PERSONAE · THE RAMPART FOOTHILLS

The Riven King

aka Maelvyr, The Cracked Crown, The King Who Would Not Break

The eldest living Vyr and lord of Aelvyrenn — the mind who directed the great engine meant to hold the failing human god Vallen together, and instead cracked him. The same fracture runs in the King: he has not aged and has not broken in four centuries, and he has felt the crack travel through him, a little further each year, the whole time.

Maelvyr was Aelvyrenn's finest reader of the Design, and so he was given the Imperium's last hope: to raise the great engine that would shore up Vallen the Wright when the humans' god began to fail — draw a measure of the god's own making through the works and feed it back, the way you brace a cracking beam with a length of the same oak. The engine did not brace him. It drew him down. Whether the design was flawed, whether the god was already past saving, whether the Vyr asked a thing no working could do, not even Maelvyr is certain anymore, and the uncertainty is the worst of it. Vallen cracked at Caer Vallen the way over-strained glass cracks — all through, at once, and never after — and the fracture did not stay in the god. It set into the King who ran the engine. He did not die and he has not aged; he is cracked and holding, cinderglass in the shape of a man, and he can feel the flaw creep. He sits the still court of Aelvyrenn neither mad nor sane, turning over a design he can no longer complete, while his court tends him and tells the world below nothing. He is the single creature alive who knows what truly happened at Caer Vallen — and he is the least able to say it plainly.

KIND

spirit

SPECIES

Vyr

ROLE

king

LOCATION

Aelvyrenn

Connected

AelvyrennPLACE · The Riven King keeps the still court of Aelvyrenn an…The Hanging ChoirFACTION · The Choir is the court that tends him and keeps him …The VyrCONCEPT · The eldest living Vyr.The Drawing-DownEVENT · His voice led the choir-working that shattered the g…The SunderingEVENT · He is the unnamed hand in the Imperium binding that …The Vyr SchismCONCEPT · The Still Court is the Riven King's own household — …

Appears In

Game Data (1)

Read live off disk from data/content/*.json — the game data itself, not a copy.

data/content/npcs.json

idthe_riven_king

nameThe Riven King

canon_refcharacter.the-riven-king

factionthe_hanging_choir

racevyr

regionthe_vale

gendermale

behaviorsentry

namedyes

health400

difficulty10

disposition20

bounty_on_kill5000

greeting…hold the third note, hold it, it slips— ah. A face from below. You climbed the crystal. Few do. Listen, if you can bear it: the chord still rings, and I am the hand that broke it.

topics{"the sundering":"They say a god broke and no one knows why. I know why. I led the choir that was to bind him whole — and my voice struck the note that shattered him instead. Four hundred years I have heard it. You hear a little of it now; that ache behind your eyes is mine.","aelvyrenn":"We raised the city out of reach so the loudest of the ringing would trouble the Vale less, and so we need never look away from what we did. Penance with a view.","the choir":"They keep me from falling wholly silent. Kind of them. Cruel of them. The same thing, in the end."}

Type Fields

kindspirit

speciesVyr

roleking

locationplace.aelvyrenn

affiliationsfaction.the-hanging-choir

disposition20

secretsHis engine, not the Imperium's command alone, drew the making out of Vallen and cracked the god — the Tap, the true cause of the Sundering, known nowhere in the Vale., He is no longer sure whether the breaking was his flawed design, the god's doom, or a thing no working could have done.

voice_notesAncient, courtly, and fractured — speaks in unfinished lines of a design he cannot close, drifts mid-sentence into silence, then snaps back lucid and grieving. Never raises his voice; the light seems to bend a little wrong around him, the way it does through a flawed pane.

All Relationships (9)

located_in

→Aelvyrenn — The Riven King keeps the still court of Aelvyrenn and has not left it in four centuries.
→Aelvyrenn — The Riven King sits the still court of Aelvyrenn, the sky-seat his people raised out of reach after the breaking.

leads

→The Hanging Choir — The Choir is the court that tends him and keeps him from falling wholly silent.
→The Hanging Choir — Maelvyr still reigns over the Choir that tends him — the Riven King, held unaging by the same fracture he drove into Vallen, still feeling it travel through him after four hundred years.

member_of

→The Vyr — The eldest living Vyr.

caused

→The Drawing-Down — His voice led the choir-working that shattered the god — the act he has heard, unbroken, ever since.

participated_in

→The Sundering — He is the unnamed hand in the Imperium binding that became the Sundering.
→The Drawing-Down — Maelvyr led the choir-working — his was the voice meant to hold the god together, and the chord broke under it. He has rung with that mistake un-aging for four centuries.

references

←The Vyr Schism — The Still Court is the Riven King's own household — one of the schism's three silences.

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