protected the scholarship. She has not revisited this calculation.

She is the mirror Thessaly cannot quite look away from — the scholar she might have become if she had chosen safety over accuracy. Veylin did not inherit the Archive's arrangement with the Office of Continuance. She helped build it, in Year 621, believing she was securing the institution's independence. She was not wrong about what she was doing. She was wrong about what it would require of her, year by year, in the decades that followed. She has not noticed the accumulation. She has simply kept doing what the role required, and the role, quietly, has required more and more.

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