Orin Barrow-Sworn

aka the First Keeper, the Warden Who Stayed

The first man to swear the keeping-oath over the walled shard and the last to still be holding it — a barrow-warden of the old march who chose the wall over the world, died at his post, and, being dead so close to the wound, never learned he was dismissed.

When the shard was carried up out of Caer Vallen and the Asheni raised the barrow to hold it, someone had to be the first to walk down the oath-stair and take the keeping. Orin was that man — a warden of the old imperial march who had seen enough of what the Sundering left loose to believe the barrow-keepers when they told him what the splinter at the bottom was. He read his oath off the risers a line at a time on the way down, swore that no living hand could relieve him, and meant it. He was right that no relief would come; he was wrong to think death would count as one. Buried in the inward-facing ring with the keepers who followed him, and lying so near the thing that unmakes oaths, Orin's own ending never closed — the one binding the shard could not loosen was the binding of a man to a post he swore to hold forever. Four hundred years he has kept the door, giving orders to a watch that is all dead, filling the ring back up whenever the barrow makes a new keeper of some fool who dug too deep. He is not cruel and not mad. He is on duty. Now the outer seals are failing, the light is coming in, and the First Keeper has begun, for the first time in centuries, to move toward the mouth — because a wall has been breached, and a breach is the one thing his oath will not let him ignore.

This world ships in Valenfeld. Play the game →