Lady Vigil Octavia
The orphan Vigil raised and the Sword of Vigilance chose, and the last person it has chosen
Octavia was Lady Vigil before Theresa Sarros, and she is the last person the Sword of Vigilance has chosen. She never met the company. She had been dead some months by the time they came up the lake, and everything they have of her came from the people she left.
Background
She was an orphan, and the town raised her. Vigil does not elect its ruler and does not pass the office down: on the day of a burial the sword is put forward, anyone who holds themselves willing and worthy lays a hand on the hilt, and the sword decides. It decided on her. She was about fifty-three when she died, and she was of the ninth Abstergo line, the one the Empire built for commanders. A Peren and a paladin, and Venessa Hasek was something of a mother to her.
The Raid
Vigil brought it on itself and knew it. The town had taken a group of outsiders captive, found a practitioner of magic among them who could not be trusted, executed him for it and returned the rest to their own town. The people those captives belonged to came back for it in the middle of the night.
Vigil is well guarded and its guards do not slacken after dark. Peren eyes cut through a night easily and Peren watchmen do not fall asleep on a wall, however long the evening. The raiders found a way in regardless, and the way they used has since been shut. There was killing and there was wounding inside the walls before anybody had the shape of it.
Octavia did not wait to be brought the news. She took the sword and went after them the moment the alarms sounded, and she was the first of the town to cross blades with anyone. She fought hard. What ended it was not a duel: a man came in behind her, hooked her arms through his and held them out wide so that she had no defense at all, and Blackguard Jack put a dagger into her over and over while she was held. He got out of the town wounded and got away. Rafi, who tells this, did not see it happen, his own wounds being too great by then.
The raiders were the Tillermen, and Vigil had badly underestimated them. The town knew of four or five and had no idea the band’s reach ran to the dozen and more of hired men who came over the wall with them.
Vigil buries only its titled, and the ground it uses is arranged around a tall obelisk on a Mól-stone base, cut in old Peren with the name of Vëné and the fact that this is where she was laid. Octavia is the newest plot in that ground, under a plain marker carrying her office and her name, and the soil over her was still visibly fresher than the rest of it months afterward.
Since the day she went into it the sword has chosen nobody, which had never happened before. Erwin Emeric has carried it since, and Theresa Sarros holds the office it did not give.