Eralan Rasi

A Hafuwë, and lead scout of the Idir Expedition: six hands hired through Whent, with Beltran Grayeras’s money behind the hiring, to strip Wraithblade Keep of Mól relics for a fee a man could retire on. As he understood it the work was easy money: a ruin picked over for centuries, where you gather rocks, carry them back, and people are pleased. He had never worked that keep before. The goblins in it were waiting, and the crew came apart in the dark.

Dwayne, who guided them, got out, and spent a long time afterwards with every reason to think nobody else had. Eralan was in the keep’s webbed cellar the whole of that time, drained and poisoned and past any reasonable expectation of being alive. Every other shape down there was a husk or a skeleton, dozens of them. Koa saw one cocoon move, cut it open expecting a goblin, and found better clothing and the wrong color of skin; Mikhail kept him breathing. He was sedated for the journey out, carried through a crossing that nearly finished what the spiders had started, and laid up at the Valiant Few’s estate in Loshev for better than five weeks.

He woke lucid, and knew Mikhail for the man who had healed him before he could get his voice to work properly. He was still pallid, emaciated to the bone, wearing borrowed clothes the way a boy wears an older brother’s, his hair long and matting, and he recoiled from any hand put out towards him. He asked after Jahi first. Told he was the only one they got out, he studied Mikhail’s face to be sure of it, sat back, and let the bowl in his hands go onto the carpet. Then he asked whose house he was in and whom they served, and why they had dragged him two hundred miles across the woods rather than leave him at the Chantry on the way. He apologized for the floor.

Jahi was his younger brother and the crew’s lorekeeper. Dwayne, telling the story before anyone knew either name, spoke of two Hafuwë brothers, and the reports that came out of the keep before the rescue made the pair twins and counted both of them dead. Two Hafuwë went up to that keep and one came back.

He could not say who had paid for the job. He was sure he had been given a name and equally sure he could not produce it: the crew’s records were his brother’s charge, and they stayed in the keep with him.

They offered him a bed until his strength came back and a place in Loshev’s town guard under Tariq al-Mahir, and a household guard offered to put a word in for him. He said neither yes nor no, and nothing has been heard of him since. They did not trust him. Koa cleaned the spilled food off the carpet by hand rather than let Mikhail cast a cantrip in front of a stranger, and Mikhail meant the post to come with a partner of Tariq’s choosing, to keep an eye on him and learn what sort of man he was. The older question, whether he had been among the crew who left Kithul half dead below the keep, was raised again in that room and nobody answered it.

He was found with a thin silver chain at his neck and a plain gold ring on it, which showed primordial characters when it was held over a forge. Aldo took the ring while he was unconscious and wears it still. Nobody has told him.