For four centuries, Althier was the Solar Throne’s most trusted censor. With a silver quill and a polite smile, he bleached the blood from elven tapestries, ensuring the 'Fair Folk' remained beyond reproach. He was the architect of a golden lie, until he found the 'Red Ledger'—a forgotten census detailing the systematic eradication of the Deep-Rooted tribes. The very foundations of the elven empire weren't built on divine right, but on the silent screams of a people whose names Althier himself had helped erase.
In that moment, the logic of the world snapped. If the most beautiful civilization in history was merely a well-manicured graveyard, then morality was a hallucination and order was the ultimate cruelty. He didn't scream or protest; he simply walked out of the archives, taking with him a single wooden doll found in the rubble of a thousand-year-old mass grave.
Now, Althier inhabits the rot of the world, a well-dressed ghost haunting ruined estates. He trades in the kind of secrets that cause kingdoms to self-immolate, not for gold, but for the exquisite moment when a noble realizes their entire life is a fiction. He carries the 'Heartbeat Nightingale,' a clockwork terror that records the last rhythmic thumps of a dying heart, converting truth into a melody he hums while he weeps for a world that never deserved to exist.