ITEMS · THE VALE
The Wright's Shard
A fragment of the broken god Vallen the Wright — a wedge of the maker's own body, carried out of the ruin at Caer Vallen and walled in a barrow so that no hand could lift it. The most dangerous thing in the Vale, because it is the only piece of a dead god that anyone can still hold.
It is not a sword and never was, though a hand closes on it as if it had always known the grip. It is a shard of Vallen the Wright — a wedge of the god of making and law, struck loose when he broke — and it is heavier than its size and colder than the barrow that keeps it, and it does not warm however long you carry it. Cut a man with it and for one breath his body forgets its own joining: the knee unlearns the knee, the grip lets go of itself, the oath the flesh swears to stand upright comes loose. That is the whole of its terror and its worth. It cannot be reforged, for no living smith knows the make of it; it cannot be melted, for it was never poured; and it cannot be left in peace, for everyone who learns what it is wants it walled somewhere their enemies cannot reach. Everything the Vale calls Old Work — every temple-bronze working dug from the ground, every device a smith envies and cannot reproduce — is someone's attempt to catch an echo of this. The Shard was never built. It is what building was trying to imitate. The Asheni sealed it in the dark and set the Barrow Prophecy over it — that it stay walled until the named one comes to bear it — which is a warding or a promise depending on who is telling you, and both tellings have gotten men killed. The full account, such as anyone dares set down, is in the reliquary text.
KIND
relic
RARITY
godlike
FOUND AT
Vallen's Barrow
ITEM TYPE
weapon
Connected
Type Fields
All Relationships (36)
hidden_in
- →Vallen's Barrow — The shard waits on the barrow pedestal.
references
- →The Sundering — The shard is what the Sundering left behind.
- ←Galdra Pyre — She covets the relic for study, not faith.
- ←Lord-Holder Dravas Vandahl — He believes the relic would restore his house.
- ←Curate Andil — He intends the relic for Temple glass.
- ←Sresha of the Silt Hands — She has a buyer for the shard.
- ←Sresh-Dar — Relics like the shard leave the vale unlogged through its customs-house.
- ←The Drowned Shrine — The shrine's pre-Sundering altar answers, faintly, to the barrow's relic.
- →Caer Vallen — The weapon was raised and shattered here in the same hour; ruin and relic are one wound.
- ←Grave Lurker — It retreats from the relic's hum toward the outer halls.
- ←A Traveler's Account of the Eastern Hills — He speculates about the relic in the final entry, without naming it correctly.
- ←Shard-Haunt — They are drawn to the shard and grow thick where it sings.
- ←The Sealed Choir — Their highest purpose: to bind the great relic under stone and name.
- ←The Hollow Writ — Proof the mandate still lives — the Writ would seal the Wright's Shard into a legitimacy it can hang men for.
- ←The Wrights' Heirs — The loudest instrument anyone ever left lying around — the Resonants mean to play it.
- ←quest.the-bought-oath (unresolved) — The warded cargo may be the Wright's Shard moving between powers.
- ←The Marrow Lances — The mercenary swing-sword of the Barrow Relic fork — they'll guard it for anyone.
- ←Relic-Reading — Mastery of tuning is the road to wielding the loudest echo.
- ←The Far College — The relic is the instrument they most want to play.
- ←The Greenwake Rite — Applied to the great echo, the rite is the 'fade' ending — let it sink back into the cycle.
- ←The Stillwater Order — Their answer to the relic is to want nothing it offers.
- ←quest.the-kept-find (unresolved) — The relic trade is what's really at stake.
- ←The Assay Staff — It sings near the great echo.
- ←The Drowned — What they reached for.
- ←quest.the-masters-refusal (unresolved) — The echo's last offer.
- →The Unclosed — The loudest crystallized echo ever found — the relic that proves what an echo-stone can be, and what it costs.
- ←quest.the-barrow-relic (unresolved) — The main quest turns on the Wright's Shard.
- ←A Coward's Field-Guide to the Vale's Barrows — The guide's gravest warning: a thing that rings teaches whatever holds it to ring back — do not keep the Wright's Shard.
- →The Sworn Gods — The Wright's Shard is the largest shard of Vallen's sundered weapon — a piece of a god of the old pantheon.
- ←The Mourners of the Hush — The Mourners would carry the Wright's Shard to the Hushing Deep and sing it back to ash — the loudest echo in the Vale silenced at last, the wound finally allowed to close.
- ←The Gaunt Ledger — The Gaunt Ledger would weigh the Wright's Shard and break it into honest shards for the trade — the Sundering sold by the ounce, the whole Vale armed and ringing for coin.
- ←The Drowned Shrine — The shrine's altar and the Wright's Shard in the barrow are both pre-Sundering Imperium work from the same age — old bronze recognizing old bronze, nothing stranger than that, though the faithful say otherwise.
foreshadows
- ←The Barrow Prophecy — The prophecy is wholly about the shard.
guards
- ←Hollow Warden — It guards the relic's pedestal and has never moved from that radius.
- ←Shard-Haunt — The shard-haunt coalesces around the Wright's Shard in the deep barrow — the relic's last and worst warden.
created_by
- →Vallen, the Wright — The Wright's Shard is a shard of Vallen's own shattered weapon — a splinter of a god, which is why men killed to raise it and then shattered it again.
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