Characters · Road to Redemption

Maudra keeps a stool by the Last Hearth, worn smooth on the side where she leans toward the coal.

Two kinds of people meet a fallen on the climb. The people of Velmarch don't know what you are, and each of them believes something about the fire. The angels know exactly what you are, and each of them wants you. Either may be right.

The angels

The Apostate who finds you

Where you wake: a floor of grey feathers, and the embers of those who fell before

Decided: she waits where you wake, and lights a fire beside you before anything can reach you. The cold embers on that floor are the fallen nobody found. She raises you back up and tries to win you over on the climb, and at the top she asks one thing back for it: one more fall. You owe her, and you pay. She cuts you loose a second time, keeping your memories, and drops you a hundred years on, so you see what your choice cost. She never says what she wants you to see.

Proposal

She is human-looking and plain, with a hammer made by men, and she is the first voice of the campaign: the one who explains the world and hands you your first weapon. She knows you very well, and you don't know her. She never says who paid for your fall, if anyone did. When she finds you a hundred years later, you know her. Her name is never said on the first climb, and on the second you don't need it.

The second time she found you, she didn't have to say her name.

The Prophet

Decided: the Heirs follow a prophet, who says God speaks through him and has asked him to claim the throne. He is sincere, and he has one thing nobody else has: he listens at the House's door, and nobody can prove he hears nothing.

Proposal

His name is Ithiel ("God is with me", from Proverbs 30, where Agur admits he does not know the holy), and other angels call him the Listener. He was a Warden, and kept the House's door. One day he put his cheek to it and listened, and soon after he left the City with those who believed him. Nobody knows what he heard. He speaks to an Heir himself.

The Prophet has never once said what God's voice sounds like.

The Doorward

A Warden at the House's door, his back to it

Proposal

The Warden who keeps the House's door, his back to it, a key heavy at his neck. He speaks to a Warden, and is perhaps named Abdiel, after Milton's seraph who stayed loyal. He has never looked at the door he keeps. He knew the Prophet when they kept it together.

The Wardens are the only angels who never look at the House.

The gate's keeper

Decided: the last fight of each climb is the fallen who keeps heaven's gate that age. Whoever holds the gate sets a fallen in it, so that only fallen strong enough reach the top, and stakes on its keeper something carried up long ago. Whoever passes takes it.

Proposal

The keeper is a fallen like you, who climbed and chose and was bought to stand there. It is the only fallen on the climb who knows what you are about to choose, and it never says which side set it in the gate.

The champions of each region, the angels' true forms set down on the board, are on the factions.

The people of Velmarch

Orrin, the Drowned King

Orrin on his flooded throne, crowned in coral

The eleventh and last king of Velmarch. On the Night of the Tide he opened the Tidewall and drowned his own kingdom to put out the Ember. Now he sits his flooded throne in Saltreach, crowned in coral, ruling the drowned.

The Hearthfolk curse his name and swear their oaths by it. The Stilled light no lamps on the anniversary of the Night and call it his feast. Orrin himself still believes he saved the world. He may be right.

He is drowned, and he is not a skeleton. He keeps a king's dignity: grey-teal skin crusted with salt, kelp in his beard, and a crown of branching coral with old gold showing through it. Fallen who have seen him say he barely moves. The water around his throne is still, and coral has grown over his hands where they rest on the arms of the chair. His court still brings him petitions. He still answers them.

Orrin waits in the flooded heart of the Sunken Reach, on the Drowned Coast. His crown is already in the game, the unique Crown of the Drowned King.

Proposal

He asked heaven to drown the fire, and someone in heaven answered with the sea. Nobody below knows which side. He is a piece moved by an angel's own hand, the one that answered him, and his Drowned Court is the act boss of the drowned world. He has never learnt who he made his bargain with. He asks every fallen who reaches him.

He ruled the tide until the tide ruled him.

Maudra, the Hearthwarden

Maudra lit from below by the Last Hearth

Keeper of the Last Hearth. She is old, and half blind from a life of staring into the coal. The Hearth lights her from below, and her iron tongs are never far from her hand. Her stool and her tongs stand by the Hearth under the hull of the Crowned Gull, on the hill at the centre of Hearthold.

Maudra is kind in the way of people who have buried many. She feeds the fallen who come up the road, teaches them the old reigns and tells them to come back. She cuts the notches on the Hearth's cradle that count the years since the drowning, or she used to.

Proposal

She is of the faithful, the forbidden faith that keeps fires for whoever climbs, and the Last Hearth is the fire she keeps. She performs the Lighting, Hearthold's oldest and least spoken-of rite: a fallen lights its own fire from the Hearth, and Hearthold becomes one of its fires. She knows what you are and does not say it, because in Velmarch the faithful burn. When asked who taught her the rite, she talks about the weather in the hold. On the second climb, a hundred years on, someone else keeps her stool.

She fed the fire every night for forty years, and nobody came up the road.

Ilse of the Stilled

She leads the Stilled in Hearthold. She is gentle, persuasive and patient. There is salt at her lips and a row of seawater vials at her belt, and she offers a bowl of it, faintly glowing, to anyone who will drink. Every argument the world makes for the fire, she answers for the sea.

Ilse has drunk seawater for twenty years and remembers very little of her life before. She says she does not miss it. She keeps the Stilled's house in the forward ribs of the hull, where the old planks weep salt, and she feeds anyone who knocks.

Proposal

She does not stop the fallen from going on up. She asks each one a question as it passes, "Why would you want to remember?", and offers it the bowl. A fallen is climbing toward its memories, and the first few are kind. She is the one person on the climb who says the later ones might not be worth it, and she is right about that.

The Stilled call her song The Low Water. Nobody who hears it can remember the words afterwards.

Sereth the Ashen

Sereth, ash-cracked, a dead cinder in his chest

Sereth is grey from head to foot, as if dusted with ash that never brushes off, and his skin is cracked like a burnt log. Behind his cracked breastplate, where a fallen's coal glows, there is a dead grey cinder. He still walks. Nobody knows how. He sits apart from the Hearth and does not warm his hands. He speaks quietly and seldom, as if the fire is listening, and he will not say what he saw.

The Hearthfolk say the amulet called the Ashen Heart is his. Some say he gave it away. Some say it was taken from him in the Heartfire, and that he came back to look for it. The amulet is already in the game, the unique Ashen Heart.

Proposal

He is a fallen who went the wrong way. Every fallen climbs; Sereth went back down, into the Heartfire, the heap of everyone's lost grace, to look for his own among it. He came back with his coal burned out, and nothing has relit it since. He is the one fallen in the world with no fire to relight at, and he walks anyway.

Sereth head to toe, standing with his arms held out from the cloak

Painted head to toe, he became a rigged 3D model, which turns in the asset explorer. It is a concept model, not yet in the game.

Still warm, long after the fire went out.