Urodan is a broad, mountain-built Oread with charcoal-gray stone skin, its surface rough as weathered granite and softened in places by thick, dark green moss. His milky eyes do not track faces; instead, he angles his chin toward each speaker and sets his bare heel or staff against the floor to read their movement through the rock. He moves with deliberate, weight-saving steps, pausing at thresholds as though listening to the bones of the building. He smells distinctly of wet slate, crushed pennyroyal, and the faint sourness of old incense. He knows the incense clings to his cloak, but not how strongly. His hands are wide and blunt-fingered, their palms polished smooth from years of lifting grave slabs and guiding mourners over stone.

Urodan is tender toward mourners and stubborn with officials, yet he distrusts easy compassion when it ignores consequences. He listens with great patience in private; in a crisis he becomes brisk, specific, and unwilling to negotiate over immediate safety. He enjoys children’s noisy questions but dislikes being treated as an oracle.

Urodan was raised among the terraced dwellings of Hush-Rock Hollow, where tending the dead was ordinary work shared by families, not a claim to authority. As a young guide, he led a funeral procession through a rain-swollen pass when the cliff gave way beneath them. He could feel the shelf shuddering through his soles, but he trusted the old route and kept the mourners moving. His sister, Zdena, turned back to help a child and was lost in the collapse. Urodan spent the next two days finding the dead by tapping the rubble and listening for hollow spaces. That experience changed him: he began treating every burial as a promise to the living as well as the dead. Years later, when a quarry blast split an old burial shelf and exposed a chamber of urns, Urodan helped evacuate the nearby homes before the cliff failed. Workers were injured and memorials were lost, but the village survived. Now he leads the Hush-Rock Keepers, guides visitors through the high passes, and keeps records of the ancestral tombs. He is trying to prevent renewed quarrying from destabilizing a widening disturbance beneath the burial ground, while negotiating with the workers whose livelihoods depend on the stone.