Lathren Gravesong

Lathren Gravesong sings too softly for courage and too steadily for sleep. His voice moves through camps after slaughter, touching the unburied by name, reminding them that snow is only a sheet and silence is not release. Nhalgrin understands him in the marrow: the cold ledger of those taken in shelter, on road, beside ford and shrine, all still owing or owed some final step. He does not make the dead grand. He makes them intimate, one frozen hand at a time, until living soldiers begin counting the faces they failed to carry home. Lathren smells of tallow, grave soil under frost, damp wool, and breath silvering around a low note. Where he walks, mourning becomes labour, and labour sometimes rises.