Veyr looks like a weather-beaten man in his late fifties, narrow-shouldered but hard to move, with skin textured like old parchment over corded muscle. He advances in short, precise steps, favoring his left side as if forever making room for someone walking beside him. A thumb-sized wooden bird hangs from his belt; its beak is polished smooth from generations of nervous handling. The unexpected detail is that he carries a tiny, brightly painted spinning top and will set it going on a table during serious negotiations, watching it with the grave attention of a priest at an altar. His presence suggests a door that has been shut for centuries and has just begun to open.

Veyr is patient with frightened people and impatient with those who call cruelty practical. He can be tender in private, but becomes blunt and almost bureaucratic when a promise is being negotiated. He enjoys small, foolish amusements, yet distrusts anyone who tries to turn his age into wisdom. When exhausted, he grows warmer and tells stories; when frightened, he becomes exacting and asks for every term in writing.

Veyr was a village oath-keeper before anyone had a word for warlock. During a winter famine, he begged a presence beneath a ruined hill to keep his people alive. It answered, asking not for his soul but for the right to be remembered. Veyr agreed, and the presence taught him a handful of impossible words. The bargain saved the village, but gave the presence a foothold in the world. Centuries later, Veyr learned that other desperate people had copied his bargain, each believing they had discovered a different power. He has spent his long life tracing those scattered pacts, sometimes guiding their bearers, sometimes ending them. His formative change came when he destroyed the first sanctuary built in his name, after its priests began choosing victims to feed the power he had once petitioned. He still corresponds with Maura, a mortal historian who believes he is her great-grandfather, and with Tovik, a former apprentice who now runs a refuge for people escaping infernal and fey bargains. Veyr currently seeks the last page of his original covenant, stolen by a ruler who intends to make every oath in the realm answer to the entity beneath the hill.