PERSONAE · THE VALE

Auver

aka Auver the Downcome, the Bridge-Prophet, Mad Auver, the Sky-Cur

A Vale-walking Vyr who learned what his elders did and could not keep it — and so stands at the Highbridge crossing and the cairns along the Rampart road telling anyone who passes that the sky drew down the god and means to erase the world. Every word he says is true. He says it like every ranting street-prophet the Vale has ever thrown a copper or a stone at, and is dismissed the same way — the more so because he is Vyr, and a Vyr crying doom sounds like the sky pleading its own case.

Auver came down as the Downcome always come down: to study, quietly, at the Far College, one more pale strange scholar among the settled Vyr who no longer know what their elders intend. The guilt did not descend with the blood; most Downcome live and die never learning the Tap. Auver learned. He will not say how — a letter, an elder's deathbed slip, a thing read in a margin at Aelvyrenn before he was sent down — but he learned the whole shape of it: the engine that bled Vallen to lift the sky-cities, the Still Court's silence, the Menders working their fair copy, and the failed drafts loosed downhill to empty a world his own people intend to wipe clean. And unlike his cousins in the Still Court, Auver is not old, not eldest, not bound by a hundred years of poured cups. He could not hold it. He tried to tell the College and they closed ranks; he tried to tell the Writ and they laughed a Vyr out the door; so now he tells the road. He stands where the traffic is — the crossing, the toll-queue, the Grey Walker's cairns on the climb to the passes — and he preaches. The sky killed your god. The sky is not done. The things that eat your outriders are not beasts, they are drafts, they are the sky practicing at making people so it can throw yours away. Repent of nothing; you did nothing; run. It is all true and it is unbearable to hear, and it arrives in the exact register of doom the Vale has learned to tune out: the wild-eyed foreigner at the bridge with a apocalypse to sell. Children throw pebbles. The guard moves him along. The pious pity him. The Skyblamer, Ellery Coss, is the only soul at Highbridge who half-believes him, and the two of them together — the crank clerk and the mad sky-elf — are precisely as credible as either alone, which is to say a joke told twice. This is the whole engine of the secret made flesh: a defector who knows everything, saying everything, to no effect. Auver is proof that the Vyr conspiracy does not need to be guarded — only left to sound like what it is. The truth about the sky reaches the Vale constantly, in the mouth of Auver the Downcome, and the Vale has a word for the truth about the sky, and the word is 'mad.' A player who sits with Auver long enough — past the raving, past the third repetition — will find the ravings do not contradict themselves, do not contradict Coss's ledgers, and do not contradict the pale envoy's careful silences on the terrace above. Three sources, no proof, one shape. And still nothing to do about it, which is the point: dread delivered, nothing resolved.

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