Vëné

Background

The Mól bred the Peren the way they bred horses and hounds, for use, and Vëné was born into that. She was the one who ended it.

Some seven hundred years ago the Peren rose against the Empire that had made them and pulled it down, and she led the rising. What the party has of it comes from the Peren spirit in the curse-keeps, who was there: the Mól made servants and refined them toward perfection, perfection came round on its makers, and the Peren broke free in anger and hatred and tore the Empire apart as they left it. He named the one who led them without any ceremony at all. She was the leader of that revolution, and the leader of the Peren.

Vigil claims the beginning of it. Its people hold that the rebellion started in their own streets, that they threw their Mól masters out and made the town a fortress against being retaken, barricading even the teleportation chamber so the Empire could not come at them from the inside; and that near the end of the war she gave her life there, in front of a stone obelisk. How she died was never written down. Every telling of it says she sacrificed herself and then stops.

In the vision Aldo was given of the old war, a Peren was being beaten for information and asked, over and over, to say who she was. The answer came up through the blood: You won’t catch Vëné.

Appearance

For seven hundred years nobody living had seen her, and no Peren description survives from the people who did. Three likenesses stood in her place and not one of them was made by a witness.

Aldo’s vision is the nearest thing. A slender woman stood alone against several hobgoblins, her hair so bright that it read as a brilliance rather than a color, with a look about her he could only call divine. One of them raised fire at her without speaking a word for it. The fire wrapped around her, failed to burn her, and she kept walking forward.

The town shrine in Haudh-Gwenn keeps a small statue of the Martyr, very old, roughly cut, a little over five feet tall. Aldo looked at it by candlelight and thought it very like the woman from the vision.

Vigil’s statue is the finer work and says the most. She stands in what were once slave’s clothes, an eagle or a phoenix on her shoulder, smiling kindly, driving a knife into her own heart. At her feet lie broken slave chains, taken off slavers in Idir and laid there in her honor.

Then the curses broke and two men got a look at her. She walked out of the burning ruin at the Twisted Grove carrying Aldo sideways in her arms, tall and slender, compressing as she crossed the ground until she was about the size of a woman. Koa knew her before she reached him, from the effigy he has prayed to his whole life. She handed Aldo over, touched his face the way a mother would, and was gone before Koa finished asking whether they had done it.

Relationships

She had a brother. Nancáro fought beside her in the rising and was cursed alongside her, and where she is bound to positive energy he is bound to death and its opposite. A Peren woman whose last memory is of running for the fields that day remembers seeing the pair of them, Vëné and the one whose power rots the ground, holding the Mól off while others got away. What remembered it back was only a shadow of him: told the story seven centuries later, the spirit in the keeps said it rang familiar, and that he recalled her fighting for the survival, the salvation, sacrificing herself. No parent, no other sibling and no husband was ever written down.

They met again the morning the curse over Idir broke, which had held him and kept her out. She blinked in as though interrupted; they knew each other on sight, the way family does after a long parting, and they held on far longer than the moment had room for. Then they argued about Aldo. There is a natural order of things, he said, and it was the breaking of that order that had led to where they were. As right as you may be, this was done because of you, and for your benefit, she answered. You cannot leave it like this, with what he has done for you. She had opened with the admission that she could not do it alone, and it ended in together then. When their hands met as beings rather than as bodies the fabric of the world shuddered, because the two of them are not meant to touch.

Al-Sāmiyah, the great eagle of the Valley of Doom, is old enough to have known her: seven or eight hundred years, by the reckoning of the people who keep her, and she is held to be tied to Vëné. She will carry a rider who can sing Vëné’s song. The Elder told the party to look for that song among the Peren’s own records, since it is because of her that they have their freedom and they ought to have kept something. They have not found it.

The Martyr

Idir prays to the Martyr, protector of the land and patron of endurance, worshipped at ancient ruins rather than in temples. Vëné is who she was before that.

