Adept Maren

Adept of the High Room — the Resonants' seat over the Listening Post — and the ring's sharpest argument that the old arcana should be made to work rather than filed: ambitious, precise, and generous exactly once per debt.

Maren came up through the reading floor and left it the day she understood the difference between a library and a power. She runs the High Room's commissions — salvage, restoration, the quiet sales the Censors blacklist — and keeps the ring's oldest dispute alive single-handedly by winning it a little more each season. She pays well, praises rarely, and remembers everything, which in the High Room amounts to the same thing.