The Riven King

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.