Koa finished praying at the Crack and rose to find a shrine the ruin’s poor had put up, and on the back of a crude idol of the Martyr somebody had cut Vëné. The far older town shrine in Haudh-Gwenn carries the same name beneath her statue. Loshev swears by it without thinking, in the name of Vëné, the way a town swears by anything. Elliot supplied the folklore, which is that Vëné was who the Martyr had been before she was the Martyr, and said he did not believe a word of it. The party argued a whole evening over whether a god can have been a person first, and settled nothing.

Rafi of Vigil settled it for them. Vëné and the Martyr are one and the same, he said, and using her mortal name is no blasphemy. There is a spite-name her enemies gave her, and that one he would not repeat. It is the Felusi, which is what the Mól called her. Where it was first spoken aloud again was never written down.

Two questions stayed open, and one of them closed. Leon put the first: it does not sit right that a goddess should be younger than a thousand years, and if she truly fought beside the Elder seven hundred years ago then that is all she is. Against which the older accounts have the Martyr’s presence in Idir stretching back centuries past counting, with some holding she has been there since the land was made. The second was the same doubt from the other end, whether a woman was raised to divinity or a goddess came down and wore a Peren woman for a while, and both had been argued in front of the party by people with reason to know. Mikhail put it to her himself, as the last question of the night the curses broke, and asked whether she had ever been mortal. Yes, in a fashion. She did not enlarge on the fashion.

The Grave at Vigil

Vigil is a walled Peren town between the rivers, a night and a day north of Haudh-Gwenn, and it is hidden on purpose. Its graveyard takes only the titled and stands around a tall obelisk on a base of Mól stone, cut in an old Peren dialect: this is Vëné’s resting place, who martyred herself for our freedom. Koa, looking at it, caught the metal filigree woven through the stone shimmering for a moment, and it seemed to carry on downward and branch outward beneath the ground.

The town’s leaders swear the Vigil’s Oath, which binds them to stand watch over that grave even after their own deaths, until the curse is sundered. The Vigilites keep three: Lady Eravil Dark Eyes, Winifred Orenda, and her.

When Koa prayed there, something answered. The Iophanite, an angel and a messenger of the Martyr, manifests at the obelisk and takes questions. Asked which of her names a supplicant ought to use, it was not much interested in the question: names are words mortals use to carry meaning, and it is not the name but the meaning behind it that matters, and the reverence held while the word is formed.

How her body came to be at Vigil, and who put it there, was never discovered.

Current Role

She chose the party, and for four seasons that was the whole of her business with them. It was stated at the outset: she would not lay so impossible a burden on a single person, they were brought there by her will, and the responsibility for the breaking of the curse is shared between them. She is the reason the Valiant Few are curse-breakers at all.

She was also inside the thing they were trying to break. The Iophanite’s word, carried back to the rest of them afterwards, was that Vëné and Nancáro were both part of the curse, and that when it broke she would return, for a moment. The moment ran long. She went with her brother to gather Aldo’s soul back from where it had been left, told the two who were standing over his body that no single mortal frame could take it back and that the load would have to be shared by three, and let Aldo choose which of the two gods would spend the essence to reseat it. He chose her brother. She healed the body after. Then she knelt and breathed a portion of herself into the ground so that Idir’s old keep-endpoints would answer one another again, and beams of light went up from the Grove and from points west, northeast, southeast and east, which are the keeps the party already had marked.

She stayed for a second audience after that, and gave more of it away than her brother did. She corrected his account of Gwen’s illness in front of him, telling him his information was seven centuries out of date and that the family had done work toward a resolution in his absence, and he was visibly surprised to be told something he did not know. She put a hand on Aldo’s shoulder, told him he was with them and would be for as long as the three of them chose each other, and answered the question he whispered about where he had been with nowhere, nothing. And when Koa moved to decide Gwen’s future for her, she stopped him: cruel if it’s not her choice.

Then the two of them went. Her brother is simply gone. She is not. She does not leave so much as move into the next room of the same house.

Once every fourth year Idir and Peredhel keep Martyr’s Day for her. Harad held the last one.