Santaris Sendus is the Lord High Steward of Mordikhaan. He is also dying. He has been dying for a very long time, and he cannot stop.
The shaking sickness is a degenerative condition that rots the body by degrees. Normally it kills. In Santaris’s case it cannot, because decades ago the Queen of Mordikhaan visited him in the Crag, pressed her fingers to his chest — burning, by his account, both flesh and soul — and left a permanent scar of five points of cold fire. With that mark she bound him to a command: “I need you to live, Santaris. You must remain, even when all else falls away.”
He is still obeying. His body rots. He cannot complete the process.
The Steward in the Rotting Fortress
In the Queen’s absence, Santaris holds the administration of the Crag together through sheer willpower and the authority his title still carries. He is not a political schemer in the mould of Mordikhaan‘s great lords — Santaris’s role is continuity, not ambition. He represents the last institutional thread connecting the present realm to whatever the Queen’s rule once meant.
He is attended by his physician, Lycellis, and his chamberlain, Myskin. The three of them constitute what remains of the Crag’s functioning court.
The Physician’s Task
Santaris has asked Lycellis to find a way to free him from the Queen’s command. Not to cure the shaking sickness — the disease is secondary. He wants to die. He wants to finish the process the sickness has been trying to complete for years. Lycellis, brilliant and resourceful, has broken into a sealed library within the Crag to search for a solution, finding secrets that were not meant to be found.
Whether there is a release — whether the Queen’s binding can be broken, and what breaking it would cost — is one of the questions that drives the Crag storyline through Book One.
The Anchor Theory
Santaris came to believe, at some point in the decades since the Queen vanished, that she made him her anchor to the mortal world — a beacon she could find her way back to. He does not know whether this is true. He does not know whether she is coming back.
What he knows is that he is still here. And that the command has not lifted. And that something, somewhere, still needs him to remain.
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