Saela Venn

Saela Venn tends the Shrine of Returning Footsteps, and her softness has teeth. She preserves names the roads tried to erase, names families whisper into firelight, names chiefs hoped would stay buried under snow. Her authority smells of lamp oil, ash, old wool, and the little tokens laid before the shrine: boot nails, cracked beads, scraps of mitten, carved sticks. She can comfort a mother by proving the lost were not erased, or shame a clan by reciting who it failed to search for. In Nhalgrin, memory is mercy until someone powerful needs forgetting.