Xander Sarros

Vigil was founded about a hundred and twenty-five years ago, and Xander Sarros founded it. He is still alive inside its walls, somewhere around a hundred and thirty-two years old, retired to the Sarros mansion and asleep for most of the day. He is Theresa Sarros’s grandfather, which she confirmed when the company assumed it must be a generation further back than that.

He lost a princely election in Peredhel to a Krangal, and took his people out of the country rather than live with what came after. What he and the other founders wanted, in his grandchild’s account of it, was a way of raising their families that Peredhel would not allow them: they did not care for how things were done at home, and what they believed instead would be called a schism back there, and by some a cult. They brought the Peredhel army’s habits with them and left the rest. In Ikhtar and the mette-hina were both put down on arrival and neither has been taken up since, and Peren have crossed the border ever since for no better reason than that second one.

The year is known. The month and the day were never written down.

Since then the town has had nearly a dozen rulers and most of them died before their time, and he has outlasted all of them. Age has taken the rest of it. He surfaces now and then and is not himself when he does.

That is why the one question in Vigil the company could not get answered stayed that way. Koa alone had seen the Mól filigree at the base of Vëné’s obelisk shimmer and appear to run on underground, and when Mikhail put it to the town, the only person in Vigil who might have known what it was is the founder, who was not expected to be lucid before the company had to leave. He was not.