High Mortarch Selkos was chief priest of the royal cult of Iskandar, keeper of the Veinwright dynasty’s crypts and its rites of the dead — and the man who did what the rest of the realm came to believe King Varyon had ordered.
He wore a ceremonial mask cut from the jawbone of a former saint, hung with small chains that clicked against it when he spoke, and he carried a staff of bone. He was patient, unembarrassed and faintly amused by authority, his king’s included.
He never accepted that the civil war was about grain or taxes. To Selkos the revolt was fear and disloyalty, and the answer lay where Veinwright power had always lain: in the dead, whom he held to be a lawful instrument of the throne, older than its crowns. Varyon forbade necromancy outright. Selkos went on regardless. Behind doors the king had sealed, he began raising the loyalist dead beneath the palace, and before the separatists laid siege to Greywatch Keep on the eastern road he had already placed one of his disciples inside it.
Greywatch became the catastrophe of the war. Its starving commander let the priest raise the fallen garrison to hold the walls, and the keep grew into a fortress of walking dead that answered to no living command. Nothing the separatists did harmed the Veinwrights as badly: to the rest of Ashkar it proved that the Justicar’s Legion had been right to intervene, and when the Legion burned Greywatch the purges of the old houses followed. Varyon had Selkos arrested along with every Mortarch in the capital, and Selkos went without resisting.
He escaped. A report through Shadow Weaver channels placed him inside the Tomb of First Kings, the dynasty’s oldest sanctuary; the Legion surrounded it, loyalists gathered to defend it, and blood was spilled over a tomb he had already left. He was declared an enemy of the realm and never found. Rumour put him in the crypts beneath the capital, among the western rebels and somewhere beyond the northern snows, all in the same season.
Everyone else answered for the ruin of Iskandar. The one man who had actually done what the realm punished it for was not there to answer at all.