Lotann

Every soul the Idoneth reap is counted, and Lotann is the one who counts it. As Warden of the Soul Ledgers he keeps the grim arithmetic of the enclaves — souls harvested, souls banked, souls grafted to failing Namarti — set down in tide-stained ledgers that amount to the most honest history his people possess. In a civilization that erases the memory of every raid it makes, Lotann's books remember all of it.

He is never alone at his work. About his shoulders coils his Ochtar, a many-armed familiar of the deep possessed of unsettling cleverness: one tentacle wields the quill, another steadies the ledger, and the rest hold a cudgel and knife for any fool who interrupts the accounting. Lotann himself bears the scars of a dozen raids gone wrong, for the Warden insists on making his tallies at the water's edge, in the raid's own wake, where the count is true.

What makes Lotann strange among the Isharann is that he burns. Against all the custom of his muted people his soul is vivid — full of zeal, pride, and open devotion to his office — and the Namarti fight harder beneath his gaze, knowing the worth of their dying is being written down by someone who cares. The enclaves find him faintly embarrassing and utterly indispensable: the one Idoneth who remembers, in a nation built on forgetting.