Characters

The Lither heir the party reached too late to save, struck down on the road as he carried an urgent message to the King — proof that the Ottomans were using their weather pylons to ruin rival farmland. Torvin served at his side for years before the two of them fell out. He lies buried at the Jewel of the Lake.

The Lither patriarch, holding the family seat at Qavvik’s Tower. An old-guard Orderborne noble: stubborn, formal, slow to trust and slower to accept how far the family has fallen. He grieves his son quietly and has not yet named an heir.

Lord Lither’s personal steward of thirty years. He vanished from Qavvik’s Tower during the night of the assassination attack and has not been seen since.

An apothecary the party pulled out of Greef hands near the Pinch. He knows how to work Golden Mandrake into real medicine, which makes him a target for everyone who wants that knowledge buried. The party’s stabilized sample is gone now, but Silas may still be the one person best equipped to help them find a replacement path.

A name that keeps surfacing and never a face. V. Ottoman sold Silas Vane to the Greefs and sits somewhere near the heart of everything the party has been pulling apart. No one has met them. No one knows who they truly are.

A politically connected Haven weatherman and Bobby’s personal nemesis. He gave the false “clear day” forecast before the fire that took Bobby’s ship. Smug, well-protected, and touchy about the nickname “Scottoman.”

Bobby’s creator, whose severed head Bobby carried for so long without being able to understand it. Beneath Stalkholm, Cybin helped bridge the gap, and Bobby accepted the connector Cogsworth had left for him. The head is now grafted onto Bobby’s back, awake enough to watch, remember, and pull old truths slowly into reach.

An Orderborne noble whose estate the Greefs seized and turned into a drug farm. The party freed the farm and Cassia rescued his family. He is now a guest at Qavvik’s Tower.

A violent Greef son who burned the Clover Tavern chasing the Golden Mandrake and murdered an honest farmer who was a client of Torvin’s. He is dead now, killed in the chaos of the attack on Qavvik’s Tower.

The head of research at Stalkholm, finally met in the deep level beneath the station. Melda studies ancient Clanks and mycelial integration with unsettling calm, more fascinated than frightened by Bobby’s changed body. For the moment she is showing the party another way out, though no one has decided what she is to them after that.

The man who runs Shellsinki‘s counting house and, the party now knows, a link in the Greef cargo chain. He moved the channel marker that sent boats through the turtle cove, and he held his composure under questioning. Not quite well enough.