Dame Ysolt Farewatch

The current Farewatch of the Vigil — an aging knight who has kept the Last Lamp at the Wind-Cut Pass alight for thirty winters, turning back travelers' worst nights on an oath she is no longer sure she understands, and no longer sure it matters that she doesn't.

Ysolt took the plain oath at nineteen, the way most Vigil-Knights do, without asking too hard what the Light actually was — you swore it, you meant it, and it answered, and that was enough for a nineteen-year-old with a sword and no better plan. Thirty winters keeping the Last Lamp at the one crossing of the Northern Rampart have given her more time to ask than she wanted. She has heard the Reliquary-Keepers' theory — that the Light is Vallen's dying fire, spent a little further every time she calls it to close a frost-wound or turn a half-frozen corpse back from walking — and she has decided, deliberately, not to let it change anything she does. If the lamp is burning down toward nothing, that is one more reason to keep it lit properly for as long as it lasts, not a reason to stop. She is short with anyone who wants to debate theology at her waystation and immediately warm to anyone who is simply cold, which the Vigil's own novices have learned is the entire content of her teaching. Her real trouble is quieter and closer to home: she has not found a Lamp-Sworn worth training up to take the Last Lamp when she is done with it, and the dusk-singing wind at the pass has started to sound, some nights, like it is asking her the same question she asks herself.