Magistrate Ferrane

The magistrate of the Writ-House, Highbridge — the Hollow Writ's public face at the crossing, who stamps a dead empire's tolls with a live conscience and has started letting strangers carry the choices she can't file.

Ferrane came up through the Sealbearers on penmanship and stubbornness, and runs the Writ-House the way a good clerk runs a sinking ship's log: accurately, to the last. She believes in the Writ the way one believes in a bridge — not that it is loved, but that it holds. The mandate question sits on her desk in a locked drawer, and lately she has taken to handing its keys to outsiders, to see what the Vale does with them.