Corr Ash-Tongue, the First Unhushed

The long-dead gravesinger who raised the Unhushed Tower by refusing to let his own ending close — the first to bear the Ash-Tongue name, and the lich enthroned at the top of his own stair.

Before the tribes made 'Ash-Tongue' a name to spit, Corr made it a method. He held that a gravesinger's rites were never meant to lay the dead to rest — only to teach them their names again — and he proved it on himself, climbing his own tower as he raised it, refusing the closing rite stone by stone until there was no ending left to complete. He sits at the top still, presiding over the court below: every wight on every landing is an ending he has left deliberately unfinished. He does not hunger or hate. He simply will not let go, and he greets a climber the way an old chorister greets a latecomer to a rite that was never finished — with a place already kept.